Ryder Cup Special - day 4: Why sinking a putt is the hardest thing your brain ever does

There are surprisingly - and oddly - many scientific papers on how to become a better golf putter. And there is a good reason for that.

Golf putting looks simple. But every golfer knows the real villain is the putt, especially the short, embarrassing, “I should make this every time” putt.

Neuroscientists now know that it is a battle between competing brain networks and offer a simple explanation: putting is not a physical challenge but a cognitive one.

This article covers the surprising neuroscience behind why sinking a short putt is one of the hardest cognitive motor tasks in all of sports.

The calm green where brains go to panic
On television, putting is so effortless. The pro golfer takes a breath, stares at the hole, draws the putter back, and the ball rolls obediently toward its destination.

For the rest of us, the ritual is slightly different. The putter trembles. The ball trickles sideways. The golfer whispers unspeakable things into the grass.

Despite its innocent appearance, putting is one of the most cognitively demanding actions in all of golf. It requires absolute precision, perfect timing, steady vision, and the ability to stop your inner narrator.

Neuroscientists have known for years that elite performers enter specific mental states before a precise motor action. Researchers studying skilled golfers have found that what separates a perfect putt from a disastrous miss is not muscle strength or technique, but the state of the brain in the seconds before the putter moves.

The states involve the quieting of some networks, the activation of others, and a delicate internal power shift from verbal reasoning to visual focus and motor planning.

Previous studies have used electroencephalography to examine these moments - that's those odd hats with electrodes on that measure brain waves. The studies showed that good putts are typically preceded by brain patterns suggesting efficient attention and reduced verbal chatter. 

But those studies relied on traditional analytical techniques that treat the brain as a steady, predictable system. In reality, the brain behaves more like a living lightning storm. Activity changes from millisecond to millisecond.

The new research investigates precisely that: brain entropy, which is moment-to-moment variability reflecting how ready a brain is to adapt. Instead of asking how strong certain brainwaves are, the new research asked how unpredictable the brain’s activity is before each putt. 

And the surprising result: the brain must be both complex and quiet at the same time.

So, why does entropy matter? Or, in other words, why is chaos better than order?

A highly predictable brain signal may indicate rigidity—too much order and not enough flexibility. A flexible brain rhythm is often a sign of a system that can switch strategies easily, integrate information from many regions, and adapt to tiny changes in the environment. 

That is exactly what a golfer faces when standing over a ten-foot putt. Only one muscle flicker, one shift in attention, one intrusive thought can ruin the shot.

Enter the scientists with wires, sensors, and a putting mat
Professional golfers make only about forty percent of ten-foot putts. Besides being sort of comforting, it suggests the brain has to be in a specific state for success. 

To understand what separates a great putt from a shitty one, a team of researchers invited fifty expert golfers into a laboratory. The scientists covered their heads with electrodes, placed them on an indoor green, and asked them to complete sixty ten-foot putts each while their real-time brain activity was recorded.

Instead of focusing on one narrow frequency, they examined the brain at multiple timescales to measure entropy - you know now that is how unpredictable the brain signals were.

Golfer by golfer, putt by putt, the researchers compared brain entropy before successful putts and before missed putts. The golf task was simple. The science behind it was not.

The results reveal that the putting brain has to strike a delicate balance: it must be alert, flexible, and ready for fine adjustments, while simultaneously quieting the verbal and analytic regions that tend to overthink and sabotage the stroke.

This combination reflects the strange paradox of putting. It requires attention without tension, focus without forcing, and precision without conscious effort. Neuroscientists sometimes call this a hybrid cognitive state: half deliberate, half automatic.

No wonder putting is darn difficult.

Be quiet and putt!
When the researchers compared successful putts to missed ones, they found something unexpectedly beautiful.

When a golfer is about to make a great putt, the left temporal lobe of the brain winds down. That inner monologue that says “Back straight, knees soft, do not embarrass yourself” becomes quieter. A quiet left temporal lobe helps the body execute the movement cleanly, without interference from overthinking.

At the same time, regions in the back of the brain responsible for visual spatial guidance become more active and more coordinated, as if the brain were preparing a detailed internal map of the task.

The ideal mental state for putting resembles a highly disciplined form of daydreaming. You are paying attention, but only to what matters. You are analysing, but silently. And if you are doing it really well, you are not thinking in words at all.

The challenge is that the brain is not built to behave this way on command. It prefers to comment, predict, panic, and overthink. When things go wrong on the green, it is usually because the wrong system grabs the steering wheel. Instead of trusting trained motor patterns, the golfer starts negotiating with every possible outcome.

