The Neurological Nuts And Bolts Of The National Pastime.

[PoliticalChic]

"When Ruth was asked if he thought he deserved to be making more money than President Hoover, he said, “'Why not? I had a better year than he did.” Yet Hoover's enduring delight in baseball deserves to be remembered as more than the punch line of a humorous story." Google



I just received the latest copy of my alma mater's magazine, and was pleased to find an excellent article on my fav, baseball:

1. "Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure
What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure

What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

magazine.columbia.edu

2. For most mortals, making any contact with the ball would have been next to impossible. A pitch traveling at ninety miles per hour from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove takes about four-tenths of a second, and it takes a full two-tenths of a second for the brain to send a signal to the muscles to respond. “That leaves your brain with two-tenths of a second — half an eye blink — to be able to see the pitch as it’s coming in and decide whether or not to swing,” says Zach Schonbrun ’11JRN, author of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius.

3. The decision is complicated by other factors: the type of pitch (fastball, curve, slider), its location (high, low, inside, outside), the situational stress (in Larkin’s case, extreme), the noise of the crowd (ditto). “Anything that clouds the hitter’s focus eliminates the possibility of squarely hitting the ball,” Schonbrun says. “There’s just not enough time during a pitch for a hitter to readjust.”


4. “To understand the brain is to understand action,” says Daniel Wolpert, a neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Institute and a leading authority on motor control. “We tend to think our brain is there for us to perceive the world, but the brain’s most basic function is to move our bodies, whether to evade a threat or to interact with others through speech or gestures. The only way to affect the world is through the control of movement.”

5. Whether we’re biking in traffic or trying to hit a moving ball, there is a delay between the eye seeing and the muscles reacting. “It takes time for the retina to respond, for the information to get to your brain, and for the body to respond,” says Wolpert. “That means that when you want to make fast movements in sports, you have to predict ahead of time. Prediction is fundamental. You have to anticipate where the ball will be.”

 

[jwoodie]

Withing the Animal Kingdom, being able to throw a ball (or similar object) with speed and accuracy is unique to humans.

 

[OhPleaseJustQuit]

"When Ruth was asked if he thought he deserved to be making more money than President Hoover, he said, “'Why not? I had a better year than he did.” Yet Hoover's enduring delight in baseball deserves to be remembered as more than the punch line of a humorous story." Google



I just received the latest copy of my alma mater's magazine, and was pleased to find an excellent article on my fav, baseball:

1. "Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure
What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure

What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

magazine.columbia.edu

2. For most mortals, making any contact with the ball would have been next to impossible. A pitch traveling at ninety miles per hour from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove takes about four-tenths of a second, and it takes a full two-tenths of a second for the brain to send a signal to the muscles to respond. “That leaves your brain with two-tenths of a second — half an eye blink — to be able to see the pitch as it’s coming in and decide whether or not to swing,” says Zach Schonbrun ’11JRN, author of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius.

3. The decision is complicated by other factors: the type of pitch (fastball, curve, slider), its location (high, low, inside, outside), the situational stress (in Larkin’s case, extreme), the noise of the crowd (ditto). “Anything that clouds the hitter’s focus eliminates the possibility of squarely hitting the ball,” Schonbrun says. “There’s just not enough time during a pitch for a hitter to readjust.”


4. “To understand the brain is to understand action,” says Daniel Wolpert, a neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Institute and a leading authority on motor control. “We tend to think our brain is there for us to perceive the world, but the brain’s most basic function is to move our bodies, whether to evade a threat or to interact with others through speech or gestures. The only way to affect the world is through the control of movement.”

5. Whether we’re biking in traffic or trying to hit a moving ball, there is a delay between the eye seeing and the muscles reacting. “It takes time for the retina to respond, for the information to get to your brain, and for the body to respond,” says Wolpert. “That means that when you want to make fast movements in sports, you have to predict ahead of time. Prediction is fundamental. You have to anticipate where the ball will be.”

Never having played, I am on the outside looking in, but the most zen experience I've ever had is watching the batter hit the ball from my seat about 20 rows behind first base at Safeco, and hearing the ball singing "I-chi-rooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" as it flies straight for the man's glove. He was poetry, as a Mariner.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Withing the Animal Kingdom, being able to throw a ball (or similar object) with speed and accuracy is unique to humans.

