Becoming an Olympic athlete requires countless hours of daily practice to master every single aspect of one’s discipline. This can make even the most difficult movements become automatic, leading to an excellent performance without much cognitive effort. Though imperceptible to the eyes of an external observer, the sportsman often oscillates between an effortless automatic state to a more effortful and controlled one, especially during important competitions.
In this talk, given at SISSA during one of the weekly Journal Club meetings of the Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, the last one seeing me as presenter, I present a case study focusing on identifying the neural markers underlying such states before optimal and suboptimal performance of an elite air-pistol shooter. The results, obtained by combining shooting performance, self-report data and event-related desynchronization/synchronization, are presented by a quasi-elite air-rifle shooter himself (yes, that’s me), relating the findings to his own experience.
Tiziano Suran, Ph.D. 