Psychology Today Blogs - Steven Kotler

PART II: What's Wrong With The Women of ESPN

Steven Kotler — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:38:33 -0700

There is something of a consensus opinion among those who think about sports for a living that part of the charm of the games is that the games never end. Unlike other forms of entertainment-say a movie or a play-sports are a continuous narrative. When you go see Burn After Reading, the latest George Clooney movie, it is not necessary to have seen his previous outing, Leatherheads, to follow the plot. But the same is not true for sports.

The sportswriter Leonard Koepett writes about this in his Sports Reality, Sports Illusion: "By and large we watch plays, listen to concerts or read books without regard to the content of the last play, concert, or book we experienced. [But] in sports, the relationship to earlier events is automatic, almost always present in the forefront of consciousness, and part of the melodrama that is unfolding."

Along these lines, the headline story in today's New York Times sports section is entitled: "After 3,846 Days, It's Finally the Rays' Time." Those 3,846 days refer to the gap between the first time the Tampa Bay Devil Rays ever took the field and tonight, the first time they'll take the field in a championship game. The tension of the game then rests not only one a contest between two teams who have worked hard all season to earn a chance to play tonight's game, rather a contest between the long suffering Tampa fans and the much longer suffering-though more recently sated-Red Sox fan.

In my last post, I wanted to know what was wrong with the female reporters for ESPN, why their performances were so flat, why they always seemed to be a square peg in a round hole and other such oddities. And the reason I bring up the question of continuity in sports, of the thru-line narratives that make game appreciation an on-going dialogue rather than a one time affair, is because it addresses part of this problem.

Most of the sports discussed on ESPN are played by men. For sure, they give the WNBA it's due, pay attention when Danica Patrick wins a car race, and pour the appropriate amount of praise on either of the Williams sisters for turning women's tennis into one of the most exciting sports around, but their bread and butter fare is football, baseball and basketball-and until one of these leagues decide to integrate, these games are played by only men.

And they have always been played by men-and that fact is important here. When talking about sports today, we are always talking about sports yesterday. Just like in politics, in sport, the past will always inform the future. Part of the issue with ESPN's women then is that, in the mind of their audience, listening to women talk about male-only sports, is like listening to a white man talk about the problems black face with racism-no matter how well-informed and well-intentioned that white man may be, something rings hollow.

Why it rings hollow is a more interesting question. After all, we've never had a female President, but that doesn't mean I discount what Arianna Huffington has to say about George Bush. But many find listening to Hannah Storm talk about the Cleveland Browns ridiculous because, they say, "she's never played the game." And this is especially odd because by the "game" I don't mean football, I mean professional football. Not that the vast majority of ESPN viewers have played that game either, but that doesn't seem to matter.

What actually matters is what cognitive psychologist James Bruner meant when he said there are two primary modes of thought: the ‘paradigmatic mode' and the ‘narrative mode,' an idea I plan to expand further upon in my next post.

What's Wrong With The Women Of ESPN?

Steven Kotler — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:31:18 -0700

In the past few years, the sports entertainment behemoth ESPN has done a remarkably great job of integrating female reporters into what has long been the ultimate boy's club. There are now women anchors, women side line reporters, women correspondents and a half-dozen other estrogen-laden categories.

Even better, ESPN has also done a great job pushing the boundaries of what people can look like on television. Balding guys, guys with weird comb-overs, fat guys, whatever. And the same rules seem to apply to their female reporters-which is pretty much a TV first as far as I can tell.

But the more interesting question is not what do this women look like, but why do they so often appear bad at their jobs?

I don't mean this in a sexist fashion. I think all the women working for ESPN deserve to be working for ESPN. It's actually a question of psychology. ESPN makes great television, but they make it in a very tight box. Tone and style are exceptionally important and, one suspects, tightly controlled. So why then, I keep wondering, does ESPN have its female reporters acting so peculiar.

If you've never seen it, it's a little hard to explain. It's not a lack of professionalism, it's over-professionalism. The women are very good, but somehow bloodless. Robotic. Comparison might be helpful. Most ESPN reporters have very big personalities. They have great fun with language. They make up words ("Gi-nor-mous" not too long ago), they elevate phrases (Chris Berman's ‘Rumblin, bumbling, stumbling: He-could-go-all-the-way!") and they often stop making sense mid-sentence (Stuart Scott, enough said).

But not the women.

