Soccer goalies have elite Spidey-Senses

Your goalkeeper friend who’s always saying they’re “built different” may actually be right.

A research team in Ireland—which includes a former professional keeper pursuing a neuroscience degree—discovered that the guardians of the 18-yard box are leagues ahead of the rest of us in their processing of audiovisual information.

To arrive at this conclusion, they tested professional goalies, field players, and similarly aged plebeians on their responses to quick beeps and flashes of light, representing the stimuli of a real soccer game. They found that…

• When a noise played closely to a single flash of light, nonplayers and field players were more likely to report seeing two flashes of light—suggesting that their brains were confusing sight and sound signals.
• The time gap between the flash and the beep had to be three times shorter than it was for everyone else to throw the goalies off their game.

Nature or nurture? The researchers aren’t yet sure whether people who become keepers are born with naturally superior sensory skills, or if they develop them through years of training.