Have you heard that Klay Thompson can make eight out of ten three-pointers, in total darkness? It may sound less surprising if you know that Klay Thompson is one of the best three-point shooters in the NBA league and he must have spent thousands of hours on the court practicing his shooting skills. However, what he did is still amazing.

Why could he do that? One possible answer is the persistence of vision. Although it is still a controversial theory, most people think that this is real. Persistence of vision states that human eye can save the image he just saw for a small period of time, just around 0.04 seconds. In the Klay Thompson shooting video, the time between the lights going out and he shooting the first ball is not long, and persistence of vision may explain why he made the first basket.

However, how did he make the following seven goals? The time he took to make those goals was way longer than just 0.04 seconds. Although people’s muscle can memorize actions, shooting three-points is such a precise work that even the best basketball player cannot shoot without knowing where the basketball is.

Another explanation to how he did this is that, the place cells in his brain was navigating him. Place cell can depicts a map of the location in animal’s brain. By introducing this concept, Thompson’s achievement seems to become explicable. After the brain cell recorded where the hoop was, he started to repeat the action he had done thousands of time before this particular experiment – shooting three points. With the help of the brain cell, he was able to “see” where the hoop was and shot the hoop according to the information provided by his brain.

Still, what place cells did seem to be the easiest part of Thompson achievement. Everyone’s brain has place cells and they all serve the same function – mostly to remember where a person has been to before. The practice Thompson did is the most important part that enabled Thompson to make 8 out of 10 three-pointers in the dark, and become one of the best shooters in the world.

Resources:

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.neuro.31.061307.090723?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%3Dpubmed

http://www.sportingnews.com/nba/story/2015-02-25/golden-state-warriors-klay-thompson-sports-science-three-pointers-threes-lights-

http://www.mediacollege.com/glossary/p/persistence-of-vision.html