Category Archives: Items of note
Elite athletes’ ability to focus the brain might even explain their struggle to eloquently describe performance after the game. Like a starship captain diverting power from life support to bolster shields in a battle, professional athletes temporarily shut down the memory-forming regions of the brain so as to maximize activity in centers that guide movement.
“That’s why they usually thank God or their moms,” says cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago. “They don’t know what they did, so they don’t know what else to say.”
Not to belabor the Hoyas’ win last night, but it’s hard to read that Science News excerpt without thinking of Hollis Thompson’s postgame quote about his tiebreaking three-pointer:
Um, I mean, I was open, and my teammates found me…. Honestly, I don’t remember.
The Science News article, which comes via Eno Sarris, is a good one but it mostly presents a bunch of evidence to corroborate things we already know from experience playing sports or from those same seemingly uninformative postgame interviews.
You’ll never hear a baseball player say after a walk-off home run that his secret was mentally running through all the potential ramifications of his at-bat while simultaneously considering the various intricacies of his swing mechanics and keeping conscious of the particular home-plate umpire’s strike zone and the pitcher’s arsenal and tendencies.
All of that information exists somewhere in his mind while he’s swinging, of course, but as the article asserts, it is his ability to process it and keep it in his subconscious during the actual important event that in part allows him to succeed.
Sometimes the cliches are cliched for a reason: You really don’t want to overthink things in sports. That’s for bloggers and experimental psychologists. The elite athletes are the ones who, on top of the physical gifts, have the ability to maintain focus on their tasks in spite of myriad pressures and exterior factors, and it’s really only when they waver that we notice it at all. Until then, we just snicker at the seeming meaninglessness of their postgame interviews without considering how we might gladly give up our presumed eloquence for their unfaltering control.
I don’t think you ever say ‘never.’ That’s a discussion I’ll have to have with my family. I’ll need to pray on it.
- Stephen Colbert, on the possibility of running for President.
If you’ve got 20 minutes and you appreciate Colbert as much as I do, read Charles McGrath’s entire N.Y. Times Magazine feature on Colbert’s real and on-camera personas.
It’s Christmas, and it’s certainly not in the spirit of the day to spend any part of it making fun of anyone else for their religious beliefs. So I’ll lay off those that suggested the world would end — or begin to end — on May 21st of this year, with some small fraction of humanity whisked off to an afterlife and the rest of us left here to suffer as human life on earth came to a triumphant and terrifying demise.
It didn’t happen, and our continued, utterly non-Raptured existence on this planet strikes me as at least the seventh-best thing that happened this year.
Plus, though I may not have ever been seriously worried about the coming Apocalypse, I do appreciate the heads up. The people put up billboards. That’s just good looking out.
It turned out they didn’t have what I believed to be a very convincing case, but in the event that someone does have strong evidence the world is going to end in a couple of weeks, I do want to know about it. I’m a serial procrastinator, and I’m inevitably going to have some crap I need to take care of before End of Days. I’d at least pick up my dry cleaning.
Anyhow, like I said: Didn’t happen this time around. So we get more baseball and fried food, and all the other things that’ll be on this countdown. And maybe that little suggestion of rapture-fear, however unlikely, is good for us every once in a while. There’s a bunch of stuff we should celebrate more often that we probably overlook, and this whole existence is pretty damn fragile. It’s probably not going to end like they said, but asteroids are very real bro.
Remember all those extra off-days I said I had saved up that I need to use before the end of the year? This is another one. I actually just woke up. It’s amazing.
The rest of 2011 should be slow around here, but starting tomorrow I’m going to kick off the now-annual year-end tradition of counting down the TedQuarters Top 10 Things of the Year. For now, enjoy this trailer for Fart Detectives by Brett from SNY’s promos department:
Remember how I said a couple weeks ago about all those remaining off days I have that I need to use up before the new year? No? Well I have them, and this is one of them. Normally I’d cue up a couple more posts or something, but I’ve been spending a lot of time in front of the computer making jokes about Derek Jeter and my back kinda hurts. Plus, you know, it’s my day off:
What we tried to do, simply, was take almost all of the information we could and put it together and say ‘is the big picture consistent with there being life on Mars?’
- Astrobiologist Charlie Lineweaver.
Take a look at the lawmen
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best-selling show…
Is the big picture consistent with there being life on Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-hharrrrs?
Seriously though, this is a reasonably interesting article right up until this part:
“It’s not important if you want to figure out what the laws of physics are and you want to talk to some intelligent aliens who could build spaceships.”
Oh, nevermind then. I thought we were talking spaceship aliens.
Back to Bowie. Call me when Martians make anything this awesome:
Given a choice between eating chocolate alone and rescuing their pals, rats will apparently save their pals and then share the chocolate with them. Trapping a rat in a cage sparks its cagemate into action, as it figures out how to open the cage and liberate its jailed friend. This is an unusual example of rats expressing empathy, a trait thought to be reserved to us higher mammals, the primates.
It’s interesting from an evolutionary perspective, because it suggests that pro-social behaviors originated earlier than previously thought. And it’s interesting from a neuroscience perspective, because it suggests rats are wired for pro-social behaviors, which means they can be used as a model for human behaviors.
So that’s interesting.
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