Does good vision make you smarter? (not OT by the end)

You’re essentially equating basketball IQ with IQ; court vision with regular vision. They’re unrelated.

The thing with players with great court vision, they see what they cant see. They know where, why, and how the other 9 players want to move on the court, they know what someone is going to do before they do it. This comes with experience, and communication. I bet if you followed alot of the “high IQ” players during timeouts, dead balls, etc, they were talking to their teammates alot, talking about cuts made, cuts not made, asking people what they saw or didn’t see and so on.

Reaction/Peripheral vision feat. Corey Maggette: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcVDyVFf7c

In terms of vision, while sharp vision doesn’t equate peripheral/court vision, it can surely help you. I had LASEK (PRK) done on my eyes to correct a shortsightedness and very light astigmatism, and it has improved my performance e.g. when snowboarding, playing basketball, or at school.

but the brain and vision are connected in many ways. It could be that your brain (subconscious?) was working so hard at trying to adjust to this overcorrection that awareness was lessened. Were you aware of feeling tired? If you were consciously trying to change your vision it could have created physical stress which would certainly have affected awareness.

I wore contacts for many years because of nearsightedness and astigmatism. When my near vision started to deteriorate bifocal contacts were new and not very good and I never tried them. I reverted to glasses. Then I decided to try contacts again and my dr. talked about monovision – one lens for distance, one for close-up. I decided to try it and it worked beautifully for me (tho I never wore the close-up lens ; I could read well enough without it.) Many people’s brains can not make the adjustment to essentially see out of one eye at a time. I have no idea why it worked for me. I recently had a second cataract surgery and we discussed monovision (I had the first t surgery several years previously and that lens was distance only.) Although it had worked before it was without wearing the one lens and since the cataract lens was a permanent installation :-) I decided against it.

but not smarter. After switching from regular glasses to contacts, my ability to “see the ball” was definitely better and I hit with more confidence. The basket seemed bigger, too. Likewise, following cataract surgeries, the world became brighter in multiple ways.

She was blind and deaf…. and SMART.

This sort of bleeds into the same topics as the BBIQ post, or maybe this one inspired that one (I hadn’t even looked at this one til now for some reason).

Anyhow, I think I get the drift of what you are saying. Anything that the brain has to do takes some brain power or bandwidth. Like talking on your cell phone when driving, you may not think it makes you a worse driver, but do you check your mirrors and gages as often when on the phone? So if the brain is using some extra power to sort out fuzzy images, does it subtract from available power for thinking?

Actually another alternative may be that the brain just has less input available to make decisions with if images are fuzzy because it ignores them. Have you ever learned the definition of a new word and then all of a sudden you are hearing it all the time? Well you heard it just as often before, but now you know what it is so the brain takes the time to process it. When you didn’t know the definition the brain simply ignores it. There are already plenty of things to do and taking the time to process a word that it doesn’t understand just gets shoved to the back of the line.

So in basketball if there are some things on the court, vision-wise, that aren’t quite as clear as others, maybe the brain just prunes down the field of view and ignores those slightly fuzzy images. Essentially it decides to do the best it can with the good data and ignores the bad data.

This probably is a good explanation of experience also, in basketball or in life. Why does the savvy veteran, who is now physically slower, stay one step ahead of the 19 year old? More stuff is now automatic, freeing the brain to think about some of the more complex aspects of the play. Now I’m not thinking about my dribble…where to position the ball from the defender…how does this play develop.

Not to completely rehash my response on the BBIQ post, but processing power and intelligence are (almost) completely divorced. The ability to gather data, however, is the ability to learn which can enhance intelligence, or usability of intelligence, over the long run. Just like the example with vocabulary, learning new words leads to more still. One skill builds upon another.