See.....that's why Babe got paid more than Hoover!

 

[Donald H]

You're leaning a little too heavily toward science of the brain and away from the god's influence on human thought process.

 

[Damaged Eagle]

*****SMILE*****

 

[PoliticalChic]

Never having played, I am on the outside looking in, but the most zen experience I've ever had is watching the batter hit the ball from my seat about 20 rows behind first base at Safeco, and hearing the ball singing "I-chi-rooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" as it flies straight for the man's glove. He was poetry, as a Mariner.

I love that post!

I love baseball......they have stats about everything!!!!!.....and hockey.....my Rangers won the first round of the playoffs last night....it was truly a religious l here!!!!

I don't follow football, 'cause I'm a NYGiant fan.....



Found this book great, too:

John Sexton, "Baseball As a Road to God:

.....Boone took Jeter's reminder to heart...."... Jeter told him not to worry:

"The ghosts will come."

"In a flash, Boone's attitude changed. As he walked to home plate, he junked his plan to take the first pitch. Instead, he would be looking for what the players call 'a pitch to hit.'

Wakefield obliged with a knuckleball that didn't flutter very much and drifted toward the middle of the plate. Boone was ready and sent a beautiful long fly ball deep into the leftfield grandstand.

Bedlam ensued.

Jeter's message had transformed Boone from a defensive hitter to an aggressive one, the kind who wins pennant. His faith had carried him forward."

Sexton, Op. Cit.



Jeter's words, "The ghosts will come," are the same sort of reminder we conservatives should pass on to other Americans. A daunting task, in that the schools and the media are both wholly owned subsidiaries of Liberalism, Inc.

But.....this is only a bar to the weak.

 

[PoliticalChic]

You're leaning a little too heavily toward science of the brain and away from the god's influence on human thought process.

Perhaps a good reason why you should consider getting an education.

 

[OhPleaseJustQuit]

I love that post!

I love baseball......they have stats about everything!!!!!.....and hockey.....my Rangers won the first round of the playoffs last night....it was truly a religious l here!!!!

I don't follow football, 'cause I'm a NYGiant fan.....



Found this book great, too:

John Sexton, "Baseball As a Road to God:
View attachment 645418


.....Boone took Jeter's reminder to heart...."... Jeter told him not to worry:

"The ghosts will come."

"In a flash, Boone's attitude changed. As he walked to home plate, he junked his plan to take the first pitch. Instead, he would be looking for what the players call 'a pitch to hit.'

Wakefield obliged with a knuckleball that didn't flutter very much and drifted toward the middle of the plate. Boone was ready and sent a beautiful long fly ball deep into the leftfield grandstand.

Bedlam ensued.

Jeter's message had transformed Boone from a defensive hitter to an aggressive one, the kind who wins pennant. His faith had carried him forward."

Sexton, Op. Cit.



Jeter's words, "The ghosts will come," are the same sort of reminder we conservatives should pass on to other Americans. A daunting task, in that the schools and the media are both wholly owned subsidiaries of Liberalism, Inc.

But.....this is only a bar to the weak.

Beautiful post! I am so lucky to have been able to able to attend M's games during a certain period in their continuum. The most real experience of life, pretty much.

That looks like a great book. I will look it up.

 

[PoliticalChic]

"Baseball is a five skill game, all of which require strength, agility, fast twitch muscle, study, consistency and desire (practice, practice, practice)."

And Baseball, closer to life than any other sport....

"The thing about baseball is that the regular season is one hundred sixty-two games long. Way, way longer than any other sport. Any other sport has about half as many games as baseball. Basketball, hockey, football, soccer, anything. Any other sport, the players can start out thinking they can win every single game all season long. It's just about a realistic motivational goal. It's even been achieved, here and there, now and then. But it's impossible in baseball.

The very best teams, the greatest champions, they all lose around a third of their games. They lose fifty or sixty times a year, at least. Imagine what that feels like, from a psychological perspective. You're a superb athlete, you're fanatically competitive, but you know for sure you're going to lose repeatedly. You have to make mental adjustments, or you couldn't cope with it. And presidential protection is exactly the same thing. That's my point. We can't win every day. So we get used to it."

