The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius - Hardcover

Schonbrun, Zach

 
9781101986332: The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101986336 ISBN 13: 9781101986332
Verlag: Dutton, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

“A must-read for the cerebral sports fan…like Moneyball except nerdier. Much nerdier.”
--Sports Illustrated

Why couldn't Michael Jordan, master athlete that he was, crush a baseball? Why can't modern robotics come close to replicating the dexterity of a five-year-old? Why do good quarterbacks always seem to know where their receivers are?

On a quest to discover what actually drives human movement and its spectacular potential, journalist, sports writer, and fan Zach Schonbrun interviewed experts on motor control around the world. The trail begins with the groundbreaking work of two neuroscientists in Major League Baseball who are upending the traditional ways scouts evaluate the speed with which great players read a pitch. Across all sports, new theories and revolutionary technology are revealing how the brain's motor control system works in extraordinary talented athletes like Stephen Curry, Tom Brady, Serena Williams, and Lionel Messi; as well as musical virtuosos, dancers, rock climbers, race-car drivers, and more.

Whether it is timing a 95 mph fastball or reaching for a coffee mug, movement requires a complex suite of computations that many take for granted--until they read The Performance Cortex. Zach Schonbrun ushers in a new way of thinking about the athletic gifts we marvel over and seek to develop in our own lives. It's not about the million-dollar arm anymore. It's about the million-dollar brain.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Zach Schonbrun  is a senior editor for business & technology at The Week and has been a longstanding contributor to the New York Times. He has also written for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fast Company, ESPN The Magazine, Newsday, The Washington Post, SB Nation, VICE, and other outlets. He is the author of One Great Shoe, which was selected as one of the best Kindle Singles of the year in 2015. He lives in New York City with his wife and their son.

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1.

deCervo

"How Can You Think and Hit at the Same Time?"

There was no indication that anything unusual was taking place on an early Saturday morning in August at the Hilton Garden Inn, of Avondale, Arizona, other than the piece of loose-leaf paper taped to the wall by the elevator bank. On it was scribbled in black Sharpie: decervo testing room 307. The room number was underlined. The tone was "no trespassing." Still, the housekeeper knocked on the door of Room 307 at 8:15 with an armful of fresh towels. No one answered, so she used her key to enter. When she did, she did a double take. The furniture in the dumbbell-shaped suite had been rearranged completely. The beds were still made and the blinds were drawn. Two scrawny, acne-pocked Latino teenagers in T-shirts and sandals were seated at matching desks on opposite sides of the room staring unblinking at laptop screens. Each wore a sort of thin metallic hairnet, with wires snaking down the back of their necks. A pile of plastic syringes and two padded briefcases lay scattered on the floor. The only sound came from soft, intermittent taps on the laptop keyboards. Neither of the men looked up to see the housekeeper quickly drop the towels off and go.

In the everlasting war for even the slightest competitive advantage in Major League Baseball, the battlefields have come to look a lot different than the playing fields. They have left the playing fields behind. This new terrain was once thought to be impregnable. Now, suddenly, held captive on Saturday mornings in suburban hotel rooms, it was spilling its secrets. When other teams learn of this, they will undoubtedly try to do the same. "Moneyball" was that way; once the data-driven revolution started, it became difficult to contain, until every team started using advanced analytics to discover new players or rediscover old ones. Then the battle had to be moved someplace else. Those teams that were late to that data revolution now had a chance to get ahead in this one. This data revolution required a new type of radar gun, one that could measure in milliseconds.

