Experience
Based Learning. Our brain reuses motor experience we learned doing things to
comprehend what we are watching or reading about. All of our experiences of doing
in the world contribute to our comprehension of the world. So say you want to
learn Physics, actually moving your body to experience the principals of
physics could help you understand it. If the experience is grounded in your
body, you would call on those motor areas of your brain when you’re listening
to a lecture and it could facilitate understanding.”
Also watching activity can make
us feel good.
“Oh, yeah,” he
said. “Although this is something very hard to prove, it makes a lot of sense.
If this system is important for the things we believe it is, which is social
cognition, understanding the mental states of others, empathizing with others,
and how to learn things just by watching others, evolution must have devised
something that makes us feel good when we activate these cells, which makes us
do it more and more, because that is an adaptive mechanism. The popularity of
watching sports is a good demonstration of this.”
Here is the study I highlighted
the parts I found interesting in yellow.
This Is Your Brain on Sports
The science
behind watching the game
If you were
watching World Series Game 6 when David Freese hit his game-saving two-run
triple on a 3-2 pitch in the bottom of the ninth, you may have jumped out of
your seat, sloshed beer down your chest, and spewed half-chewed nachos toward
the screen. But unbeknownst to you, as the beer fizzed, your brain leapt up,
stretched your left arm nearly out of its socket trying to close the air
between ball and glove before you slammed your backside into the Gulf logo on
Busch Stadium’s right-field wall.
Your brain
plucked the ball from the grass, rocketed it toward third and, effortlessly
switching allegiances, your brain slid headfirst into the bag. It also trotted
home to score the tying run, and in the next few seconds, it waved a white
rally towel, spat, and looked glumly over the Ranger dugout fence. Whatever your
conscious fan loyalties, your brain couldn’t help playing both sides, all
roles. What your eyes see, your brain plays — as best it can, which is, of
course, as variable as our actual playing and living.
The evidence
that the spectating brain is also a playing brain has been mounting ever since
the early 1990s, when a group of neurophysiologists at the University of Parma,
Italy implanted electrodes in the brain of a macaque monkey to find out exactly
which neurons fired when the monkey grasped a peanut and brought it to his
mouth. The electrodes were placed in the monkey’s premotor cortex, the region
known to initiate signals that direct muscle movement in both macaques and
humans. The researchers hoped that pinpointing the individual motor neurons
that fired when the monkey grasped the peanut might lead to therapies that
could help brain-damaged humans recover hand function.
The Parma team
succeeded in their original brain-mapping goal, but it was an accidental
discovery that made Parma a world-renowned source of cutting-edge neuroscience
(not to mention hard cheese and cured ham). As science lore has it, a
researcher in the Parma lab was eating peanuts one day when he heard a monitor
buzz, indicating that the monkey’s peanut-grasping neurons were firing. But the
monkey had no peanut. After a moment of puzzlement came the researcher’s
“eureka!” moment: Some of the same motor neurons that fire when a monkey
performs an action were also firing when he watched someone else perform that
action.
In fact, it
took several such chance observations and then years of testing before the
Parma researchers could believe what they were seeing, because it so violated
their understanding of how the brain worked. Neurons in a macaque or human
brain that are specialized to plan, select, and initiate our muscle movements
should not fire to somebody else’s muscle movements. But since they appeared to
be firing, the researchers wondered what the difference was, from our brain’s
point of view, between doing and seeing, between playing the game and watching
the game, and, most fundamentally, between one’s self and someone else?
The answer,
according to subsequent research on both monkeys and humans, is that in a
healthy premotor cortex, the difference is about 80 percent. In other words,
about one-fifth of the neurons that fire in the premotor cortex when we perform
an action (say, kicking a ball) also fire at the sight of somebody else
performing that action. A smaller percentage fire even when we only hear a
sound associated with an action (say, the crack of a bat). This subset of motor
neurons that respond to others’ actions as if they were our own are called
“mirror neurons,” and they seem to encode a complete archive of all the muscle
movements we learn to execute over the course of our lives, from the first
smile and finger wag to a flawless triple toe loop.
When we see a
familiar action, our mirror neurons activate, and their firing lasts exactly as
long as the observed action. This allows us to instantaneously understand the
action, its goal, and even the emotions associated with it, without having to
do any inferential thinking about it. If we are watching strenuous action,
mirror neurons even provoke a small but measurable uptick in our heart and
respiration rate.
In the nearly 20
years since the macaque in Parma gave new meaning to the phrase “monkey see,
monkey do,” hundreds of research projects around the world have studied mirror
neurons to learn about everything from how we acquire language to how we
develop empathy. And if you are still reading this, you have probably started
to wonder what mirror neuron research has to say about the experience that
brings you to this site: sports spectating.
