Mirror Neurons: Part I. Powerful training tool for sports in general and ski racing in particular

I happened upon the phenomenon of mirror neurons several years ago. These specialized circuits in the brain were coming very much into vogue in relation to everything from language acquisition to explaining the mechanics of autism. I think I was making a connection in Chicago's O'Hare, browsing the magazines, and here, fighting its way to the forefront between Maxim and Men's Health, was this copy of "Scientific American" with a big color neuron right on the front page. Something about the headline intrigued me, and I picked it up. The article I first read is here.

Although I am neither a scientist nor a regular reader of Scientific American, one of the tag lines relating to the cover story resonated with my experience in how I learned my own ski racing. Something about how we can learn simply by watching. This was not new to me.. and it's probably not new to most modern coaches. I had been watching video to learn since, well, about the time I started to get really really good. As I read the article, first in the airport and then again on my connecting flight, the dots began to connect in a way that helped make a lot of sense about some of the more unexplainable late bloomer aspects (I'm told..) of my ski career. I took notes. I bought the electronic version of the article and sent it along to the coaching staff at Loon Mtn.

Background on mirror neurons: Although they've obviously been "in" the modern brain for a while, they were "discovered" in the 80's and 90's by three Italian neurophysiologists who were studying neurological activity in relation to specific movement. Without going into all of the details, they discovered along the way that about 10% of the motor cortex portions of the monkey's brains they were studying showed nearly identical activity while both performing a movement and watching a movement, hence the "mirroring" terminology used to describe their function.

Most athletes have used, or at least heard of, relaxation and visualization techniques that both refine and improve performance in sport. Using these techniques one can essentially rehearse the correct activity over and over in the mind's eye. It is hugely beneficial and I was fortunate enough to learn this stuff pretty early on during a summer camp with Pepi Stiegler and Otto Tschudi when I was about fourteen years old. One of the limitations with this method however is that the visualization you're replaying may or may not be the correct one. It's almost impossible to conjure up a clear moving image that resonates in your mind's eye, with all of the timing and movement and all of the other orchestrative stuff that inures to ski racing at a high level. So although practicing this way may help.. it doesn't really always work that way. Why? As my mentor used to say... often, when I assured him that "practice makes perfect," he would say: "Does practice make perfect? No! Practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect." So, repeatedly visualizing a less than optimal movement pattern only deepens the pattern. And few can visualize something perfectly when they haven't yet done it or even seen it before. If you have a faulty template to begin with, garbage in will equal garbage out.

Well how about watching good skiers ski? Is this an effective way to learn? I contend that it is, and, for the reasons I outline in this post, learning by watching is by necessity in our sport one of the most essential training components of any racer intending to get better quicker.

The function of our brain's mirror neurons takes the technique of learning through visualization one giant step further.

Before we go any further, here is a bit more background courtesy of Jonah Lehrer at Scienceblogs.com.

A quick primer: In 1996, three Italian neuroscientists, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese put an electric probe into the premotor cortex of monkeys. They discovered that inside these primate brains there were networks of cells that "store vocabularies of motor actions." Just as there are grammars of language, rules for forming a sentence, there are grammars of movement. These populations of cells are the bodily "sentences" we use every day, the ones our brain has chosen to retain and refine.

But these cells aren't just essential for performing complex actions. As Rizzolatti, Fogassi, and Gallese wrote: "The main functional characteristic of mirror neurons is that they become active both when the monkey makes a particular action (for example, when grasping an object or holding it) and when it observes another individual making a similar action." In other words, these peculiar cells mirror, on our inside, the outside world; they enable us to internalize the actions of another. They collapse the distinction between seeing and doing.

If you pull nothing else from the above, remember that YOU have the ability, already within you, evolved over many thousands of genetic iterations before you, to observe something, and then to collapse the distinction between seeing and doing, without analysis of any kind.

It's kind of a hard wired thing.

If you aren't yet convinced how powerful this is, consider our sport of ski racing. Although our training sessions may range from two to eight hours per day, the actual amount of time spent performing the act itself is ridiculously small by comparison. Most of our training time is spent in that "between time," e.g. riding the lift, talking, waiting, etc. Even six full length runs in the morning and four in the afternoon, considered by many to be as high a volume as is tolerable, you have spent a total of ten minutes out of your entire day performing the act that you're trying to get better at. At 36 direction changes per run, you have exactly 360 turns, 180 on each leg, and the bottom third of each of those runs may be compromised because of the difficulties of executing fine motor control movements while fatigued by the anaerobic nature of our sport. This is hardly the kind of repetition that is going to allow you to learn a complex movement pattern in a variable environment.

If it is true however that observing a thing can be perceived as doing a thing, and that our sport is very largely a mental endeavor in the first instance, you could at the end of that "ten minute" training day go home and watch world class skiers do exactly what you're doing, more "perfectly" than you do it, thousands upon thousands of times. Your mirror neurons are incapable of knowing, or caring, that what you are watching is not you actually doing it. Their job is to learn.

Next post: Putting it into practice, and some examples.