Volleyball Tournament Part 2

Once we had a break, I took the opportunity to train my own vision. While the team was reffing a game, I followed the ball through the entire rally. This is a less than optimal way to play volleyball, it was a good way to train eye tracking. Initially I found it very hard to track the ball the whole time. As the ball crested it's, arc my eyes wanted automatically drop down to the court to see what the players were getting ready to do. I had to force my eyes to stay on the ball the whole time. For the last game of the day, I switched back to to watching the ball in the beginning and then scanning the court, to make sure my volleyball instincts still stayed sharp.

This brought up two volleyball memories for me. The first was when I played volleyball in college. For me the game took place in slow motion. I was able to scan the court and take in the subtlest details of body on the other side of the court while listening to verbal input from my teammates, in a matter of seconds. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this in his book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience." In it he wrote of how helicopter pilots in Vietnam described their perception of time slowing down during battles to the point where they could see individual rotor blades passing by overhead. Similarly he also recounts baseball players that described being at bat and able to see which direction the seams on the baseball were spinning as it came towards them. Now, it's been a while since I read the book, but from what I remember Csikszentmihalyi theorizes that this "flow state" arrises after thousands of hours of focused, skill specific practice.

The second memory was from a time when I trained my eyes to track better without even realizing it. When I switched from indoor volleyball to beach and grass my eyes had to adjust to tracking the ball differently. Until then, I had never realized before how much I relied on seeing the ball against the backdrop of the gym ceiling and walls, to gauge the ball's trajectory and speed. With only the blue sky as a background, my eyes had to retrain their depth perception using just the ball. Once I had stopped spending as much time playing volleyball outside, my vision slowly began to get blurrier over time.

Z-health has me wondering now, how much the flow state can be attributed to focused practice, and how much can be attributed to a finely tuned nervous system. When I was in the "flow state" I felt completely aware of and integrated into the game. I felt fluent in the sport, movement and action being my language. Sensory input translated directly into action without having to first pass through the filter of interpretation. The slow motion sequences in the matrix come pretty close to simulating what this felt like. What was the role of skill specificity vs vision and balance? What would it take to be able to access the flow state while performing a previously unpracticed skill? I don't know the answer to these question yet, but I'm hoping through continued training I'll come closer to figuring out the answer.