Common sense
suggests that the sports-watching brain might be an ideal laboratory for
testing the properties of mirror neurons. Several scientists have explored this
idea, but their research has mostly focused on the spectating brains of
professional athletes, because they wanted to see if these cells encode even
the most highly specialized motor skills. And who has more refined motor skills
than world-class athletes?
The most
relevant study, published in 2008, was conducted at The University of Rome, where
neuroscientists recruited 10 professional basketball players, 10 expert
watchers (basketball journalists and coaches), and 10 students who had never
played basketball, and made them all test subjects.
In the first
part of the experiment, the researchers had all three groups watch film clips
of players attempting free throws. The clips were stopped at ten mid-action
intervals and everybody was asked to predict the likely success of the free
throws. The players made more accurate predictions at every time interval, but
their greatest advantage over both expert watchers and inexperienced students
was at the earliest intervals, before the balls had even left the players’
hands, when there were no trajectories to watch.
This indicated
that athletes were better than the others at understanding cues from the filmed
players’ bodies. But the researchers also wanted to know how much their motor
systems, primed by their mirror neurons, contributed to reading those cues. So
in a second experiment, using a technique called transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS), which yields the exact timing of neuronal firing, the
researchers monitored the patterns of motor system activity in all three groups
as they watched free throw video clips.
Everyone’s
motor system perked up watching the action, but the students showed a
generalized perk-up, while both players and expert watchers showed activity of
the specific motor areas involved in shot-taking. What separated the players
from the expert watchers, though, was greater excitation of the hand muscles
controlling the ball, especially the muscle controlling the angle of the pinkie
finger at the instant the ball left the shooter’s hand. There was not
necessarily visible movement of the pinkie, but a measurable increase in what’s
called “motor evoked potentials,” which signal preparation for intended action.
The most unpredictable result: This activation was greatest when players
watched the launch of a ball that was going to miss the basket.
Maybe the
brains of the spectating players were not just simulating the shot-taking.
Maybe they were trying to score. And so, perhaps, are we. We’re just not as
good at it.
Although most
of the mirror neuron research I found about sports spectating compared samples
at fan extremes, such as professional athletes and those with no experience in
a sport, the free throw study suggests that there is a sliding scale of mirror
neuron response among spectators based on their real-life sports experience.
Marco
Iacoboni, a
neuroscientist at UCLA and pioneering investigator of the mirror neuron system
in humans, says the brain monitoring technology used in the Rome free throw
study is best at measuring mirror neurons that are “strictly congruent,” which
means they fire at the sight of an action that exactly matches one in the
spectator’s motor repertoire. Other mirror neurons are “broadly congruent,” meaning
they fire at observed actions that are similar to ones you have performed.
“About
two-thirds of our mirror neurons are broadly congruent,” says Iacoboni, “which
suggests to me that the purpose of the mirror neuron system is to get you more
attuned to the goal of the action than the action itself.”
In sports fan
terms, this means if you are watching someone take a free throw, and you have
never played basketball, your strictly congruent mirror neurons will not fire,
but the broadly congruent ones that remember tossing a crumpled piece of paper
into a wastebasket will.
For technical
reasons, and to eliminate extraneous factors, most mirror neuron experiments
are designed to monitor brain activity while test subjects watch a fairly
simple action sequence. Teasing out what these studies imply about the
experience of watching an actual game moves us into the realm of informed
speculation. Scientists are understandably reluctant to venture far into that
realm, but I asked Iacoboni to answer a few questions and respond to
speculations of my own about sports spectating.
Having read
that Iacoboni is an avid tennis player and fan, I started there. “If you’re
watching a tennis match,” I asked, “with a rooting interest in one of the
players, do your mirror neurons fire equally to both players?”
“It’s well
known that we have imitation biases,” Iacoboni said, “that we tend to imitate
people like ourselves. When I’m watching Federer play Djokovic, most likely I’m
going to mirror Federer more, because I like him more.”
“But if mirror
neurons fire automatically,” I continued, “and they are goal-oriented, wouldn’t
that create a natural tendency to keep one’s eye on the ball, and so make you
mirror both players?”
“The motor
system is strongly oriented toward the goal of an action,” Iacoboni answered.
“When someone hits a tennis ball, the goal is to send the ball into a specific
sector of space, and because of that, yes, I think there is a tendency to
follow the ball. In fact, sometimes I want to focus on a player, watch how he
moves, especially the balance of the body, the posture, but I can’t help myself
from following the ball, and I get upset with myself.”
Switching to
Iacoboni’s other favorite sport, soccer, I asked if a spectator without much
playing experience was likely to have more mirror neuron activity when the ball
was near the net, because everyone understands the goal of the action there —
get the ball in or keep the ball out — while the goal of midfield action is
less obvious to a non-player.
“This is one I
don’t know how to answer,” Iacoboni said. “I would like to do the experiment,
look at the difference in brain activity near the goal and at midfield. My
hunch is that you are right.”
