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.”