The assumption is that the act is instinctive but Wayne Rooney makes that spectacular overhead goal sound as though it were the result of a rational process

A couple of weeks ago, David Winner interviewed Wayne Rooney. It's a fascinating piece for a number of reasons, not least the introduction in which Alan Shearer, playing magnificently to the stereotype of the English centre-forward (and ex-pro BBC pundit), "adopts a faintly pitying look" when Winner explains he wants to try to understand what happens in Rooney's head as he prepares to attempt a finish.

Rooney, though, talks fascinatingly about visualisation techniques, about how he will ask the kit man exactly what strip United will be wearing the next day so he can properly picture moves in advance.

Winner asked him about his overhead kick against Manchester City last season. "When a cross comes into a box," Rooney said, "there's so many things that go through your mind in a split second, like five or six different things you can do with the ball. You're asking yourself six questions in a split second. Maybe you've got time to bring it down on the chest and shoot, or you have to head it first-time. If the defender is there, you've obviously got to try and hit it first-time.

"If he's farther back, you've got space to take a touch. You get the decision made. Then it's obviously about the execution."

To have that level of consciousness seems extraordinary. The assumption is that the act is instinctive but Rooney makes that goal sound as though it were the result of a rational process. I have – I think – experienced something similar twice: once, playing in goal for my school hockey team against Whickham aged 17, when I dived up and to my right to push away a flicked last-minute short corner; and once playing cricket for the Oxfordshire village of Toot Baldon against the BBC about six years ago when I took a diving left-handed catch at short midwicket to end a frustrating ninth-wicket partnership.

On both occasions, once airborne, it felt as though I had hours to make decisions, that I could move stick or hand into the path of the ball as easily as if I were picking an apple off a supermarket shelf. This, I assume, is what proper sportspeople feel most of the time. As David Endt, the Ajax team manager, commented while listening to Winner's interview with Dennis Bergkamp for Issue One of The Blizzard, "the seconds of the greats last longer than those of normal people".

Winner, in that same piece, cited Jorge Valdano, who recalled how Diego Maradona, after his brilliant second against England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final, apologised to him in the dressing-room for not having squared the ball at the end. That had been his original intention but, as he approached the goal, he recalled a similar situation against Peter Shilton at Wembley seven years earlier. On that occasion he'd missed but, with Terry Butcher closing in, he realised his mistake and concluded that he didn't need Valdano and could score by himself. Footballing genius, Valdano said, lay in the ability to analyse and solve problems creatively under pressure at unimaginable speed.

As Winner points out, the tendency is to regard athletes and sportsmen as "nitwit[s] with useful … instincts" – to deny the extraordinary mental capacity, the processing speed, that underlies even quite basic acts. This was something that troubled the US evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. "I don't deny the differences in style and substance between athletic and conventional scholarly performance," he wrote, "but we surely err in regarding sports as a domain of brutish intuition … The greatest athletes cannot succeed by bodily gifts alone …

"One of the most intriguing, and undeniable, properties of great athletic performance lies in the impossibility of regulating certain central skills by overt mental deliberation: the required action simply doesn't grant sufficient time for the sequential processing of conscious decisions."

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CALCULATION

Gould is not speaking figuratively: brains don't work fast enough for much of sport to be a conscious activity. The neuroscientist William Calvin investigated how hunters and sportsmen threw spears and balls with such accuracy, calculating the "launch window" in which a swinging arm must release a missile: too late and the missile hits the floor, too early and it sails off into the sky. For what he calls "a reasonable beginner's throw", hitting a rabbit-sized target approximately four metres away (a task most able-bodied persons could perform), he found the launch window was about 11 milliseconds wide (this is discussed in Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow).

The launch window shrinks rapidly, as Calvin underlines: "Hitting the same target from twice the distance with equal reliability [eight out of 10] means releasing within a launch window about eight times narrower, 1.4ms … An eight-fold decrease in total launch window occurs when the distance doubles, a 27-fold decrease when distance triples." This assumes a stationary target and a stationary thrower; clearly the physics behind, say, a sprinting cricketer intercepting a moving ball and almost immediately throwing it to strike the stumps from 20 metres – or Rooney meeting a cross with a perfect volley and lashing it into the corner of the net past a diving goalkeeper – are far, far more complex.

That's one side of the equation. The other is the speed of conscious thought. In 1985, Benjamin Libet, a pioneer in the science of human consciousness, oversaw an experiment in which participants, with EEG electrodes fixed to their scalp, sat at a desk in front of an oscilloscope timer and were asked to press a button within a given time frame. The subjects were asked to note the position of a dot on the oscilloscope time when "he/she was first aware of the wish or urge to act".