At 8:25, there was another knock at the door of Room 307. A third baby-faced teenager appeared: Manny, a shortstop, wearing a gray T-shirt and sandals, his eyes puffy and reddened. The boys, they were really just boys, had played in a doubleheader the day before, in the searing Sonoran heat, as the playoffs neared. This being a rookie league team, below Single-A, even below Low-Single-A, every player had recently been drafted or acquired from overseas. It was their first taste of professional American baseball. They remained years away from a whiff of a chance at the Majors; most will never even get that. But as the newest and youngest parcels of a Major League Baseball empire, they are handled delicately. They reside in the hotel, a short drive from a hulking, concrete-and-glass Spring Training complex, where they relax and train in uniforms that bear the familiar colorway of their big-league parent club. They are currently chaperoned by Frank, the organization's director of sports science, who popped in and out of Room 307 with a list of the telephone numbers to each of the players' rooms, in case any of them tried to sleep in. A stocky man with soft blond hair, reddish cheeks and bright eyes, he is friendly, but with a no-bullshit mien, like a waiter at the end of his shift. Frank did not seem to care that 8:00 a.m. for an 18-year-old on the Saturday morning after a late doubleheader is a considerable, if not downright malicious, request. But there was a lot to get done. Jason Sherwin and Jordan Muraskin were only in town for two days. Their sort of expertise is not easily replaceable. The club paid $2,000 to fly them out there. As the ballplayers tapped on their keyboards, and Manny waited on the couch, Jason and Jordan shushed about, adjusting the hairnets. They chatted idly with Frank about the upcoming fantasy football season, but there were giveaways that they were not members of a typical athletic entourage. Noticing the colorful symbol on the front of Manny's T-shirt, Jordan asked him, "Is that a Google shirt?" "No," he replied sheepishly. "World Baseball Classic."

A spot opened up at one of the desks after the first player finished. Manny took a seat and waited as Jason prepared the laptop and Jordan readied the headgear. He used an alcohol swab to dab behind the player's ears and fitted the strange translucent swim cap-an EEG headset-over Manny's short hair. Then he grabbed a syringe and squirted a pale creamy substance into the seams around the nine spots where the sensors were expected to maintain the closest contact with the skull. The cream, the consistency of toothpaste, is a conductive salve for the electrodes. "You remember this?" he asked. Manny nodded. He quickly typed his username and password into the system and the screen went dark, with only a small rectangular box appearing in the center. A moment later Jason signaled the program was ready.

"It'll take about 40 minutes," Jordan said. "Do you want any practice?"

"No," Manny said. "I'm good."

The simulation began. "And we're off," Frank said.

First came the orthopedists. They came to baseball in the late 1950s and early 1960s, transforming how pitchers were assessed and treated. The psychologists followed. Then the optometrists, strength coaches, massage therapists and nutritionists. The economists and sabermetricians. The Zen masters and sleep doctors and yoga instructors. And finally, at last, there came the neuroscientists, fresh from school, brandishing doctorates and peer-reviewed papers and exactly nothing of any value that mattered to a baseball executive other than their answer to the question, ÒCan you make my team better?Ó To which, Jason and Jordan, cofounders of a startup called deCervo, would answer unequivocally, ÒMaybe.Ó They were not sure. They were scientists, and they had no background in business. They seemed to have no business in baseball. That a sport moored to tradition-where managers still wear uniforms in the dugout and make calls to the bullpen using a landline phone; the last major league to adopt on-field instant replay-had any interest in doing business with them was also unclear. But they wanted to help. There is a saying about baseball that, even after 170 years, you can still see something new in any game. Outside of cheating, though, there was not much new for improving the act of hitting. Hitters can so often seem besieged by so many factors-mounting velocities, defensive shifts, the unyielding constraints of our visuomotor system-that reaching base safely even on occasion is widely considered a paragon of skill. Ted Williams once called hitting a baseball Òthe most difficult thing to do in sport.Ó Some say that the hands need to be ÒcoordinatedÓ well with the eyes, which can be deceiving if you are one to believe that hitting, like a lot of athletic endeavors, is mainly a rote exercise based on muscle memory, a term coaches use often. Coaches also say things like Òwatch the ball hit the batÓ and Òslow the game down.Ó In 1921, psychologists at Columbia University designed a battery of sensory-motor tests for Babe Ruth, under the guise of empiricism, to explain his prodigious...

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101986336
ISBN 13 
9781101986332
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
Deutschland

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