But how could you tell? The explanation has to be that our brains know much, much more about the physics of moving golf balls than we give them credit for. Golfers who do what putting teachers sometimes tell them to do—keep their head down until they hear the ball hit the bottom of the cup—deprive themselves of their best opportunity to enlarge their ball-behavior database. Looking at the hole also keeps your internal range finder fully engaged and enables your increasingly well-educated subconscious to intervene, on its own, when it senses something going awry. Besides, the easiest way to keep your head still is to aim it, at the outset, toward the thing it yearns to peek at.