The year was 1920. It was George “Babe” Ruth’s first season playing for the New York Yankees.

In that season, he hit an amazing 54 home runs. He alone hit more home runs than any team.

But “The Bambino,” as he was nicknamed, was far from an example of athletic prowess. He was chubby, disliked exercise and was constantly seen at parties drinking and gambling.

So, how was he able to achieve such greatness on the baseball field?

To answer this question, a prominent New York Times sportswriter, Hugh Fullerton, knocked on the door of Columbia University’s psychology laboratory where two researchers, Albert Johanson and Joseph Holmes, were invited to answer.

Fullerton’s inquiry was simple: if Ruth’s achievements could not be explained by physical abilities, then what other factors might be involved?

It was no surprise when the researchers discovered that Ruth scored higher than the average population on every psychological test he took.

Ruth’s test results formed the basis of an article by Fullerton in Popular Science Monthly entitled: “Why Babe Ruth is the greatest home run hitter“.

These findings changed the popular perspective on sports performance, suggesting that physical attributes were not the only reason athletes excelled—mental skills finally took center stage.

The development of sports psychology

Ruth outperformed normal people in attention, memory and cognitive tasks.

It took almost a century for sports scientists to figure out if these high-level skills were a common trait of elite athletes or if Ruth was just a genius.

In an exploratory meta-analysis published in 2018focusing on athletes alone, my colleagues and I found that athletes recruited brain areas involved with attention, memory, and motor control when making sport-related decisions.

Then, in 2022, a review by Nicole Logan and colleagues from Northeastern University in the US collected 41 studies comparing professional athletes and normal controls (people like us).

Data from 5,339 participants (including 2,267 athletes) were meta-analysed. The results showed significantly higher scores in attention and decision-making among professional athletes compared to normal people.

So athletes generally outperform us in cognitive tasks – but why?

It was the emergence of cognitive neuroscience that allowed researchers to map neural networks involved in sports imagery (such as athletes’ ability to recreate sports-related situations in their minds) and athletes’ decision-making regarding in-game situations.

Elite athletes are also smarter than amateur athletes

Decision making is a human skill. The more you practice, the better you get.

But good decision makers like elite athletes rely on other cognitive skills to simulate in their minds the potential outcomes of a given situation.

Here’s an example – imagine a rugby league match.

A running back starts a play with his team near the try line. He has several teammates to pass the ball to but he decides to tuck the ball under his arm and sprint for a try – he had seen open space in the opposition’s defensive line.

In a split second he had to make a decision based on the information he had available. Using images, he had to consider the position of every other player in the field and calculate the best route for every possible pass or run he could make.

It requires high levels of attention to visually scan the field, stop all distraction from clouded thoughts, memory to hold and retrieve information while processing all options, and creativity to imagine the same game from different angles.

These three skills—attention, memory, and creativity—have technical names: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, respectively.

They are the three central executive functions used by the brain to perform complex tasks.

The most groundbreaking study on the role of executive functions in sports performance came out in 2012.

Torbjörn Vestberg and colleagues from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden compared the three central executive functions of elite soccer players from the first division with their counterparts from the fourth division (usually only semi-professional athletes).

The higher division performed better than the players in the lower division in all executive functions.

Similar results were found in other studies over the last decade, including one from my colleagues and I in 2023which compared female soccer and futsal players to their amateur counterparts.

We found that elite athletes outperform ordinary people in decision-making and executive function.

Athletes outwit us for one reason: training

Elite athletes are highly specialized decision makers because they practice it every day.

They surpass normal people cognitive flexibility and inhibitionwhich can lead to smarter decisions on and off court.

However, the scientific literature still lacks evidence for the other central executive function, working memory. In my current research, I try to fill this gap.

Being creative and finding better solutions to overcome an opponent is what sports are all about, while many normal people like us struggle when faced with large amounts of information at once.

Practice, and a bit of biological predisposition, make most elite athletes smarter than us.