Interaction of Your Brain, The Track and Your Race Performance

Your brain is an amazing thing. It controls everything we do and it obviously then impacts your performance on the track. The big question is to what extent? Wha is so different about the brain of Villopoto and Stewart that allows them to do such amazing things on the track?

There are many reasons why their brain may be better at motocross.  However, we're going to take a quick peak into some great science that shows us, our brain makes it's decision 6-7 seconds beforehand.

I'm sure many of you have seen the movie Minority Report. In this movie Tom Cruise is a police officer of the future where they have a system called PRECOG. This systems see's when people are going to commit murder ahead of time. It see's their thoughts and warns the police when they are going to commit murder. The biggest issue with this is that they see the idea something like 30 minutes ahead. In reality, (at this point anyhow) we can only tell that the brain makes a decision 6-7 seconds before your motor cortex executes the action. So far we seem to be fairly helpless to this. To read more about this science you can go to the following website for a taste Exploring The Mind.

The majority of research in this area and replication of this type of research shows that we don't seem to be able to stop ourselves from changing our actions after this pre-cognition. We are helpless to our own precogs. So what is the real purpose of telling you this and why does it matter for yourself? Because, you may just be able to use it to your advantage.

If you cant change your actions after these precogs occur, why not just give your precogs some influence? Now the solution to this isn't rocket science. Study the tracks you are going to, study your competition and you may enhance your precogs. The reason I know this works is because we see it in every day life and especially in school. You study about something and become more intelligent about it. You increase your mental skills at a specific task. You practice on your dirtbike and you get better at riding and making better decisions of how to execute a corner. However we see track planning and this more traditional method of studying as medieval and pointless.

This traditional planning and studying of the track could be very helpful. The better you know the track and your opponent the better precogs you could incur. Since you cant change them you need to make sure they are better than before. 6-7 seconds means your decision to take the inside or outside on a turn is made 6-7 seconds before you really know you want to take it. That means potentially you have made a decision a straight and half before hand. How crazy is that?

How do you know your making the right decision? You don't but considering that you know things better since you studied up, your precogs have a higher chance of being more effective. Like I said, this may not be revolutionary, but it gives you some ideas of how much small things can impact your performance. Each little bit is a step forward, especially when the difference between the top guys in the world is only 1%.