This is the last of a 3-part story that investigates what we have learned from three athletic “phenoms” about the brain and its adaptability during its period of greatest neuron growth. In Part 1, we looked at the early life of soccer star Pelé, and examined the flow state he experienced, during his moments of surreal performance. In Part 2, we visited “The Great One,” Wayne Gretzky, and his earliest experiences that enabled him to “play the game above the ice.” In this final part, we explore Tiger Woods, believed by many to have been, by a significant margin, the best golfer of all time. We then present information connecting extraordinary athletic performance to early brain development.
Earl Woods had been a professional-calibre baseball player before he became a Green Beret and went to fight in Vietnam. Shortly after his return from Vietnam, he retired from the military and went to live with his wife Kultida in Orange County California. At age 42, Earl’s passion for sports had turned to golf. In Empowerment: The Competitive Edge in Sports, Business & Life, author Gene Landrum writes:
Now obsessed with golf, Earl lamented that he had discovered the game too late in life to develop his skills to their full potential. He resolved that this would not happen to his son. Earl often placed tiny Tiger in a high chair in the garage where the young child could watch his father hitting golf balls into a net for hours at a time. Whether it was subliminal conditioning or a natural inclination is not clear, but when Tiger was ten months old he climbed down from the high chair and swung his dad’s putter like an accomplished golfer. Charged with excitement, Earl summoned Tida [Kultida] to witness the birth of a champion.
Before his third birthday, the young prodigy was featured on the Mike Douglas Show in a putting and driving contest against Bob Hope. At age three, he won a Pitch, Putt and Drive competition against 10- and 11-year-olds, and just before his fourth birthday, he shot a 48 from the red tees on the back nine of the Navy course in Cypress, California. On August 27, 1980, at the age of four, Tiger made his first birdie on the par-three 91-yard hole at Heartwell Park Golf Club.
During his illustrious career, Tiger had so powerfully dominated the PGA tour that golf fans turned on their television sets on Sunday to watch Tiger win with sensational shots and to bet on who was going to come in second. During these final-round competitions on Sunday afternoons, the television cameras would capture Tiger studying a crucial putt, with hands cupped around his eyes to block his peripheral vision as he moved into a kind of unconscious state characterized as “being in the zone.” It was during this Zen-like transcendence that Tiger would sink putts or execute shots that most mortals could only imagine. Like Pelé and Gretzky, his performance exceeded what the fans and fellow competitors thought possible. Sports psychologists and aficionados ask about the origins of such exceptional capability. Traditionally such exceptionality is believed to be a combination of favorable DNA (inherited) and hard work. Certainly both are necessary, but many people invest as much time and effort as the superstars and never achieve anything close to superstar stature. An answer may lie in neurology.
During a person’s first two years on the planet, the neurons in the brain connect, in what are called synapses, at the rate of about 2 million per second, so that by age 2, the brain has about 100 trillion synapses–twice the number that person will have on reaching adulthood. Unable to sustain the biochemical reactions across all these synapses, the brain enters a stage known as neural pruning, removing the synapses for which there was little use. The brain is fine-tuning itself to function effectively in the environment into which it is born. So much in this early stage of this brain development determines the skills and proclivities that a person will have throughout life.
In the years following infancy, the brain continues to restructure itself in accordance with environmental stimuli. Early demands for certain types of cognitive tasks such as, learning a language, counting, or acquiring a physical skill play a role in determining which cognitive capacities will become most highly developed. Stanford University neurologist David Eagleman observes:
In a sense, the process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed.
Research scientists have recently uncovered what they call mirror neurons that may explain Tiger’s precocity. Apparently, children learn to mimic the actions they see early in life. This so-called “muscle-memory of the mind” was reported by Christian Keysers of the University of Groningen, who explained (Wall Street Journal, 1A, Begley, March 4, 2005), “We start to feel actions and sensations (of others) in our own cortex as if we were doing these actions and having these sensations.”
As an infant, Tiger sat in his high chair watching Earl hit golf balls, and his mirror neurons were absorbing Earl’s actions, at a time when Tiger’s brain was producing and pruning neurons at a prodigious rate. At a very early age, Wayne Gretzky was being taught to anticipate where the puck would be, and Pelé, was exploring how to maneuver makeshift “soccer balls” of varying weights and sizes. In our infant years, our brains are incessantly restructuring to adapt to our environment. If that environment demands a particular set of physical or cognitive skills, the brain restructures to support those skills and purge those not required. That is why those who take up golf as adults have to struggle to develop a “natural” swing–the period of maximal adaptation has long since passed.
The fact that experiences between birth and age 4 may be even more vital in shaping our cognitive powers, than previously believed, has significant implications for the world beyond sports. Rich learning environments in the home and in pre-school become vital components in shaping our society and helping the next generation develop the highest level cognitive skills. More research will help us identify the connection between experiences during the early formative years and the long-term acquisition of types of intelligence.