That strong
goal orientation, I speculated, might make our mirror neurons show a preference
for certain player positions that see more on-the-ball action, like
quarterbacks, wide receivers, and running backs in football, who already exert
a strong pull on our mirror neurons, because even if we have never played football,
most of us have at least “broadly congruent” experiences of running, tossing,
catching, and evading the attack of large men who want to harm us.
Iacoboni
thought that was a reasonable hypothesis, especially with regard to
quarterbacks, but didn’t expand, confessing little interest in American
football, because, compared to soccer, it was “so slow, with all that
stopping.”
Moving deeper
into speculative territory, I asked if our mirror neurons, when activated
strongly enough to set off MEPs (the aforementioned motor evoked potentials),
could make us feel younger because those potentials, unlike our actual
motor skills, could still be at or close to their best.
“In real life,
when you make a full-blown action, you get all this sensory feedback,” Iacoboni
said, “but when it’s just these tiny muscle contractions or maybe just
increased excitability of your motor cortex, your motor plans can go unchecked
by sensory feedback in a way that, it’s possible, makes you feel
younger. That’s a nice idea.”
Doing an
informal study of my own unrealistically youthful mirror neurons before talking
to Iacoboni, I watched some Monday Night Football and noticed that I
felt more intensely involved in the game when I turned off the sound, so I
asked if announcers got in the way of our mirror neurons by engaging us in
constant analysis.
“Absolutely,”
Iacoboni said. “We actually have some data on that. Being analytical almost
shuts down your motor cortex, doesn’t let you simulate in full what you are
watching. I shut the sound off while watching tennis.”
Analytic
language may put the damper on our brain’s motor areas, but that is not the
case with other kinds of language. Research using football and hockey players
produced evidence that mirror neurons are activated not only when we see or
hear action, but also when we listen to or read descriptions of it. And as with
the response to sights and sounds, the degree of mirror neuron activation,
which speeds up comprehension, depends on our individual experience with what’s
being described.
That
research was conducted
at the University of Chicago’s Human Performance Lab, where cognitive
psychologist Sian L. Beilock is the
principal investigator. Beilock explains it like this:
“Even when
reading, one of the ways we understand information is by calling on those motor
systems we used to act in the past. So for someone with a lot of experience
playing, reading about football, for instance, has what we call ‘motor
resonance,’ because they can call upon the parts of the brain they used playing
to simulate the action in their heads, and that often makes what they’re
reading easier to follow and makes them like that information better.”
And this
enhanced comprehension is not just a matter of their having heard or read a lot
of football language, because they were players?
“Background knowledge certainly aids comprehension,”
Beilock answered, “but our brain also reuses motor experience we learned doing
things to comprehend what we are watching or reading about. All of our
experiences of doing in the world contribute to our comprehension of the
world. It turns out, for instance, that we reuse areas of the brain that
control our fingers when we count in our head, because at one point we learned
to count on our fingers, and those same areas of the brain come alive again. “
You mean every motor skill we master makes us smarter?
“Yes, in the sense that the better you can do it, the
better you can perceive it,” Beilock said, adding that her research team has a
National Science Foundation grant to see if motor experience can be used to
help students learn physics. “The idea is that if you get a student to
physically experience being part, for instance, of an angular momentum system,
to experience forces and torques and have to counteract them to keep something
stable, it might help them understand these concepts when they’re reading about
them. If the experience is grounded in your body, you would call on those motor
areas of your brain when you’re listening to a lecture and it could facilitate
understanding.”
I guess this
means that the evolutionary purpose of our mirror neuron system is not
primarily to make us more engaged sports spectators, although ESPN has
certainly profited from this major side effect. It’s more likely designed to
advance the species by helping us develop cognitive skills, including but not
limited to predicting the success of free throws.
After reading
the research and talking to Iacoboni and Beilock, I still had an unanswered
question. What had launched me on this particular quest for information was the
subjective experience of feeling almost physically active when I watched
sports or dance, as if I were running, leaping, dodging, punching, and crashing
to the ground myself. It was as if from my couch potato position I had reaped the benefit of at least
a portion of the endorphins a workout would produce. But nothing in what I read
about mirror neurons indicated whether or not we liked it when our mirror
neurons fired.
So in a last phone call, I asked Iacoboni if mirror
neuron activity made us feel good.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Although this is something very
hard to prove, it makes a lot of sense. If this system is important for the
things we believe it is, which is social cognition, understanding the mental
states of others, empathizing with others, and how to learn things just by
watching others, evolution must have devised something that makes us feel good
when we activate these cells, which makes us do it more and more, because that
is an adaptive mechanism. The
popularity of watching sports is a good demonstration of this.”
Le Anne
Schreiber is the former editor-in-chief of Womensports Magazine and a former
sports editor at the New York Times. She was ESPN’s ombudsman from 2007
to 2009 and is the author of two books, Midstream and Light
Years. This is her
first piece for Grantland.
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Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at
www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at
www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at
http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
