Why do basketball players miss shots they’ve made a thousand times before? Neuroscience has an answer

Every March Madness it happens. A player steps to the line, takes the shot and misses. And just like that, there goes your perfect bracket.

These are elite players. The player has made that shot thousands of times before. So what went wrong this time?

Research from my lab has found that the difference between making and missing a shot may come down to stability not only in how you move but how you think. Measuring brain activity My team wanted to understand how people build their skill at shooting hoops. So we examined the early phase of learning this particular skill – when coordination between your brain and body is still being formed rather than taken for granted.

Decades of research on the performance of elite athletes suggest that their sport-specific movements are consistent and their brains appear to be optimized for the task . In other words, they show less unnecessary brain activity and more focused processing on executing a specific activity. But it is not known whether these brain states are exclusive to elite performance or whether they can begin early in the learning process.