This explains why short putts during friendly rounds turn into nerve-shredding trials when there is something at stake. The putt itself has not changed. The brain has.

This pattern resembles a mental version of the “quiet eye” concept, widely discussed in sports psychology. The idea is deliciously simple. The longer your gaze holds steady on the top of the ball before the stroke, the better you tend to perform.

In putting, this quiet window appears to be when the brain shifts resources from verbal to visual and distance-measuring systems.

This balance - strong engagement where it matters, quiet disengagement where it does not - is sometimes called psychomotor efficiency. It reflects a brain that knows exactly which circuits to activate and which to silence. The result is a state of mental precision that few golfers can summon at will.

Shhhhh …. Quiet, please

Why the tiniest shot deserves the biggest scientific attention
Putting seems simple: the ball barely moves, the swing is small, and the goal is obvious. But neuroscientifically, putting is almost absurdly complex. 

To succeed, the brain must manage an enormous amount of information: slope, speed, grain direction, weight of the putter, distance to the hole, pressure, emotion, and memory of previous strokes. 

Putting asks the brain for contradictory combinations of skills. It must stay relaxed but accurate, calm but attentive, automatic but intentional. It must also silence the prefrontal cortex, the region that insists on narrating everything.

For beginners, this balance is almost impossible. They rely heavily on conscious control. But the conscious mind is not capable of processing all this in real time. The moment you try too hard, your performance collapses. 

This is why even elite golfers describe good putting as “letting the body do it” or “getting out of your own way.”

That corresponds very well with another intriguing finding from the study. Communication between the verbal region and the motor planning networks was reduced during the successful putts. In everyday language, this means the golfer is not “talking” to their own muscles. They are letting them do the job without interference.

The study also hints at why putting collapses so easily under pressure. Stress tends to activate verbal-analytic circuits. The conscious mind steps in, tries to “help,” and unintentionally limits the flexibility of the system.

The results also fit with real-world experience: expert golfers spend enormous effort on pre-shot routines that control breathing, gaze, and focus. These rituals may work because they create the mental conditions that maximise the brain’s entropy where needed and reduce it where harmful.

Putting, in other words, is a neurological balancing act.

When mad scientists literally tried to “jump-start” putting
Human brains struggle so much with putting, that some other scientists (who were probably frustrated golfers themselves) thought: “Can a bit of electricity to the brain improve putting?” 

Enter transcranial direct current stimulation, a technique where a very weak current is sent across the scalp to make certain brain areas a bit more or less excitable. 

So they rounded up forty young adults who had never held a golf club and placed them on an indoor green for hundreds of putts. Some got stimulation over the motor cortex, others over the prefrontal cortex. 

In theory, it sounds wonderfully simple: boost the motor areas to speed up learning, dial down the prefrontal cortex to shut up the inner swing analyst, and watch your putting transform from chaos to cup.

But, after all that clever design, the statistics delivered a very un-dramatic punchline: nothing special happened. It did not matter which region was stimulated. Everyone just… got better with practice. The “no effect” was impressively consistent. The brain, in short, refused to be hacked that easily.

That might feel disappointing, but it actually tells us something important. Putting is not a simple “flip this switch, and you are good” skill. For raw beginners, the message is clear: no shortcut, just practice.

Maybe the green is not cruel — maybe the brain is 
The above helps explain why putting is so famously inconsistent. Even expert golfers cannot always reproduce their best stroke. They do not just need strong technique. They need their brain to play along.

A distraction, a flicker of doubt, a gust of wind outside the building, a friend coughing politely behind you — they all nudge the brain out of its ideal state. And because the stroke involves almost no force, the brain must do all the heavy lifting.

So if you wonder why-oh-why your putting stinks, it's because your brain is busy doing exactly the opposite of what is required. Instead of quieting the chatter and boosting the visual networks, it buzzes with prediction, fear, memory, overthinking, and problem-solving.

Elite performers succeed not because they have perfect muscles, but because they learn to silence the systems that sabotage precision.

Putting is therefore not a mechanical chore. It is a small window into the brain’s habits. And those habits, as every golfer knows, are very hard to retrain.

Putting looks harmless, but your brain knows otherwise.

About the papers that inspired:

First author: Ting-Yu Chueh, Taiwan
Published in: Biological Psychology, August 2025
Link to paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301051125001164?via%3Dihub

First author: Virginia Lopez-Alonso, Spain
Published in: Sensors, July 2025
Link to paper: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/25/14/4297