On the final hole of the BMW PGA Championship, Manuel Elvira was tied for the lead with J.J. Spaun when he opted to send his second shot short of a creek crossing the fairway. But Elvira pulled the ball into a fairway bunker, made double bogey and fell out of contention. How did Elvira miss such a meaningless shot? Probably because it was meaningless. Research around “quiet eye” visualization says we benefit from locking in on a specific target because vague targets lead to imprecise motor patterns. In other words, the less direction our brains give our bodies, the sloppier the result.

We’re not here to say we know for sure. What we do know is research has identified benefits for kids trained in music at a young age, and that the same reasons cited also apply to tasks required in golf. A Harvard Medical School study compared children trained in music at a young age to those with no musical training, and found the former group developed richer pathways between the two hemispheres of the brain, leading to betterr motor planning, decision-making, and executive function. According to the study, “musicians acquire and continuously practice a variety of complex motor, auditory, and multimodal skills.” In other words, musicians are forced to process information, perform a complex physical task, then react to their output in real time. For a study that isn’t about golf, it sounds a lot like golf.

The 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is an opportunity to revisit some of Golf Digest’s journalism covering  the event and its aftermath. Among those stories is the late Tim Rosaforte and Bill Fields’ profile of Jimmy Dunne, then a relatively unknown Wall Street financier who survived the attacks when most of his colleagues perished, and is now considered one of the most influential figures in the game.

The first obvious answer is score, and after that, most golfers will talk about greens in regulation. But even that can be an uneven gauge for certain players (assuming you even understand what it means—Shane Ryan explains how that can happen). The other day, after playing one of my best rounds of the year, I realized in hindsight I still didn’t hit many greens in regulation. But what I did do well, however, is give myself a lot of opportunities to save par. And that’s because I was successful in the stat I devised a few years ago— “greenside in regulation”. The metric is exactly as it sounds. You're either on the green, or you’re at least close enough to chip it on and potentially save par. For mid-handicappers like me who don’t count on a lot of birdie putts, it’s probably the best indicator of a decent score, and in my case, it was.

A few months ago, I wrote about a costly moment in a club tournament in which I opted for the wrong shot in a pressure situation. Turns out I did the same thing this past weekend. The specifics were different, but one consistent thread was opting for a supposedly “safer” shot that I didn’t usually hit. The result was predictably disastrous, and it was even more regrettable given course-strategy expert Scott Fawcett had warned me against this type of decision months earlier.

“It’s the same thing,” Fawcett said. “Now you're in a pressure situation hitting a shot you don't really practice. That’s a lot to ask.”

I am, and I’ve already noticed a discrepancy between the balls I hit mindlessly into the net in my backyard, and when playing for real. One comes relatively easy, the other is still awkward. None of this should be a surprise, especially to me. In a recent Mind Games video, I discussed one of the essential ingredients of good golf practice, which is stress. In order to ingrain a new pattern effectively, golfers eventually need to do so in an environment that most closely resembles real competition. For what it’s worth, our Stress Tests platform is a collection of practice games designed for this very purpose.

Long one of the game’s best putters, Snedeker in this month’s Golf Digest cover story discusses why he doesn’t like to delay over the ball once he picks his line. “I find that the longer you stand over the ball, the less natural and athletic your stroke becomes, and you can fall prey to negative thoughts and indecision,” Snedeker writes.

This isn't just Snedeker's theory. According to Dr. Scott Wylie, a cognitive neuroscientist and the co-founder of S2 Cognition, golfers create a “mental map” when they look at their line for a shot or putt, but that image recedes with time. “By about seven or eight seconds, you, you've lost a certain percentage of the quality and it starts to distort a little bit,” Wylie said. “When you get to 15 seconds, you've lost the majority of that spatial representation.”

There are a few ways to tell. When our Luke Kerr-Dineen analyzed more than 250,000 practice shots from tour events this year, he uncovered a trove of valuable insights, and one of the biggest is how often tour players mix it up. According to Kerr-Dineen’s analysis, players averaged between two and three shots per club before moving on to the next one. This is a habit the rest of us would be wise to follow, and my most recent Mind Games video explains why. Real golf isn’t just about how well you hit golf shots, but also how well you adapt between one type of shot and another.

When Rolapp acknowledged to Beall his rule about not playing golf for work, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was missing the point. Rolapp’s reasoning is there’s too much work to do, and I’m sure there is. But working in golf, especially as a newcomer, also means trying to understand the game through the eyes of a player. And not playing also forfeits one of golf’s most powerful tools. If you really want to connect with people, especially if you want them to respond to you as a leader, let them see you dribble one off the tee. A willingness to look stupid on the golf course is not a sign of weakness, but confidence.

A worthy example can be found in how Ryan Fox handled a brutal lie on the 15th hole of last month’s Open Championship. As Fox’s mental coach Karl Morris explained on the How Low Can You Go Podcast, it would have been easy for Fox to lament the unfairness of a shot that missed its intended target by inches, and was now buried in the lip of a bunker.

“We probably had 500 conversations somewhere around the concept of acceptance,” Morris said. “This idea that you know you’re either dealing with the reality of the game in all its chaos and its unfairness or you’re in a story. At that point, Ryan could’ve gone to a story like ‘I’m unlucky. Why has this happened to me? I’ve just blown the Open.’"

Instead, Morris said, Fox determined he simply needed to play out backwards. He went on to make bogey, but wasn’t deterred, and claimed the claret jug with a walk-off birdie on 18.

“I actually think you could build a whole mental game seminar on those last four holes really,” Morris said.

One is devious; the other delusional. What I’ve determined is they can easily be identified through one common scenario.

In a best-ball match, when your partner is already in for your team’s score, you might decide for pace-of-play reasons to pick up and proceed to the next hole. What score do you put down then? According to the World Handicap System, players are asked to enter their Most Likely Score based on where they are and their skill level. But even then, it’s a matter of perspective. A four-foot sidehill slider is no gimme, but two different golfers might assess it differently. The vanity handicap wants the lower score and will put assume they would have made it for par. The sandbagger will go with a two-putt and bogey. The easiest way to avoid confusion? Just putt everything.

By one measure, it’s a plus-2 handicap. Or being able to shoot even par from 7,000 yards (as Notah Begay defined below). But what if it’s not something you can quantify and more something you can sense? The question recalled Luke Kerr-Dineen’s list of things scratch golfers never say, all of which hint at a mindset about golf you can't fake.

When Bryson DeChambeau takes issue with a controversial ruling, and then Rory McIlroy takes issue with Bryson, it leads to the worthwhile question of whether playing golf with a grudge ever helps. The science looking at other sports suggests a little bit of axe-grinding can sharpen a player’s focus and motivation; for instance, studies have shown long-distance runners and basketball players compete harder when they have a particularly personal stake. But in a game like golf, when too much adrenaline can come at the expense of touch or decision-making, it might do more harm than good. In the absence of a definitive answer, we’ll have to see what happens the rest of the way at Birkdale.

What’s most interesting is how they arrive at their answers. A few years ago, we created an interactive experience reflecting some of the decisions players will face around the greens during the Open Championship. When do you fly a pitch to the hole rather than run it low? When is a putt the better choice? Much of this is player dependent, but at least in seeing how the ball behaves in certain contexts, you can at least appreciate why players pull certain clubs when they do.