Pressing the button also recorded the position of the dot on the oscillator electronically, allowing the time from volition to action to be measured. On average, around 200ms elapsed between the appearance for the conscious will to press the button and the act of pressing it. So, if Libet is right (and it should be acknowledged there are many who query his method), the simple act of pressing a button requires a thought process 18 times greater than the window for throwing a stone at a rabbit-sized target from 4m, many thousands of times greater than the window for an act such as Rooney's overhead kick against Manchester City.

Rooney cannot consciously be making the necessary calculations – or at least not in the way physicists would recognise by working out trajectory, velocity, direction, and taking into account wind speed, release time, the force necessary relative to the mass of the projectile, where opponents are positioned and where they are likely to move to.

"On paper," Dr Jon Adams of the LSE said, "the task seems impossibly difficult, and certainly beyond what we would credit the mind with being capable of within the time available, and yet it palpably is possible, forcing us to recognise that there is a level of sophistication here far beyond the conscious intention of the person doing the action, or rather, because the intention is quite clear – make the missile connect with the target – it is more correct to say that these actions are beyond the conscious calculation of the actor."

THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY

But that's only part of it. Researchers also analysed EEG recordings and discovered that brain activity involved in the initiation of the action, primarily centred in the secondary motor cortex, occurred on average approximately 500ms before the pushing of the button; that is to say, 300ms before the subject reported awareness of the conscious will to act. In other words, apparently conscious decisions were preceded by an unconscious buildup of electrical charges within the brain. "The calculations and the physics behind realising this intention are where the actor's purpose and the mechanics of execution part ways," Adams said. "In light of the physicists' analysis, we gain a renewed respect for the achievement of the sportsman as a biological organism or machine, but not for the sportsman as a conscious agent."

If the sportsman is not a conscious agent, though, then to what extent is his "responsible" for his actions? Libet's findings brought the study of consciousness into a debate on free will that has been going on for centuries. "The next thing demanded," John Locke wrote in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), "is whether a man be at liberty to will which of the two he pleases, motion or rest. This question carries the absurdity of it so manifestly in itself that one might thereby sufficiently be convinced that liberty concerns not the will. For to ask whether a man be at liberty to will either motion or rest, speaking or silence, which he pleases, is to ask whether a man can will what he wills, or be pleased with what he is pleased with. A question which, I think, needs no answer; and they who make a question of it must suppose one will to determine the acts of another, and another to determine that and so on in infinitum."

Locke's argument is refined by Galen Strawson in Freedom and Belief (1986), who says that "one is truly self-determined if and only if one has somehow or other determined how one is in such a way that one is truly responsible for how one is".

If we cannot want what we want, if our wants are not self-determined, then in what sense is the view of the self as an uncaused originator of action that lies behind the Christian idea of the soul, the Kantian noumenal self and the Cartesian ego adequate? Or, to bring it back to Rooney, if the impulse that leads him to turn his back to goal, leap, and strike a cross back over his shoulder and into the top corner pre-exists his conscious volition to do so, in what sense is that his goal?

THE SHAM OF VOLITION

That again raises two questions. First of all, if it's not Rooney, then who or what is it? It's something behind the Cartesian cogito, perhaps analogous to Freud's id, or the autre of Rimbaud, something primal and, frankly, rather disturbing given western society is based on the notion that the self has free will and is responsible for its actions.

Second, if those electrical impulses precede consciousness of volition, then what is that consciousness of volition? Libet proposed what he termed a "conscious mental field" (CMF), something that effectively mediates between the extremely localised functions of the cortex and the subjective experience of an integrated consciousness. In Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, he emphasises that the CMF is "not a Cartesian dualism" nor any sort of "ghost in the machine" but a "non-physical phenomenon" that "as a system produced by billions of nerve cell actions, it can have properties not directly predictable from these neuronal activities".

Like gravity or electro-magnetism, he says, it must be accepted as a given.

In The Illusion of Conscious Will, though, Daniel Wegener discusses the possibility that the consciousness of volition is a post-hoc rationalisation. Something beyond the conscious self acts and so, to explain that, an awareness of volition is flashed into the brain. For Freudians, that would mean either that the id is tricking the ego into believing it is in charge or that the ego itself, desperate as always to assert its mastery, is deluding itself that it is making decisions.

If that is the case, then those "six questions in a split-second" Rooney experiences have been answered before he has even asked them, that sense of control I felt flying a couple of feet above an astro in Gateshead and above a cricket pitch in Oxfordshire was my ego telling me I was doing this. And, if that is true, then it turns out – through flawed (or, rather, no) logic – that Shearer was right; that moments of sporting excellence are inexplicable.