On the Sweet Spot by Richard Keefe

On the Sweet Spot by Richard Keefe

Like most moments of spiritual revelation, this one took place on a landfill in New Jersey.

A young man is standing at an unprepossessing driving range, hitting balls toward a distant fence, when something unusual takes place. As he begins his swing, he has the sensation that his club is drawing itself back on its own; when it is ready, it starts downward, makes perfect contact, and the ball soars off in the right-to-left arc he'd imagined, hitting the exact fencepost he'd been aiming at from 250 yards away. He steps back and wonders if he can do it again. He feels like an observer as the swing begins itself and resolves itself after perfect contact with the waiting ball, which again smacks against the distant post.

He has, for however brief a time, entered the zone.

Everyone who plays a sport knows that fleeting, ineffable sensation of everything falling into place: The pitched baseball looks as big as a grapefruit, the basket looks as wide as a trash can, the players around you are moving in slow motion. But as Richard Keefe, the director of the sport psychology program at Duke University, looked deeper into the nature of his experience, he found profound links to the spirit, the brain, perhaps even the soul.
Keefe recognized that the feeling golfers and other athletes have of being in the zone is basically the same as a meditative state. And as a researcher with experience in brain chemistry, he went one step further: If we can figure out what's happening in the brain at such times, he reasons, we can learn how to get into that zone instead of just waiting for it to happen. This is the Holy Grail of sport psychology--teaching the mind to get out of the way so the body can do the things it's capable of doing. Keefe calls it the effortless present, when the body is acting of its own accord while the brain has little to do but watch.

All religions describe some kind of heightened awareness in their disciplines; Keefe explores whether such mystical experience is a fundamental aspect of our evolution, an integral part of what makes us human and keeps us from despair. And he brings the discussion back to the applications of such knowledge, reflecting on our ability to use these alternate planes to achieve better relationships, better lives, better moments. Keefe's true subject is extraordinary experience--being in the zone, in the realm of effortless action. On the Sweet Spotbuilds from the physical and neurological to the mystical and philosophical, then adds a crucial layer of the practical (how we can capture or recapture these wondrous states). It is a work in the proud tradition of The Sweet Spot in Time, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, and How the Mind Works.

Richard Keefe, PhD, is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. He received his BA from Princeton University and his PhD in clinical psychology from New York University. His research is primarily devoted to understanding cognitive dysfunction and its treatment in patients with schizophrenia and related disorders, including those at high risk for schizophrenia. Dr Keefe has had a leadership role in several large National Institute of Mental Health studies including the CATIE, MATRICS, TURNS, and TENETS projects. He has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed scientific papers and two books. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Schizophrenia Research, Schizophrenia Bulletin, and Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, and is Associate Editor of Psychological Medicine. He is President of the International Society for CNS Clinical Trials and Methodology for 2012-2014. He is the Founder and CEO of NeuroCog Trials, Inc. He is a Co-Principal Investigator and Director of the Neurocognitive Core for the Translational and Clinical Research Neuroscience project at the Institute of Mental Health in Singapore.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780743223355
ISBN 10	0743223357
Titel	On the Sweet Spot
Autor	Richard Keefe
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Simon And Schuster
Erscheinungsjahr	2003-03-11
Seitenanzahl	272
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.