Soccer Superstar Plays With Very Low Brain Activity

jones_supa (887896) writes "Brazilian superstar Neymar's (Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior) brain activity while dancing past opponents is less than 10 per cent the level of amateur players, suggesting he plays as if on "auto-pilot", according to Japanese neurologists Eiichi Naito and Satoshi Hirose. The findings were published in the Swiss journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience following a series of motor skills tests carried out on the 22-year-old Neymar and several other athletes in Barcelona in February this year. Three Spanish second-division footballers and two top-level swimmers were also subjected to the same tests. Researcher Naito told Japan's Mainichi Shimbun newspaper: "Reduced brain activity means less burden which allows [the player] to perform many complex movements at once. We believe this gives him the ability to execute his various shimmies." In the research paper Naito concluded that the test results "provide valuable evidence that the football brain of Neymar recruits very limited neural resources in the motor-cortical foot regions during foot movements"."

Comments

Put it another way...

[denzacar]

You don't need much brain for running around kicking a ball.

Re:Put it another way...

[alphatel]

You don't need much brain for running around kicking a ball.

You're absolutely correct in a very zen kind of way. In order to be in the zone, or flow, you still need to make decisions such as "lean left, kick right", or "stop short, pass forward", but they key is to not let those minor mental decisions get in the way of your physical ability to execute. Some people are born with the ability to simply "do it", other may take years of practice to learn to let go of the process, but in the end it's all about realizing your potential without anxiety about the outcome.

Re:Put it another way...

[denzacar]

That's called being obsessive compulsive and it is a mental disorder.

expert skill-based integration

[anegg]

I'm only an armchair cognitive scientist, but my interpretation of this result is that it shows how an expert player has integrated the knowledge of how to play as a skill. The player no longer has to think through each situation and plan a response, the brain recognizes patterns and produces a response automatically. This allows for a higher-level of play because the player's conscious mind is free to act at a higher level, producing better tactics and strategy.

Re:expert skill-based integration

[drkstr1]

It's just muscle memory. They drill this into us all the time in martial arts. When fighting, you don't have time to sit and think about your next move, it just has to come naturally, like some kind of instinct. I'm not surprised by these findings at all. Sparring is one of the very few activities that allow me to quite my mind.

Duh

[c]

I guess that's a sexier headline than "Expert Soccer Player Has Good Muscle Memory", and it does tie into that recent bit of excitement down in Brazil, but otherwise I'm not seeing anything in the summary that comes as a surprise... Is it that part where they quantify the differences in neural activity between "expert" and "amateur"?

Re:"Intelligence" is not earned.

[michaelmalak]

That's a common misperception of what Gladwell write. His actual formulation was 10,000 hours + talent + opportunity.