The studies so far have been small, however—it's not easy to corral top-tier athletes into brain-imaging labs—so larger experiments are still needed to firm up the observations. Even so, the results echo earlier findings on the insula's involvement in imagining the future, whether anticipating physical pain from, say, a boxer's punch or contemplating the purchase of an overpriced item.
To Simmons, the evidence suggests that the insula does not live in the present, but the future. "We're responding to information incorporated from physiology, cognition, our surroundings," Simmons says. "By the time we've integrated all that, it's part of the past." The ability to forecast can also backfire, producing disorders such as anorexia nervosa, which combines lapses in bodily awareness with a concern for how food consumption now will alter body image in the future. "It's the anticipation that's getting in your way," Simmons says. Indeed, brain scans of individuals with eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder show that insula activity diverges from that seen in healthy subjects, suggesting impairments in this area.
Train your interoception
For aspiring athletes or individuals who suffer insular dysfunction, there are reasons to hope interoception is trainable. A meditation technique called mindfulness encourages people to tune into their present thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations. Derived from Buddhist teachings, this training seeks to heighten awareness of feelings but also to temper our reactions to them. The OptiBrain researchers have collected preliminary data, not yet published, suggesting that healthy subjects and military personnel who received mindfulness training improved in cognitive performance during a stressful situation—as measured with a breathing-restriction task—and reacted to challenges with less emotion, with the insular activation changes to match.
Small-scale studies on athletes, too, show benefit. This awareness of the feeling of the moment has been shown, for example, to improve the success of basketball players on the free-throw line. Sports psychologist Claudio Robazza at the University of Chieti in Italy has seen firsthand how mindfulness and similar techniques can single out successful athletes. He has worked for six years with Italy's Olympic shooting team, a mentally demanding sport that favors individuals who can still nail their targets when the pressure is highest. "Emotional states can reflect bodily changes, an increase in heart rate, muscular tension and breathing—all those things cause changes in the performance and the final outcome," Robazza says. "Certainly athletes need to be aware of their responses."
With tens of thousands of people gazing down from stadium seats, and millions more tuned in to television broadcasts, an Olympic athlete runs a high risk of choking. The stress of the moment can trigger many physical changes that interfere in the execution of even the most deeply ingrained maneuvers. A heightened awareness of the body's condition, facilitated by the insula, can alert a champion to tensed muscles or shallow breaths before these responses have a chance to undermine performance. The insula—where the body meets the brain—serves as the springboard from which athletic brilliance can soar.
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Add CommentA study on 20 world-champion athletes (gold medalist 3 years in a row) compared to non-world champion athletes who compete at the global level but don't place in the top 10, found that they had brain wave patterns of a specific type (coherent alpha EEG in certain areas of the brain) whose coherency score fell somewhere between short-term meditator's and "enlightened" individuals with 20+ years of TM practice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883380
Similar findings have been found comparing [award-winning managers vs average managers](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22193866), [classical musicians vs average people](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21507681), and [police who consider their job a "spiritual calling" rather than just a job, compared to average people](http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/jsmithspaper.pdf).
From my experience in marathon swimming, It would seem that Eagleman's book, "Incognito " explains all. The unconscious controls all via the mantra, "repetition breeds memory, and memory breeds permanence". Thus, implanting a desired action due to repetitive training repeats implies direct contact of action without thinking to gain a significant timing advantage..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSwim stroking can be done in a sleep-like state, conserving energy..To define it scientifically and measure it is a bit murky, tho. (my goal)