Hi Geoff,

Merry Christmas

You got to love the article on eye measurement and putting.

Finally somebody up in Canada got it right to investigate what a golfer is looking at.

Regards,

Michael Toporowski

Dear Michael,

I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I have to say that Joan Vickers is one of the thicker, least appreciative academics I've encountered in golf lately. I've tried for a couple of years to help her focus on what really matters, but apparently she is getting too much attention to care how wrong and how simple her science is.

There are two separate visual systems in the brain -- one for identifying information (the "what" path) and one for appreciating location and shape and motion (the "where" path). In putting, no one cares "what" you are looking at (it's a ball, it's grass, and it's a hole). What matters is where the body, putter, ball, and hole are all located in relation to one another and how the stroke motion will send the ball along the correct path and distance so it falls in the hole. Joan Vickers doesn't get this, and she seems to think that looking at a speific place (a "where") for a certain time is a way to get a good sense of "what" you should look at for putting. It's all messed up. There is nothing in her approach about the body and where objects on the green are located or are moving in relation to the body, so it's just stupid and misleading.

The "gaze" as discussed by Vickers is not the direction the eyes are aimed OUT OF THE FACE (and body), but is how long the eyes are aimed steadily at something on the ground (e.g., back of ball). When you really boil down what she is saying, it amounts to very little more than "don't just look in the direction of the back of the ball; look at the back of the ball." DUH!

What I teach is how to use the gaze to avoid all the junk of "what" is out there, and focus solely on relating the body to the target for purposes of rolling the ball with a putter across the ground straight at and to the target. Putting is all about "how" and "where" and has nothing whatsoever to do with "what." Vickers COULD profitably study how the eyes are used to gain an accurate and potent sense of spatial awareness that relates the body and the body's stroke action to rolling the ball straight to the target, but she has chosen not to accept the suggestion to do so.

You might chack on the Flatstick Forum where she contacted me for the history of total putts per round from the 1800s to today, and I replied by writing a fairly complete historical survey of the equipment changes and changes in greens, along with studies of putting stats.

[Putting Perfcormance thru 20th Centruy].

At this time, I had already spoken with her for a number of hours by phone, suggesting books on neuroscience for spatial awareness and gaze control that she was not familiar with, and other books about the eye-head-neck system of body orientation and control. I also sent her a detailed critique of her approach to vision in putting, which you may also read here:

The "Mechanics of Instinct" in Putting:
The Neurophysiological Paradigm for Applied Research.

Since receiving my critique, she no longer communicates with me. So much for honest scientific dialogue and inquiry.

Debbie Crews is similarly infatuated with coming at the brain from the wrong direction. For both Vickers and Crews, studying putting is simply a convient use of their equipment, which must be used for some sort of sports. Putting is easy for them because the athlete is standing still and can do the task inside from the same spot over and over, so electrodes and stuff can be hooked up. What do these folks tell you about HOW to putt? While it may be true that looking at the back of the ball or some other spot steadily right before and during the stroke is a good and beneficial technique, it has nothing to do with aiming the putter face or selecting a target, or even perceiving the line. It does have to do with KILLING visual processes so that other more important movement and spatial awareness processes in the brain can go forward without distraction or interference, but try explaining that to someone in academia who gets published in Golf Digest.

Cheers!

Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
The PuttingZone
http://puttingzone.com
Golf's most advanced and comprehensive putting instruction.

Over 540,000 visits and growing strong ...

Dear Mike,

Allow me to make three quick additional comments about the Vickers article in Golf Digest (Dec. 2003):

1. The article deliberately obscures what is meant by "good" versus "poor" golfers in describing how "elite" golfers use their eyes in putting. Apparently, Vickers and the editors of Golf Digest wanted to convey the impression that elite Tour players use their eyes the way Vickers describes in the article. That is because the lifeblood of a golf instructional magazine is the notion that whatever the "expert" players do is best, so that explaining what experts do to amateur golfers is what draws the amateur readership to the magazine's articles and hence to their ads. In this case, however, Dr Vickers has never studied Tour players. As is true of almost all "academic" science studies in golf, Dr Vickers gathered together two groups of college students, one with high handicaps and one with low handicaps. These students were observed putting straight putts in a lab setting. It would not serve the interest of the magazine or the author to explain this in the Golf Digest article.

