Quiet Eyes and Coordination
There is an interesting and robust line of research on the benefits of a "quiet eye" in sports that have targets, like golf, billiards or basketball. It finds that experts fix their gaze on the target earlier and longer than novices, and longer on hits than misses. I find this interesting because it's another example of the link between perception and action. If you want to control your body, you need to control the content and timing of sensory information flowing through the nervous system. In ball sports, visual information is critical, and therefore moving the eyes to the right place at the right time is a fundamental skill.But gaze control is rarely trained or even considered, aside from simple platitudes like “keep your eye on the ball.”
Here’s an example of how the quiet eye works in billiards, one of my favorite sports (is it really a sport?). Check out the visual focus of Ko Pin Yi, a world championl. You get the feeling he’s not going to miss right? Here's what his eyes do prior to hitting a shot. As he leans down on the shot and rehearses practice strokes, his eyes move back and forth between the cue ball and the numbered ball to make sure he has the right angle. Then locks his eyes on the numbered ball and is completely still for a second or two. Only after this brief period of stillness does he pull the trigger. Great players use many different techniques to play pool, but the pause and quiet eye is nearly universal.
The term quiet eye was coined by Joan Vickers, after she did research on the gaze fixation of basketball players during free throws. She found that elite shooters fixated on the hoop earlier and longer than sub-elite shooters (972 milliseconds compared to 400 milliseconds). She also found that experts were more likely to miss when they had less quiet eye duration. Subsequent research has revealed similar findings for trap shooting, billiards, golf putting, and penalty kicks in soccer. It has also been found that quiet eye training - (where athletes are instructed to use longer gaze fixation on specific targets before action) can improve performance and speed motor learning. Quiet eye training also promotes relaxation and protects against choking under pressure.
There are several interesting takeaways from this information. One if that "keeping your eye on the ball" is not as simple as you might think. It's an advanced skill that improves with practice. Where your eyes move is controlled by muscle activity, and like any other muscle activity, it needs to be properly timed and coordinated with other movements.
Second, there are profound connections between the eyes, the body, and the mind. If the eyes look up, muscles that extend the spine are reflexively facilitated, as if they are trying to help the eyes reach their target. When the eyes look down, this invites flexion. And when the eyes are still, the body and mind become still. These relationships work in reverse too. If your mind is anxious, your eyes and body will tend to jump around from place to place. A conscious intention to control the gaze (much like conscious breathing in meditation) may be one of the simplest ways to maintain control over a jumpy system.
Third, when you are playing with a quiet eye, you are not only increasing your chance of hitting the target, but also teaching yourself better technique. The probable reason is that by shifting your conscious focus towards the ball, you are also shifting it away from the body, which can be counterproductive. As described by Vickers: "When your eyes provide the data, your motor system just knows what to do."
This dovetails nicely with Gabriel Wulf’s research on internal versus external attention, which shows that we perform better when we are focused on events outside the body. Wulf explains that internal focus “interfere[s] with automatic motor control processes that would ‘normally’ regulate the movement.” By contrast, external attention allows the body to “naturally self-organize, unconstrained by the interference caused by conscious control attempts.” Put simply, quiet eye helps prevent paralysis by analysis and choking.
I suspect that a quiet eye also matters under more dynamic conditions, and that part of good technique in a wide variety of tasks is keeping the head steady so the eyes can see clearly. For example, a distinctive aspect of a cheetah’s sprint technique is that the head remains rock solid on the same level, like a steady cam, even as the spine is oscillating up and down like like crazy to power the legs. In sports like basketball and tennis, I would guess that an easy way to find the best lateral shuffle technique is to simply keep the head level with the gaze locked on a target, such as an opponent or ball.
My personal experience trying to have a quiet eye during billiards or golf is that it simplifies a lot of technical complications. I have a tendency to over-analyze my technique, thinking about hand pressure, wrist flexion, or swing path. The number of biomechanical variables is overwhelming, and impossible to control with the conscious mind. But it’s relatively simple to visualize the ball going into the hole, and then simply fix my eyes on the goddamned ball. Simple but not easy. Maintaining visualization and a quiet eye requires mental effort, and distracts me from interfering in a process that should be automated.
Here are some articles with related concepts.