"We lose repeatedly. But not every loss is significant. Just like baseball. Not every hit they get produces a run against you, not every defeat they inflict loses you the World Series. And with us, not every mistake kills our guy."
From the novel "Without Fail," by Lee Child, p. 114

Win a few, lose a few.

 

[OhPleaseJustQuit]

Damn, I miss baseball. It was what my husband and I shared. I lost him and baseball in the same year -- I had to place him in a care facility and then the "lockdowns" separated us farther, the same year that MBL gave the big middle finger to sanity when they chalked BLM on the mounds of parks across the country.

I now live close enough to a city that has a AA team and a lot of saner people in general, and I may try to regain some passion for the game.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Damn, I miss baseball. It was what my husband and I shared. I lost him and baseball in the same year -- I had to place him in a care facility and then the "lockdowns" separated us farther, the same year that MBL gave the big middle finger to sanity when they chalked BLM on the mounds of parks across the country.

I now live close enough to a city that has a AA team and a lot of saner people in general, and I may try to regain some passion for the game.

I am truly so very sorry for your loss.

 

[PoliticalChic]

6. "...Paul Sajda, a professor of biomedical engineering who focuses on what occurs in our brains when we make split-second decisions. ....Muraskin and Sherwin used physics equations to create computer simulations of the trajectories of three types of pitches: fastballs, curveballs, and sliders.

Their test subjects, wearing video goggles and EEG caps and placed inside an fMRI scanner, saw a gray screen with a green ball coming at them in the motion of one of the three pitches. The fMRI would show where things were happening in the brain as the pitches came in, and the EEG would show when. Muraskin and Sherwin detected variations in the way the brain noticed different pitches. Excited, they took the idea to Sajda, a Mets fan.


He was particularly interested in comparing the brain activity of athletes to that of novices, and so he recruited members of the Ivy League champion Columbia baseball team (the Lions won Ivy titles in 2013, 2014, and 2015) to put on the goggles and “play ball” while the machines recorded the fluctuations of blood and electricity in their brains.



The results were eye-opening. In one finding, the investigators discovered activity in the fusiform gyrus, in a region called the fusiform face area (FFA), a part of the brain first named in 1997. “The theory was that faces are so important to us that there’s a part of the brain specially dedicated to them,” says Sajda.
“The discussion became: maybe this area responds not just to faces but also to other objects that are important to us, and we file them there because there are neural connections between this area and the motor cortex that allow us to respond quickly. In the ballplayers, the pitches activated the FFA, which is really interesting: a pitch is not an object, it’s a ball moving in time. Yet it’s so important to the player that the brain learns to represent it in these privileged areas.”



In another experiment, the subjects were told to expect fastballs and to swing at them. If a curveball came, they were to not swing. This test activated a part of the brain called the pre-supplementary motor area, which is typically involved in inhibiting response. “When hitters are primed for that fastball, they’re a loaded spring,” Muraskin says. “Stopping that swing is as forceful a physical action as following through.”

According to Mark Churchland, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Zuckerman Institute and an expert on voluntary movement, two things happen in the motor cortex before our bodies make a voluntary move. “The first stage is purely preparatory, and while it doesn’t commit you to ultimately making the movement, it’s necessary for movement, and that takes at least fifty milliseconds,” Churchland says. “Then there is the triggering stage, when you’re committed to the movement you’re going to make. As a hitter you might be able to struggle and check your swing, but basically, once you’ve pulled the trigger, you’re going to make that movement. You can kind of see athletes struggling with whether to pull the trigger. There can be a real cost to making a movement you didn’t want to make.”

With that truth in mind, Muraskin and Sherwin adapted their research on athletes and created deCervo, a company that develops simulation apps to help athletes, referees, and law-enforcement officers improve their decision-making. A deCervo video course for police officers incorporates real bodycam footage and provides feedback on the speed and aptness of users’ actions. The principles apply across fields, and one of the most compelling findings from the Sajda lab research was that the motor areas that govern inhibition were far more active in the ballplayers than in the non-players.

“What it looks like mechanistically is that what makes some hitters better than others isn’t how fast they swing but how fast they can stop their swing,” says Sajda."

Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure

What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

magazine.columbia.edu

 

[jwoodie]

The Brooklyn Dodgers lost two consecutive pennants on two consecutive pitches in two consecutive years (1951 & 1952).

 

[PoliticalChic]

The Brooklyn Dodgers lost two consecutive pennants on two consecutive pitches in two consecutive years (1951 & 1952).

Before my time......

 

[james bond]

"When Ruth was asked if he thought he deserved to be making more money than President Hoover, he said, “'Why not? I had a better year than he did.” Yet Hoover's enduring delight in baseball deserves to be remembered as more than the punch line of a humorous story." Google



I just received the latest copy of my alma mater's magazine, and was pleased to find an excellent article on my fav, baseball:

1. "Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure
What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure

What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

magazine.columbia.edu

2. For most mortals, making any contact with the ball would have been next to impossible. A pitch traveling at ninety miles per hour from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove takes about four-tenths of a second, and it takes a full two-tenths of a second for the brain to send a signal to the muscles to respond. “That leaves your brain with two-tenths of a second — half an eye blink — to be able to see the pitch as it’s coming in and decide whether or not to swing,” says Zach Schonbrun ’11JRN, author of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius.

3. The decision is complicated by other factors: the type of pitch (fastball, curve, slider), its location (high, low, inside, outside), the situational stress (in Larkin’s case, extreme), the noise of the crowd (ditto). “Anything that clouds the hitter’s focus eliminates the possibility of squarely hitting the ball,” Schonbrun says. “There’s just not enough time during a pitch for a hitter to readjust.”


4. “To understand the brain is to understand action,” says Daniel Wolpert, a neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Institute and a leading authority on motor control. “We tend to think our brain is there for us to perceive the world, but the brain’s most basic function is to move our bodies, whether to evade a threat or to interact with others through speech or gestures. The only way to affect the world is through the control of movement.”

5. Whether we’re biking in traffic or trying to hit a moving ball, there is a delay between the eye seeing and the muscles reacting. “It takes time for the retina to respond, for the information to get to your brain, and for the body to respond,” says Wolpert. “That means that when you want to make fast movements in sports, you have to predict ahead of time. Prediction is fundamental. You have to anticipate where the ball will be.”

I grew up playing baseball and made it to semi-pros. A couple of guys in the league made MLB, so becoming a pro takes talent and developing it. Very few have the talent and skill level to make it. It may be muscle memory, hand-eye coordination and being in balance. The latter is key. All of it takes practice, practice and more practice.

If there is thinking involved, then I think it has to do with thinking about the situation, how many outs, what you are going to do if the ball comes to you, paying attention to the coach's indicator and sign. Mostly, it's being prepared for the play. If you have trouble hitting the ball or playing your defensive position, then you may be over your level of skill and you have to practice some more to raise your level of play. I never thought of it as brain power. Sometimes you aren't prepared, so that's when an error could come in or a bonehead play is made. Some guys have natural talent to do what I listed in the first paragraph along with putting it into action as baseball skills, so they're the ones who have the best chance to make it to the pros. Being smart helps in any profession, so I don't think it's limited to playing baseball.

 

[PoliticalChic]

7. “What it looks like mechanistically is that what makes some hitters better than others isn’t how fast they swing but how fast they can stop their swing,” says Sajda.

In baseball this is known as having “a good eye” — the ability to judge the path of a pitch as soon as it’s released, and, if it’s out of the strike zone, to not pull the trigger. But such radical motor control isn’t the only tough demand on a batter.

Early on, a player must overcome the primal fear of getting drilled by a whistling baseball. “This game is a crazy pursuit, because when you’re batting you’re always inches from getting hit,” says Jordan Serena ’15CC, a Columbia baseball star who played for three years in the Los Angeles Angels farm system and now runs the hitting program at Rogue Baseball Performance, a sports-training facility in Colorado. “Your brain sees a ball coming at your face, and it wants to save you. It wants you to move. But you’re playing a sport where you have to stand there, without freezing up or flinching, in case the ball comes down into the strike zone. Hitters at all levels freeze at the plate on certain pitches.”

Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure

What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

magazine.columbia.edu

 

[PoliticalChic]

I grew up playing baseball and made it to semi-pros. A couple of guys in the league made MLB, so becoming a pro takes talent and developing it. Very few have the talent and skill level to make it. It may be muscle memory, hand-eye coordination and being in balance. The latter is key. All of it takes practice, practice and more practice.

If there is thinking involved, then I think it has to do with thinking about the situation, how many outs, what you are going to do if the ball comes to you, paying attention to the coach's indicator and sign. Mostly, it's being prepared for the play. If you have trouble hitting the ball or playing your defensive position, then you may be over your level of skill and you have to practice some more to raise your level of play. I never thought of it as brain power. Sometimes you aren't prepared, so that's when an error could come in or a bonehead play is made. Some guys have natural talent to do what I listed in the first paragraph along with putting it into action as baseball skills, so they're the ones who have the best chance to make it to the pros. Being smart helps in any profession, so I don't think it's limited to playing baseball.

Impressive!!!!!

 

[Oddball]

"When Ruth was asked if he thought he deserved to be making more money than President Hoover, he said, “'Why not? I had a better year than he did.” Yet Hoover's enduring delight in baseball deserves to be remembered as more than the punch line of a humorous story." Google



I just received the latest copy of my alma mater's magazine, and was pleased to find an excellent article on my fav, baseball:

1. "Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure
What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

Brain Games: How the Mind Performs Under Pressure

What neuroscience and psychology can tell us about baseball – and ourselves.

magazine.columbia.edu

2. For most mortals, making any contact with the ball would have been next to impossible. A pitch traveling at ninety miles per hour from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove takes about four-tenths of a second, and it takes a full two-tenths of a second for the brain to send a signal to the muscles to respond. “That leaves your brain with two-tenths of a second — half an eye blink — to be able to see the pitch as it’s coming in and decide whether or not to swing,” says Zach Schonbrun ’11JRN, author of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius.

3. The decision is complicated by other factors: the type of pitch (fastball, curve, slider), its location (high, low, inside, outside), the situational stress (in Larkin’s case, extreme), the noise of the crowd (ditto). “Anything that clouds the hitter’s focus eliminates the possibility of squarely hitting the ball,” Schonbrun says. “There’s just not enough time during a pitch for a hitter to readjust.”


4. “To understand the brain is to understand action,” says Daniel Wolpert, a neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Institute and a leading authority on motor control. “We tend to think our brain is there for us to perceive the world, but the brain’s most basic function is to move our bodies, whether to evade a threat or to interact with others through speech or gestures. The only way to affect the world is through the control of movement.”

5. Whether we’re biking in traffic or trying to hit a moving ball, there is a delay between the eye seeing and the muscles reacting. “It takes time for the retina to respond, for the information to get to your brain, and for the body to respond,” says Wolpert. “That means that when you want to make fast movements in sports, you have to predict ahead of time. Prediction is fundamental. You have to anticipate where the ball will be.”

@2:32....Your subconscious mind doesn't differentiate between what it thinks something will be like in reality, and reality itself.

If you imagine what the right follow-through is enough through mental rehearsal, the body will react in that correct manner when the moment comes to actually perform.

True story.

 

[Oddball]

I grew up playing baseball and made it to semi-pros. A couple of guys in the league made MLB, so becoming a pro takes talent and developing it. Very few have the talent and skill level to make it. It may be muscle memory, hand-eye coordination and being in balance. The latter is key. All of it takes practice, practice and more practice.

If there is thinking involved, then I think it has to do with thinking about the situation, how many outs, what you are going to do if the ball comes to you, paying attention to the coach's indicator and sign. Mostly, it's being prepared for the play. If you have trouble hitting the ball or playing your defensive position, then you may be over your level of skill and you have to practice some more to raise your level of play. I never thought of it as brain power. Sometimes you aren't prepared, so that's when an error could come in or a bonehead play is made. Some guys have natural talent to do what I listed in the first paragraph along with putting it into action as baseball skills, so they're the ones who have the best chance to make it to the pros. Being smart helps in any profession, so I don't think it's limited to playing baseball.

I played in the senior scrub leagues for five years....*Attempted* to hit against a couple kids who eventually played A ball.

At the AAA - MLB level, the players are in fact genetic freaks...That's not derogatory, it's just the way it is.