Elite Athletes Are Usually Smarter Than Us—Cognitive Science Can Explain Why

The year was 1920. It was George “Babe” Ruth’s first season with the New York Yankees.

He hit an incredible 54 home runs this season. He has hit more home runs than anyone else on the team.

However, “Bambino,” as he was called, was far from a paragon of athletic prowess. He was chubby, disliked exercise, and was constantly seen at parties drinking and gambling.

So how did he achieve such greatness on the baseball field?

To answer this question, renowned New York Times sportswriter Hugh Fullerton knocked on the door of the Columbia University psychology laboratory, where two researchers, Albert Johanson and Joseph Holmes, were asked to provide an answer.

Fullerton posed a simple question: If Ruth’s achievements could not be explained by her physical abilities, what other factors might have contributed?

It came as no surprise when the researchers found that Ruth scored better than the average person on every psychological test he took.

Ruth’s test results became the basis of Fullerton’s article in Popular Science Monthly titled “Why Babe Ruth Is the Greatest Home-Run Hitter.”

These results have changed the common perspective on sports performance, suggesting that it is not just physical attributes that make athletes successful – after all, mental skills also come to the fore.

The Evolution of Sports Psychology

Ruth outperformed average people on tasks requiring attention, memory and cognitive abilities.

It took nearly a century for sports scientists to determine whether such superior skill was a trait common to elite athletes or whether Ruth was simply a genius.

In an exploratory meta-analysis published in 2018 focusing exclusively on athletes, my colleagues and I found that athletes engage brain regions responsible for attention, memory, and motor control when making sports-related decisions.

Then, in 2022, Nicole Logan and her colleagues from Northeastern University in the United States conducted a review of 41 studies comparing professional athletes and control subjects (like us).

A meta-analysis of data from 5339 participants (including 2267 athletes) was conducted. The results showed significantly higher scores on attention and decision-making among professional athletes compared to normal individuals.

So athletes typically perform better than us at cognitive tasks — but why?

It was not until the emergence of cognitive neuroscience that scientists were able to map the neural networks involved in sports imaging (e.g., athletes’ ability to mentally recreate sports-related situations) and in athletes’ decision-making about game situations.

Competitive athletes are also smarter than amateur athletes

Decision-making is a human skill. The more you practice, the better you get at it.

However, good decision makers, such as elite athletes, use other cognitive skills to mentally simulate the potential outcomes of a given situation.

Here’s an example – imagine a rugby league match.

The halfback starts the play with his team close to the try line. He has a few teammates he can pass the ball to, but decides to tuck the ball under his arm and sprint for a try – he sees an open space in the opposing defence.

In a split second, he had to make a decision based on the information available to him. Using the images, he had to take into account the position of every other player on the pitch, calculating the best route for every possible pass or run he could make.

It requires intense focus to visually scan the field, blocking out any distractions caused by unclear thoughts, memory to store and retrieve the information while processing all the alternatives, and creativity to imagine the same play from different angles.

These three skills—attention, memory, and creativity—have technical names: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility.

These are the three basic executive functions that the brain uses to perform complex tasks.

The most groundbreaking study on the role of executive functions in athletic performance was published in 2012.

Torbjörn Vestberg and his colleagues from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden compared three basic executive functions of elite first-division soccer players with their fourth-division counterparts (usually only semi-professional athletes).

The higher division outperformed the lower division players on all executive function tasks.

Similar results have been found in other studies conducted over the past decade, including a 2023 study I conducted with my colleagues that compared female soccer and futsal players with their amateur counterparts.

We found that elite athletes outperformed ordinary people in decision-making and executive functioning.

Athletes are smarter than us for a reason: Exercise

Competitive athletes are highly specialized decision-makers because they practice this skill every day.

They outperform average people in cognitive flexibility and inhibition, which can lead to smarter decision-making both on and off the field.

However, the scientific literature is still lacking evidence for another fundamental executive function, working memory. My current research aims to fill this gap.

Sports are all about creativity and finding better solutions to beat your opponent, while many ordinary people like us have difficulty dealing with large amounts of information at the same time.

Practice and a bit of biological predisposition make most competitive athletes smarter than us.

This article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.