The following essay is reproduced with permission from The conversationan online publication covering the latest research.
The fastest serve so far at this year’s Wimbledon Tennis Championships was delivered by Argentine Thiago Agustín Tirante on the first day.
His serve of nearly 148 miles per hour (238 km/h) was still well below the Wimbledon record of 250 km/h, established by Frenchman Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard in 2025. And although Tirante gave his opponent less than a fifth of a second to play each serve, he lost the match in two sets.
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Which means its rocket services have been successfully returned on many counts. Our new understanding of how the human brain works may help explain how this feat is achieved.
Whether you’re a player or a spectator, the ability to see a tennis ball move so quickly across the court is a marvel of human physiology. At nearly 150 mph, the ball is travel faster that no one can watch it move.
By the time your brain has processed the sight of the ball leaving the racket, it’s already well on its way to the other end of the court. Yet professional tennis players return these powerful serves with astonishing precision.
The reason is that they don’t rely on reaction alone. Returning a tennis serve depends on one of the brain’s most remarkable abilities: predicting the future.
Tennis players – and spectators – face the same fundamental problem: visual information arrives in their brains with a slight delay.
Before a player is aware of a tennis ball racing across the court, the light reflected from its surface must be detected by the retina of his or her eyes, converted into electrical signals, and then transmitted along the optic nerves to the brain. There, the visual cortex begins to analyze its color, shape, speed and direction.
Even under ideal conditions, it takes approximately tenth of a second. During this time, a bullet traveling at nearly 240 km/h will have traveled several meters.
To a viewer, this delay is rarely noticeable. The brain’s predictions are so accurate that the ball appears to move smoothly across the field, even if what you see is off by a fraction of a second.
But the player on the other end of the court has to do more than just watch the ball. They must move their body to that precise point on the court, position their racket and time their swing with great precision if they want to have a chance of winning the point.
In fact, much of this process begins before the ball has even left the opponent’s racket. It is an extraordinarily complex system.
How the brain works
As the server prepares to hit the tennis ball, the receiver is already collecting information. The height and position of the ball throw, the rotation of the server’s trunk, the movement of their shoulder and forearm, the angle of the racket face, and the speed of the swing all provide clues as to what is about to happen.
Elite gamers have, of course, spent thousands of hours learning to recognize these subtle biomechanical signals. Their brains combine the latest signals with all that previous experience to estimate the likely speed, direction and spin of the serve, before the ball has even crossed the net.
At the center of it all is the cerebelluma densely folded structure nestled beneath the back of the brain. Although it is best known for coordinating movement and balance, advances in brain imaging and computational neuroscience have revealed that it is also one of the elements of the brain. excellent prediction engines.
Rather than simply responding to sensory information as it arrives, the cerebellum continually generates internal models of the behavior of the body and the external world. As new visual information reaches the brain, these patterns are updated almost instantly, allowing movements to be adjusted before consciousness catches up.
But the cerebellum does not work alone. A specialized region of the visual cortex, called area MT or V5is extremely sensitive to movement and calculates the speed and direction of the ball as it crosses the player’s visual field.
This information travels along the dorsal visual stream – often called the brain’s “where pathway” – to the posterior parietal cortex, where the position of the ball is integrated with information about the player’s body.
From there, the premotor regions begin to prepare possible movements. The supplementary motor area helps organize their sequence and the primary motor cortex sends commands to the muscles of the trunk, shoulder, arm and wrist.
At the same time, the frontal eye fields and the superior colliculus (a small structure in the midbrain that quickly redirects the eyes toward objects of interest) generate rapid eye movements toward where the ball should be next time, rather than where it was a split second ago.
That’s why the fastest comebacks in tennis aren’t just feats of lightning-fast reflexes. They are the product of a brain that is constantly making, testing, and refining predictions. Players who seem to have more time have become exceptionally good at anticipating what will happen next.
Tennis and beyond
Neuroscientists are still trying to understand why some tennis players acquire these remarkable predictive abilities more quickly than others. Is it simply a matter of hours spent on the field, or are certain brains naturally better equipped to build the internal models that underpin elite performance?
For now, the answer appears to be a combination of both.
Understanding how the brain predicts movements has implications far beyond tennis. Similar neural mechanisms help us catch a falling glass before it hits the ground, determine whether it’s safe to cross a busy road, or cross traffic.
These predictive systems are becoming an important focus of neuroscience research. An overview of how the cerebellum And wider automotive networks Anticipating movement helps researchers improve rehabilitation after neurological injury, understand movement and coordination disorders, and design robots that can interact more naturally with an unpredictable world.
Meanwhile, insights from neuroscience could also help hone a future Wimbledon tennis champion.
This article was originally published on The conversation. Read the original article.
