Dustin Sneath

A puck shot from close range gets to an NHL goalie faster than the human brain can react to it. That means the best saves you've ever seen on a highlight reel happened before the goalie consciously knew there was a shot. Flames goalie Devin Cooley just stopped 34 of 36 shots against the reigning Stanley Cup champs. When Sportsnet asked how he felt out there, he said "I felt nothing." He meant it literally. His conscious brain, he said, is "really bad at playing goalie," and when he's having too much fun he slips into thinking mode and gets slower. The math backs him up. A shot from 20 feet hits the net in about 150 milliseconds, and the average person needs around 200 just to react to something they see. If Cooley waited to see the puck and then decided where to go, it'd already be in the net. So he has to start moving off the shooter's stick and hips before the puck even leaves, and that read happens in a part of his brain he can't talk to. Ask him how he made a save and he'll tell you he has no idea. Scientists have been poking at that split for decades. In the early '90s, two researchers named Melvyn Goodale and David Milner worked with a woman called DF, who'd lost the ability to make sense of shapes after carbon monoxide poisoning. They'd show her a slot and ask her to tilt a card to match its angle, and she was pretty much guessing. Then they'd tell her to just mail the card through the slot, and she'd turn her wrist and slide it right in. Her hand knew something she couldn't tell you. Cases like hers led Goodale and Milner to argue your brain runs one visual system for seeing the world and a separate one for acting in it, and the acting one doesn't wait around for the seeing one to finish. A goalie lives in the acting one. You've felt what happens when you drag the thinking part back in. Start paying attention to each step on the stairs and you'll trip. Cognitive scientist Sian Beilock calls it paralysis by analysis. Her team had college soccer players dribble while noticing which side of their foot touched the ball, and they got slower and sloppier. Less skilled players didn't fall off the same way, since they were still dribbling consciously to begin with. Only the guys who'd trained the skill deep enough had something to lose. Cooley got his the long way. He went undrafted out of the University of Denver and bounced around the minors, including two stints in the ECHL, before landing a full-time NHL job at 28. Ever since his debut in San Jose he's leaned on a mantra, "Nothing matters. Nobody cares," which is about the most efficient way I can think of to keep the thinking part of your brain off the ice. Ten years of reps gave him a brain that can stop a puck before he knows it's coming, and now most of his job is just not getting in its way.