Chief Blur Buster wrote:
Experimenting with oneself's different stimuli, and mental states, is very educational!
I speculate that on a per-player basis may tune themselves subconsciously to their respective most-efficient cues of visual stimuli. People who are good readers (less dyslexic) might respond faster to text changes, while people who aren't partially colorblind may respond faster to color changes, and so on; as a speculation. Naturally, the drive for winning means the multi-stimuli opportunity of a esports session has many opportunities for an individual player to fine-tune to their most optimal stimuli automatically in a subconscious manner, as a rote of training.
I have to observe that esports is full of unexpected interacting stimuli factors
- FOV of stimuli (fullscreen-game-flashes, versus a single faraway target suddenly appearing, and everything in between).
- Simultaneous visual stimuli (shape-change, color-change, brightness-change, text-change, size-change, peripheral, flicker-flash, etc)
- Supplemental stimuli (audio)
- Gently focussing oneself on a specific stimuli of a multi-stimuli (like focussing on brightness/color instead of text or icon).
- Calm zen factor (professional solders/military/self-defense forces/etc fear for lives but trained to aim calm+stable)
- Pumping/priming oneself but not pumping onself to distracted-panic-attack levels.
- Nonstressed and I am slow (too relaxed), too stressed I am slow (too shaky), so prime myself to the correct level.
- Fear factors (fear of loss of rankings etc)
- Etc.
There are even more factors to consider:
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time and quality of sleep, and i would like to refer to Matthew Walker's book "Why We Sleep". You can also watch a lot of interviews and presentations from him on youtube. He describes how important sleep is, both when it comes to learning, cognition, performance, productivity, creativity and overall mental health and mental performance. You will learn why undersleeping and chronic sleep deprivation are one of the worst things you can do to your body.
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stimulants / "performance enhancers", meaning coffee, nootropics and drugs like adderall. To be honest, personally i would not focus on these things unless the effectiveness and a proper dosage is proven via RCTs. Also, just because something makes you feel different or 'good' it does not automatically mean that it improves your performance. You can often take way too much of something and make your performance worse, by being overstimulated, irritated or being way to relaxed.
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nutrition. Yes, contrary to the popular belief nutrition plays a major role in overall well being, and mental health performance. When you deprive yourself of proper nutrition, cause deficiences and malnutrition (even a mild ones), create nutritional and chemical imbalances in your body (again, even a mild ones), it all has a negative effect on your mental health and performance. These things make induce mental health problems, cause a person being irrational, easily irritated, aggressive, confused, and this in the end will negatively affect mental and physical performance. What is best brain food ? And again, to the contrary to the popular belief and to what nutritional science and nutritionists would like to tell you, the best foods for the brain and human body are basically meat, fish, eggs, liver etc. Basically animal based products, which is a species specific food for humans. You should focus on these foods if you care about your physical and mental performance and longevity.
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age. This also plays a role. Young people seem to be much more primed to perform very well in things like gaming and esports. Younger bodies are also much more robust and resilient to self abuse via things like drinking, partying, drugs, undersleeping, being overweight without too much consequences etc. Not saying that you can't reach an elite level in something while being in your 40s or 50s, but it is apparently much harder to keep up with the younger generation when it comes to gaming and esports.
spacediver wrote:
Agreed, I've not delved deep, but I believe peak performance is a legit field of research, and it seems plausible that being in a flow state, or highly physically primed state, could have an effect on reaction times. If so, reaction time tests would themselves be a great way to test whether someone's in a state of peak performance.
Flow state requires positive feedback and positive results. In fps gaming, it means that you need to have to activate an internal reward system via overcoming hard and 'stressful' situations. It means a combination of things like: perfect flick shots, crazy actions and highlight worthy plays etc. Basically everything or majority of things needs to end up in your favor. Everything that can create praise and make you feel good (dopamine hit etc.). This way, as the game progresses, you are more and more in tune and closer to the flow state. When that happens, things like learning processes, motivation and cognitive performance are being enchanced.