Scientists crack the mystery of why England is so bad at cricket

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Scientists crack the mystery of why England is so bad at cricket

Finally scientists have cracked the reason why England's cricketers so often struggle with the game.

A group of experts have shown how living in a 'slow-paced' world makes it hard to track fast-moving incoming objects - like cricket balls.

Dealing with objects rapidly approaching from straight ahead should be a key human survival skill - yet it is something all humans are very bad at.

The reason is that our brains are so used to dealing with relatively slow movements, according to British scientist Dr Andrew Welchman.

The academic, from Birmingham University, said: 'Buildings, landscape and walls around us all move past us at slow and predictable speeds.

'When an object moves quickly - be it a football, cricket ball or (for our ancestors) a spear - our brains have to interpret the movement rapidly. And because the brain draws on experience, it's often biased by what it already knows.

'The less certain we are about what we see, the more we are influenced by the brain's statistical assumptions, which means in some circumstances we get it wrong.'

England's cricketers evidently get it wrong quite often, judging by their recent performance - which culminated last weekend in a devastating defeat to South Africa and the tearful resignation of Test captain Michael Vaughan.

Dr Welchman worked with German colleagues from the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen to develop a mathematical model showing how the brain tracks moving objects.

Tests using the model confirmed that perception is worse when an object is coming straight at us. As a result, approaching objects can appear to be travelling more slowly than they really are.

The research, reported today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has implications not only for sport, but also road safety and the development of robot vision.
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Taken from here.

Finally we have an excuse, although it should be the same for other nations!
 
Re: Scientists crack the mystery of why England is so bad at cricket

Haha thats not the real reason!:biggrin
 
Re: Scientists crack the mystery of why England is so bad at cricket

Reading between the lines, I guess it may well be possible to train the brain to help overcome this. Would be interesting to try something to see what difference it made, if any.
 
Re: Scientists crack the mystery of why England is so bad at cricket

I think the Scientists have it a bit wrong after 3 on the trot against the number 2 one day side
 
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