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Wired for Victory -

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The day after my session with the Pavlovs, I found myself at a tennis club outside Toronto in Burlington, Ontario, with Sue Wilson, a top neurofeedback sports expert and a professor of health sciences at York University. A Canadian tennis coach, Pierre Lamarche, had asked Wilson to come and evaluate a young tennis hopeful. Nineteen-year-old Katy Shulaeva had twice been Canada's National Junior Champion, and on Lamarche's Web site she had written that her dream was to be "the number-one player in the world." At the moment, though, she was No. 400.

That is not to say she wasn't good. I watched her practice against another one of Lamarche's teen protégées. To my eye, they looked evenly matched. But their coach did not think so. "If they played, Katy would beat her easily," he told me. And when I looked again, I could see what he meant. Katy's strokes were good, but her game was even better: Everything was natural and nothing caused her excitement. She was like a zebra bounding through a savannah.

The question before Katy's handlers, then, was, Why wasn't she getting better results in competition? Lamarche thought it might be because she had had several recent injuries, and the aim that day was to see whether they had affected her brain or body or both. Wilson put her in a chair in the club's offices and hooked her up. Katy, it turned out, could easily do what I hadn't done at the Pavlovs'—match her breathing to her heartbeat. It made me wonder if athletes have some kind of innate concentration advantage. The graphic Katy had chosen was a bay of blue water. The tips of the waves shaded toward pink, but the goal was to keep everything blue. Her skinny body lax, Katy seemed to be looking at nothing and everything. Her eyes were glassy and her mind seemed distant. Wilson and I talked across her with no effect: Only Lamarche's praise tinged the waves pink—how players crave the love of their coaches, even it distracts them from the task at hand! But in no time Katy got right back into blue.

According to some studies, the ability to shift attention quickly is an optimal state for athletes, because the most mentally fit are the ones who can recover the fastest from short bursts of intense concentration. Watching Katy, I felt I wasn't just learning about neurofeedback, but how a well-conditioned athletic brain actually works. "I don't even know how I do it," she said. I thought of John McEnroe, how his tantrums gave way so suddenly to complete concentration on the court that many thought the anger itself was faked to intimidate umpires and opponents.

Katy's test impressed me. Her mind was pretty quiet, so Wilson and Lamarche came to realize that her problems were physical and decided to add a large dose of sports massage and yoga to her regimen. So, in this case, neurofeedback helped identify an area where an athlete needed additional training. Now, as Katy left with a friend to go see Borat, it was my turn. With Wilson's help, I gradually figured out how to lower my thetas by quieting the images in my mind and focusing on getting a flower to open on the screen. Anytime I let other thoughts wander into my mind—my flight home, my children, how much I wanted to beat Katy at neurofeedback—the flower would stop opening. But I soon became adept at returning to zoning out and making the petals open. Wilson was pleased and I was pleased.

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