Making the Read in 3 Steps

In a typical day, your brain consumes about 20 percent of your body's total energy supply. The harder your mind works, the less fuel you have and the more tired you feel. That's why you're exhausted after a tough day at the office, or when you're juggling too many thoughts. To fend off fatigue, your mind actually filters out most of what's happening around you. Your gray matter isn't failing you—it's simply using what it needs to survive and eliminating what it doesn't need. According to Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D., of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, "The brain selects very sparse information about the real world and generates a richer version by filling in information."

In other words, to conserve energy and focus on what's important, your noggin uses incomplete information to create a seemingly complete reality. Your brain's labor-saving work benefits you—most of the time. Take your morning commute. Instead of perceiving the speed, color, make and model of the countless cars whizzing by (an exhausting, high-energy task), your mind fills in the gaps and "sees" a steady flow of traffic. Those extraneous details aren't needed to get you to work, so you filter them out. But when the details are important—like when the red Range Rover in front of you slams on its brakes—your mind overides its fill-in-the-gap mode and sees with clarity: the color red, the brake lights, the vehicle make. Your brain determines that the SUV is very important, so the true picture becomes vivid, and you slow down to avoid a fender bender.

If you're a golfer, there's another time when you don't want your mind filling in gaps: when you're reading putts. Let's say you have a 20-footer that rolls straight for 10 feet, breaks right for five feet, then straightens for the last five. A cursory read lets you see only the straight parts of the putt; your brain replaces the missing information and assumes the middle portion of the putt is also straight. The result? You miss low.

To override this natural, evolutionary tendency, open your sensory channels by reading the putt from three different spots: behind the hole, behind the ball and halfway between the ball and the cup. This lets your brain gather the data it requires to read break and speed, while keeping it "busy" enouHe is cgh to not contrive a false read. Triangulating your reads (which most Tour pros do) will make you a better green-reader, saving you strokes instantly. Follow these steps and let your mind help, not hurt, when it matters most.

Three reads are better than one 

Beat your brain's "fill-in-the-gap" reads by viewing putts from three positions, as follows.

1. Start your read from behind the hole to get a feel for any tilt in the green, especially near the hole.
2. Move to a point halfway between the ball and the hole on the low side of the putt. Use this vantage point to gauge distance and confirm expected break.
3. Read the putt from behind the ball, using this perspective to confirm what you picked up at the first two positions.

Your opinion of the perfect line will often change as you move from point to point on the triangle. That's okay. It simply means that you're gathering new— and more correct— data with each read, which is a good thing. Your brain will adjust the line of the putt automatically. Just remember that it needs to be fed, or it will make up its own mind. Your job is to bombard it with information.