2. The Crews images of brains of "good" versus "poor" putters is not as easily interpreted as the authors suggest. What it means to me is that "poor" putters are poor because they have way too much thinking going on. The point of the article is about the back of the brain where the visual processes are. The comparative photos show lots of activity in the front of poor golfers (top of image in top left of four) and not much at all in the back (bottom of same image), whereas good golfers have very little in the front and some in the back (top right image of four). And these images are a blend of a number of golfers at different points in the stroke. My point is that the brain activity images tell us more about poor golfers than they do about visual processes in good golfers.

In my experience, the important processing occurs in the parietal lobe on the side, not the occipital lobe at the back of the head. (The authors seem to agree with this, but don't recognize the significance to their work.) The body in space relating to a target is all about combining visual information with body position information, so the important step comes AFTER visual processes are completed. In my approach, the gaze is how the direction of the eyes is controlled in relation to head and neck movement so that the head and neck movement is accurate in delivering the line of sight to locations of interest (e.g., target, line, ball). This properly integrates vision with the body in space, as vision is merely the handmaiden of spatial awareness of the relation between the body and the target.

To me, then, the images of "good" putters shows MORE visual processing than that of "poor" putters, according to the color scale along the side. More importantly, the images are looking at a barn with the door open while the horse to watch is off grazing in the parietal lobe combining visual information with body and movement information.

3. Vickers says that elite golfers use quick "saccades" from ball to hole and from hole to ball, and have "quiet" gaze steady on the target and then on the ball. A "saccade" is a quick darting of the eyeballs from one direction to another, moved by short quick contractions of the eye muscles to yank the eyeballs as a team to a new direction. All "saccades" are ballistic in nature, very quick from start to finish, and are not all that accurate in terms of ending up where you want them to go based on a memory of where the target is located that you want to "saccade" to. This use of the eye muscles is in direct conflict with the notion of a steady "quiet eye" gaze, and also with the author's suggestion that the gaze move steadily and smoothly from target to ball.

The advice at the end of the article on how to develop a "quiet eye" pattern states: "SCAN FROM HOLE TO BALL: Smoothly shift your gaze without interruption from the target to the back of the ball. Your gaze should move calmly and efficiently."

However, earlier in the middle of the article, Vickers writes: "Good putters use rapid shifts of gaze (head and eye movements combined) in which no conscious information is processed to link the specific spot on the hole with the specific location on the back of the ball. They fixate on the spot on the hole for one to two seconds and then use rapid shifts of the gaze between the spot and the back of the ball for 300 to 500 milliseconds. (There are 1,000 milliseconds in a second; you become aware of something when your gaze is stable on one location for at least 100ms. It takes about 180ms to see something and make or correct a movement.)"

Elsewhere she states that good putters have efficient visual processes, whereas poor putter have many and erratic quick gazes or saccades.

This is pretty confused by the author. A calm and steady scanning from target to ball is most emphatically NOT a saccade at all but what is called a "smooth pursuit" eye movement with the "vestibulo-ocular reflex" actively suppressed by resisting focus at specific locations along the scan path in favor of allowing the head turn to smoothly deliver the line of sight along a straight line. Eye muscle movements in the saccade, whether rapid and efficient or numerous and erratic, do not help the golfer get a good bead on the target and the relation of the body to the target. The important work is to build a sense of aiming the putterface and the stroke straight at the target, and this is fundamentally spatial awareness, not mere visual processes.

Some Tour players today use quick saccades in putting, but they should not, and better Tour putters use a calm steady smooth pursuit type of look from ball to target and back. You only have to look for eye motion by Tour players in putting to see this, and apparently Vickers wants all golfers to putt like college students. She also wants us to believe without study or evidence that her "quiet eye" accurately describes the best putters in the game, including the rapid saccades.

So, altogether it is something of a pity that Golf Digest endorses a misguided use of science that thoroughly muddies the waters and makes real progress much harder.

Cheers!

Geoff