Diagnostic Imaging
October 2003

OVERREAD

Functional MR reveals Zen of hitting the green

Skilled golf players cruise on autopilot, while novice duffers chatter internally

Golfers have claimed for years that it's all between the ears. Now scientists have proved them right. Using functional MR, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic mapped brain activation during golfers' mental imagery of their swing. They found that as skill level increases, less brainpower is used.

"We observed a fairly striking decrease in brain activation with the better players," said lead author Dr. Jeffrey S. Ross, head of MRI research in the neuroradiology section at the Cleveland Clinic.

Less accomplished golfers had activation particular to the vermis, motor cortex, and supplementary motor area, which is known to be involved with self-initiated, internally cued tasks, particularly of a sequential/temporal nature, according to the study published in the June/July issue of the American Journal of Neuroradiology.

"I am not at all surprised by the findings," said Dr. Lawrence Tanenbaum, section chief of CT, MRI, and neuroradiology at the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute. "As a duffer, my typical swing is a complicated array of moves and adjustments, errors and corrections, anticipation and worry."

Perhaps the professional golfer, without realizing it, practices Zen golf: effortless focus applied without doubt or anxiety, wrote AJNR editor-in-chief Dr. Robert M. Quencer in an accompanying editorial. Quencer, a golfer himself, raised other questions pertinent to the study: Would different fMRI patterns be seen in association with different clubs? Does the activation vary if the subject imagines hitting over a huge hazard versus hitting down a broad, expansive fairway? Can the technique be used to improve play?

While the study has limitations, including its small size, it shows the feasibility of defining areas of brain activation during imagery of a complex, coordinated motor task, Ross said.

"Most people think of fMRI as very concrete, such as preoperatively localizing the motor strip. But there are much broader applications," he said.

Researchers evaluated six male golfers (aged 24 to 50, handicaps from zero to 13) with blood oxygen level-dependent fMRI. Two primary control conditions-at rest and pushing against a wall-were tested against golf imagery. Each control condition activated different parts of the brain that, when subtracted from the experimental condition, rendered the functional brain map involved in mentally driving a golf ball down a fairway.

Participants imagined their golf swings from a first-person perspective, as they would on a practice tee, with each swing occurring every 1.5 to two seconds. Data for the control and experimental conditions were alternately obtained during a single MR imaging series, with the participant alternating the imagery while the images were acquired: rest, golf, rest, golf, etc., or wall, golf, wall, golf, etc. Researchers verbally instructed participants when to switch imagery tasks.

The wall-versus-golf paradigm offered more discriminatory power in areas of activation compared with the more general activation of the rest-versus-golf paradigm.

Several areas of the brain were activated during golf swing imagery: