Since 1990 archers' brains have been recorded during the aim with EEG, with functional MRI, with evoked potentials and, most recently, with fNIRS. For anyone who shoots, three questions matter most: whether the brain works differently before a ten and before a seven, whether a national-team archer's brain works differently from that of a lower-level archer, and what changes while the shot is being learnt. The answers are not equally solid. On the single arrow, the studies point in opposite directions; between levels, a difference in how the areas of the brain work together holds up better than a difference in the amount of activity; and in beginners who improve, the gain goes with a shift of theta activity towards the left hemisphere, while overall power is not linked to the score.
Before the findings, two things should be borne in mind. Almost all of these studies have fewer than thirty archers, and several have the shot imagined inside a scanner rather than performed with a bow in hand. And a comparison between the arrows of the same archer answers a different question from a comparison between archers: the first says what comes before the good arrow, the second who shoots better. The literature often blurs the two, and here I keep them apart.
What EEG and MRI measure
Electroencephalography, or EEG, records the electrical activity of the cortex from the scalp. It is extremely precise about timing, to the millisecond, and says much less about where the activity starts. The signal is split into frequency bands, and three of them matter most in archery studies: theta, between 4 and 8 hertz; alpha, between 8 and 12 or 13; and beta, from there up to 30. Reading theta as attention or alpha as relaxation is an interpretation borrowed from the general literature, not something these studies measure.
Functional MRI sees far better where the brain lights up, but it requires lying down and keeping still: in the archery studies the shot is imagined or simulated, and the release becomes the press of a button. The instruments, their pitfalls and the figures from each study are gathered in the section "How it is measured" at the foot of the page, and the order in which the studies arrived in "How we came to know it"; what matters here is what came out of them.
Before the good arrow: a divided picture
The question closest to the shot concerns the single arrow, that is, whether within the same archer the brain works differently before a ten and before a seven. Few studies have asked it this way, and they do not point the same way, so in the registry the claim is contested. The first, in 1990, on twenty-eight elite archers with just two electrodes over the temporal regions, found more power at 6, 12 and 28 hertz in the left hemisphere in the last second before the worst arrows, and no difference on the right. Twenty years later a conference abstract on ten pre-elite Taiwanese archers compared each archer's ten best arrows with the ten worst, looking specifically at left temporal alpha in the two seconds before release, and found no difference.
The other arrow-by-arrow comparisons use consumer headbands with a single electrode on the forehead and pool the arrows of different archers, so they mix differences between arrows with differences between people. Even where they find a difference, they do not agree on its direction: in eight Croatian archers the headband's calm index was lower before the tens in compound and did not change in recurve, while in five young Turkish archers the arrows shot with a higher calm index scored more.
A Turkish study from 2021 took a different route. It placed a switch under the clicker to mark the instant it dropped and measured the brain's response to that sound in fifteen high-level recurve archers, over 1,070 arrows at 18 m. The first wave of the response, the N1, is larger on the arrows that land close to the centre of the group, but only while the good zone is drawn tight: widen it and the difference disappears, and the second wave and the timing of the response never tell the good arrows from the others. This claim is contested too, and it is not known whether a larger N1 means more attention to the click or is simply the mark of a shot that was already going well.
Between archers of different levels: more coordination
When the comparison is between archers of different levels, the best data come from a Chinese research group in 2022: fourteen national-team archers and fourteen from a provincial squad, scoring 8.7 points per arrow against 6.8, shoot thirty arrows wearing an EEG. In the last second of the aim the national-team archers show stronger links between frontal, central and parietal areas in the beta bands and a more integrated network, while the provincial archers' network relies on a few dominant nodes. A 2019 Russian abstract on four masters of sport pointed the same way, with synchronisation between the frontal areas highest in the most accurate archer and lower step by step down the ranking. In the registry the claim that the elite brain works in a more coordinated way during the aim is reported: it holds up better than the one on the single arrow, but in practice it rests on a single research group, with two papers almost certainly on the same archers and dozens of connections compared.
Two further cautions apply. "Coordinated" can mean opposite things, because in rifle shooting experts show less communication between the premotor areas and the left temporal region, and the two can coexist in different bands. And a comparison between groups that were already different does not say whether the brain organises itself this way through training or whether those already built this way are the ones who make the national team.
The same group also looked at microstates, the configurations of electrical activity that take turns on the scalp roughly every hundred milliseconds. Among the thirteen national-team archers, the longer the brain stays in a frontally generated state during the aim, the lower the average score (r = -0.80), while among the thirteen provincial archers no microstate parameter is linked to score. It is a correlation across thirteen people, which a single one of them can shift a great deal, and it says who shoots better, not what happens before the single arrow.
Less brain, or the brain used differently
It is often said that the expert's brain does less work: during the aim only what is needed would switch on, and the mind would go quiet. In archers this idea holds for part of the way and no further. Three Korean MRI studies, between 2008 and 2014, compared archers with people who had never shot or had been shooting for a month, as they simulated or imagined the aim, and in all three it is the latter who activate the frontal areas more. The third study, however, also put two levels of archers in the scanner, twelve women with Olympic, Asian Games and world medals and fourteen university archers who had been shooting for almost twelve years, and between them the difference reverses: it is the medallists who activate the supplementary motor area, the middle frontal cortex and the cerebellum more. This is why the registry marks as contested the idea that, as the shot is learnt, it comes under less cortical control, and also the idea that the elite, imagining the shot, activate fewer areas than people who do not shoot: in 2014 the medallists' network was no smaller than that of people who had never shot, and each group had areas more active than the others.
