Elite athletes’ ability to focus the brain might even explain their struggle to eloquently describe performance after the game. Like a starship captain diverting power from life support to bolster shields in a battle, professional athletes temporarily shut down the memory-forming regions of the brain so as to maximize activity in centers that guide movement.

“That’s why they usually thank God or their moms,” says cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago. “They don’t know what they did, so they don’t know what else to say.”

– Nick Bascom, Science News.

Not to belabor the Hoyas’ win last night, but it’s hard to read that Science News excerpt without thinking of Hollis Thompson’s postgame quote about his tiebreaking three-pointer:

Um, I mean, I was open, and my teammates found me…. Honestly, I don’t remember.

The Science News article, which comes via Eno Sarris, is a good one but it mostly presents a bunch of evidence to corroborate things we already know from experience playing sports or from those same seemingly uninformative postgame interviews.

You’ll never hear a baseball player say after a walk-off home run that his secret was mentally running through all the potential ramifications of his at-bat while simultaneously considering the various intricacies of his swing mechanics and keeping conscious of the particular home-plate umpire’s strike zone and the pitcher’s arsenal and tendencies.

All of that information exists somewhere in his mind while he’s swinging, of course, but as the article asserts, it is his ability to process it and keep it in his subconscious during the actual important event that in part allows him to succeed.

Sometimes the cliches are cliched for a reason: You really don’t want to overthink things in sports. That’s for bloggers and experimental psychologists. The elite athletes are the ones who, on top of the physical gifts, have the ability to maintain focus on their tasks in spite of myriad pressures and exterior factors, and it’s really only when they waver that we notice it at all. Until then, we just snicker at the seeming meaninglessness of their postgame interviews without considering how we might gladly give up our presumed eloquence for their unfaltering control.