Eye Perception
THE CONNECTION: The eyes play a very important part in perfecting the skills of lawn bowls. They control the physical and mental aspects that are required in the game
PHOTOMECHANICAL PROCESS: The functioning of the eyes is usually likened to a superbly designed video camera. However, to understand fully how objects or events can be viewed inside the tiny chambers of the eyes is that they are part of your senses that operate by transmitting a looped medium to your brain. From whatever source; they bounce off objects in all directions, carrying with it the possibility of picture frame object being seen.
CAUSE AND EFFECT: The six perceptual systems that make your eyes move, give passage to thought and reaction body movement;
- Visual; (seeing) that which is perceptible by the sight, perceptible by the mind (of the nature of mental vision).
- Auditory; (hearing) pertaining to what you hear,
- Kinaesthetic; (touch) sensation of movement or strain in muscles, tendons, joints etc
- Olfactory; (smell) to perceive through the nose, odour e.g. hunger, offensive etc.
- Gustatory; (taste) hunger, taste; sweet or bitter, thirst e.g. passage of thought.
- Emotions; (Inner feelings) your inner feelings that have reacted to what you have seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelt. The emotional effect may be; anger, resentment, hunger, fear disinterest, poor concentration or physical control etc.
VISUAL PERCEPTION: Research has shown that what we see is influenced by what our mind expects to see. There is a feed back loop that allows the mind to alter visual perception; even suppressing complete images, or to fit with its interpretation of events. In the delivery technique the brain is fed incomplete or ambiguous snippets of information because; bowlers are physically moving, lighting is poor, glare is reflected from the green surface, objects are obscured, or the bowler is concentrating on something else e.g. what we see, hear, touch, smell, taste or reactions from our inner emotions. Our mind is constantly filling in the gaps and constructing its best guess of what is out there and the view it provides us might be rather more subjective than we would expect. Experiments show that many bowlers have two very different, incompatible images, one in each eye. This intricate interpretation occurs deep inside the mind, at a late stage of visual processing, long after information from the two eyes has been combined. If the eyes move the mind simply flips between both images and many bowlers see one picture than the other, consequently concentration with both eyes on a single image is lost.
EYE MOVEMENT: We are not normally conscious of our eye movements, if you observe many bowlers in the stance position and delivery action, you will see that they move their eyes in different directions in a systematic way depending on how they are thinking. Neurological studies and Human Performance Research has shown that eye movement both laterally and vertically are associated with activating different parts of the brain which control our senses such as sight, hearing, touch/ feeling, smell and taste (emotions are also included in this category). In bowls, these senses, if not controlled, affect our mental and physical ability in maintaining concentration, balance, the forward body direction, alignment and length of the delivery.
PERCEPTION EXAMPLES: A good example of an eye perception is; extend your arm out in front of your body at full length and aim your finger at an object with both eyes open. Then alternately open and close the eyes and you will observe that the finger will move right and left of the object. This perception occurs with many bowlers when the eyes are blinked; the fact is that eyes realign parallel to each other and the dominate eye will take over. The outcome for many bowling deliveries are, that the aiming point will move and bowlers will readjust their forward body movement and follow-through to the new alignment, and as a result bowl will traverse across the front of the head or come to rest wide of the head. Another example is, when bowlers correct their alignment of the first bowl and the second bowl still finishes in the same place. This type of perception also occurs with length adjustment. I believe that many bowlers experience such incidents in their delivery technique, but don’t despair it’s easy fixed.
CONTROL: The key to controlling and improving quality of work, effort levels and self - satisfaction is training the eyes to remain focused inwards on an aiming point prior to stepping on the mat and throughout the delivery. The application of a focal point controls what you think about, converges your senses and body movement towards a central axis to determine alignment and the sensitivity for judging length. Should the eyes be distracted from the aiming point when taking up the stance or during delivery, then concentration, balance, the forward body direction, alignment and length will be lost.
EYE TRAINING: To improve your quality of focusing on your aiming point you need to strengthen the eye muscles. This can be achieved by carrying out a simple eye exercise as follows; sit in a quite area that has no distraction and focus the eyes on a still object within10 feet or 3 metres, after a few seconds the eye muscles will flicker, when this occurs, look away from the object and then re-focus again. This procedure is repeated for an approx period of 3 minutes. Ensure that your practice periods are at least an hour apart. As you practice throughout the weeks the eye muscles will strengthen and time period between each flick of the eyes muscles will extend. This will also help you to mentally control the blinking of the eyes.
Filed Under: lawn bowls,lawn bowls coaching,gt for bowls,lawn bowling,Performance Lawn Bowls,Macka Jensen