A fourth Korean study points the same way with a task that has nothing to do with shooting. Twenty elite women archers and twenty-three women who do not shoot perform a visuospatial memory test in the scanner, with results that do not differ significantly, 47.9 against 40.6% correct, yet the archers activate the frontal attention areas more, and there is no area where the others activate more. The differences hold only in regions chosen in advance, and the sample is women only.
The only measurement taken by following the same people as they learn dates from 2025: twenty-six first-year university students on their first archery course, shooting recurve at 10 m over seven weeks, recorded with EEG and electromyography together. After the course less information flows from the cortex to the shooting muscles, while the return signal from the muscles to the brain does not change. It is a before-and-after design with no control group, the link with score is weak and changes sign between before and after, and the authors read the drop as stronger inhibitory control from above, not as a cortex stepping aside.
That leaves the sign most often associated with the quiet mind in the shooting sports, alpha rising over the left temporal region during the aim. This sign does not repeat consistently either: a 2024 review of neurofeedback in the precision sports concludes that among EEG measures only the sensorimotor rhythm has a consistent link with performance, while left temporal alpha and frontal theta and alpha give results that change from one study to the next. Taken together, these data say that people who have never shot activate the frontal areas more during the aim than people who can; among trained archers the idea has no solid support, because the only MRI comparison between two levels of archers points the opposite way, and the EEG data that hold up best concern how the areas work together.
While learning: where theta goes
The study that follows learners most closely comes from Germany. Eleven right-handed adults who had never shot loosed a hundred arrows a day for three days, at 8 m with a 14 lb recurve and coached by an experienced archer, wearing a sixty-four-channel EEG. The score rose only a little, by 1.18 points per arrow on average between the first day and the third.
The brain during the aim was in a state different from rest well in advance: as early as 1.2 to 0.7 seconds before the arrow's impact, theta and beta were lower and alpha higher than with the bow down, in all three sessions. The comparison, though, is with rest, so the difference also contains the drawn bow and the effort of holding it, and no window reaches back beyond 1.2 seconds, so nobody knows when that state begins.
The finding that matters for learners concerns the next half second, the one that ends two tenths of a second before impact, just before the release. The power of theta, alpha and beta does not change from one day to the next and is linked neither to the score nor to the improvement; what is linked to the gain is a shift of theta activity towards the left hemisphere, in seven regions, mostly central and parietal, led by the supplementary motor area and the paracentral lobule. The areas most active during the aim, moreover, are not the ones whose shift predicts improvement. The result separates two things that are often confused, how much activity there is and how it is spread across the two hemispheres, and it is the second that is linked to a learner's gain.
The authors offer two readings. In their participants, all right-handed, the string hand is the right one, controlled by the left hemisphere, and the shift could come from the growing workload on that side; alternatively, the brain could be moving to the left the motor programmes that give shorter and more stable timing. Neither has been tested. The study also has to be read for what it is: exploratory, on eleven people over three days with no comparison group, and nobody has looked for the same shift in trained archers, so it is not known whether it stays, grows or fades with years of shooting. What happens to the movement itself over the first weeks of practice is covered in the article on motor learning.
Neurofeedback: the signal changes, the score does not
If certain signals go with the better shot, the natural step is to try to train them directly: with neurofeedback the archer sees an index of their own EEG activity in real time and learns to move it. In archers, however, the evidence on the score points the other way. The only controlled study whose original data can be read split twenty-four Indian university archers into two groups of twelve: one did twelve sessions on the sensorimotor rhythm over four weeks, the other nothing. In the 72-arrow competition at 70 m the trained group went from 527.3 to 529.9 points and the control group from 526.6 to 526.7, with no difference between the groups (p = 0.561), while the trained signal, the ratio of sensorimotor rhythm to theta, rose more than in the controls.
The 2024 review paints a more favourable picture, with an early-1990s study of twenty-four pre-elite archers in which correct feedback raised the score and feedback tied to the other hemisphere lowered it. That study, though, is known only from its description, and the same review reports the Indian study in a way that does not match the original paper. What can be said today is that neurofeedback changes the signal it trains, not that it raises the score. A similar caution applies to the consumer EEG headbands worn on the forehead: their "attention" and "calm" indices come from algorithms the manufacturer does not publish, and in archery studies they have produced results pointing in opposite directions.
What an archer can take from it
None of these findings turns into an exercise to do with an EEG on the range. What can be taken from them is more modest: to be wary of anyone who promises to read the good arrow in your head, because that is exactly the most uncertain comparison, and to treat with caution any device that gives a "concentration" number arrow by arrow.
The mental practices usually mentioned alongside this research each have their own evidence, measured on the score rather than on the brain. Mindfulness has real but limited support in archers: in the only controlled comparison in a reliable journal, twelve archers from the Hong Kong squad gained 11.3 points over 72 arrows after twelve weeks, while the twelve controls lost three. On mental skills training in general, the archery studies with a comparison group are few and split two for and two against. Keeping attention on the sight pin steady in the gold rather than on the sensations in the arms, in sixteen young elite archers at 70 m, did not change the score over about six arrows per condition, although with attention on the sight the visual areas worked harder. And the idea of breathing at around six breaths a minute to bring heart rate variability to its peak comes from studies on healthy adults, not on archers. I go into these in more depth in the articles on mental skills training and attentional focus.