For two years I have written a page before every practice and match about attention, nerves, and what I want my mind to do when the ball is coming. Most of those pages are on this site. This year I am doing the reading behind them: an AP Research paper on blink-related brain oscillations, and the papers on how attention, memory, and motor learning actually work.
Reading a paper only gets you so far. So I am asking the people who wrote them. Each conversation is fifteen to twenty minutes, by phone or video, built around five or six questions. I write it up as a short piece, send it to the researcher first, and publish only what they approve.
The questions I start from
- What question is your lab trying to answer right now, in one sentence?
- Give our readers a basic understanding of your findings
- What does your work say about the half-second before a person acts — a serve, a return, a decision?
- Where is the gap between what your data shows and what people take from it?
- If a high school student wanted to understand your field properly, what should they read or build first?
- What do you wish athletes, coaches, or teachers understood about how the brain learns?
If you study any of this and would talk to a high school student for twenty minutes, email me. I will send the questions ahead of time.