Bowling in Focus

Bowling in Focus.

In one of my previous lives I practiced as a Lighting Engineer, even studied in America for a time. The reason I mention this is that vision and the eye was a very important part of my understanding and design application

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 eye is that they are part of your senses that operate by transmitting a looped medium between the senses and your brain. Rods and cones, plus the optic nerve (and other receptors) carry with them the possibility of a 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;

1. Visual, (seeing) that which is perceptible by the sight, perceptible by the mind (of the nature of mental vision)

2. Auditory, (hearing) pertaining to what you hear

3. Kinaesthetic, (touch) sensation of movement or strain in muscles, tendons, joints

4. Olfactory, (smell) to perceive through the nose, odours e.g. hunger, offensive etc.

5. Gustatory, (taste) hunger, taste, sweet or bitter, thirst e.g. passage of thought

6. Emotion, (passion, 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 in with its interpretation of events (you have all heard at one time or another about deceiving the eye). 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 more subjective than we would expect

Experiments show that that many bowlers have two very different, incompatible images, one in each eye. The intricate interpretation occurs deep inside the mind, at a late stage of the 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 more of 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 controls 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, effect 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 index 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 adjust their forward body movement and follow-through to the new alignment.

And as a result the 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 techniques, 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 (e.g. the bank) prior to stepping on the mat and throughout the delivery. The application of a focal point controls what you are thinking 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 (its like taking your eye off the ball, DON’T LOOK DOWN or away from your aiming point ,if you were going for a mark in football you would end up with a smack on the face and if driving a car you would be off the road )

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 small fixed object with-in a distance of 10ft or 3 metres, [as a suggestion try looking to the point where the two walls and the ceiling meet] after a few seconds the eye muscles will flicker, when this happens, look away from the object, then look back and refocus again. This procedure is repeated for 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 the time period between each flicker of the eye muscles will extend. This will also help you to mentally control the blinking of the eyes