The women are flat. They know their stuff, but their stuff doesn't shine. They don't make up new words. They don't coin phrases. Banter is the bread and butter of TV sport's journalism and most of the time these women don't banter. Instead, they are steady. Knowledgeable. Focused. Hard-working. There's nothing wrong with their information, there's something missing from their presentation.

What's the proof? Take Erin Andrews. Excellent reporter. Great at her job. But do I want to listen to her or to Lou Holtz and May talk football? Holtz and May win every time. And the same goes for just about every other female reporter on ESPN. The guys are more fun to listen to.

I'm trying to figure out why.

My assumption is this is intentional. Since these same standards seem to apply to most of the female reporters (the one consistent exception being the exceptional Linda Cohn) my assumption is this is a network decision. This is the flavor of female the executives like, so this is the flavor the public gets.

It's essentially a psychological choice. ESPN is a business. When they decided to truly intergrate women into their business, someone somewhere asked what flavor of women would be best for that business? What we see nightly is the answer to that question.

And to me, it seems a most peculiar answer, psychologically and otherwise . . .

Paul Newman's Beer Drinking: Redux

Steven Kotler — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:25:46 -0700

Stanton Peele wrote a fantastic post today about Paul Newman's beer drinking ways and the cloak of secrecy surrounding them. Steele's point, which is a very good one, is that despite all the anti-drug and anti-drink hype floating around America, we're pretty far from the puritanical society we pretend to be.

We like to smoke pot, drink booze and take drugs right there alongside the rest of the world. So how, Peele wants to know, can come to grip with the so-called ‘Newman Paradox:' The fact that a great many of us routinely use psychoactive substances (and yes, alcohol is a psychoactive substance), and pretend like we don't.

So how do you solve the Newman Paradox? Well, we could start with the facts. And by the facts, I'm mainly talking about UCLA psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel's fantastic and almost completely overlooked research found in his book "Intoxication." First written in 1989 (and republished in 2005), "Intoxication" chronicles Siegel's lifelong investigation of our mind-altering habits. He is one of our country's leading authorities on the social and psychological effects of drug use and has spent his career studying such habits around the globe. He has looked at the question of intoxication not only in humans, but in all primates and he has come to one stark conclusion: the pursuit of mind-alteration is a basic and fundamental drive. A biological drive. What he call's "our fourth drive," no different than our drive for food, sleep or sex.

Siegel came to this conclusion a lot of different ways, but one of the things he looked at was intoxication in other animals. After all, if the urge to intoxicate is really a fourth drive than this urge needs to be found everywhere else in nature. And guess what: it is.

Grazing animals will gorge themselves on the same rye ergot fungus that produces hallucinations in LSD. Rats like to get high on morning glory seeds, elephants get drunk. Ants feed on a psychoactive chemical secreted by beetles monkeys on magic mushrooms. This list goes on and on. In fact, there are very few larger species on earth that haven't discovered a way to get stoned.

Siegel's argument as to why this occurs and what it means are delightfully interesting and too long to go into here. But his message is very clear: we are a species designed to get a little out of our heads every now and again. It's good for us. Good enough that this desire is found throughout the animal kingdom, good enough that leading lights like Paul Newman can drink a six-pack a day and still be on of the greatest actors of the 20th Century.

So how do we solve the Newman Paradox? We start by teaching our children the facts about drugs and drink. We start, and I know this is a surprising election during an election year, with the truth.

The Greening of Skiing

Steven Kotler — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:48:09 -0700

A cool bit on environmental news on an otherwise gloomy day: At the ski area Whistler/Blackcomb located in Whistler, British Columbia construction has just begun on the Fitzsimmons Creek Hydro Project. While damning up a creek doesn't sound like much, for Whistler this little project will produce a whopping 33.5 gigawatt hours of electricity each year. That's the equivalent of powering the resort's entire summer and winter operations, including all 38 of their ski lifts, 17 restaurants, 269 snow-making guns and a bevy of other buildings and services.

Even better, Fitzsimmons Creek is just about the perfect waterway for this kind of construction. It already has an abundance of water, the requisite vertical drop to power the damn, it is not a major fish-bearing stream, nor is the creek the centerpiece of any major recreational activity. As a sort of cherry on top, no new roads will have to be cut and the power lines can be buried so as not to disturb the scenery.

Any excess power generated by the single turbine will be sold back to BC's main hydro electric provider BC Hydro. Construction has already begun and should be finished in time for the 2010 season.

While all of this may not sound like much, ever since the Earth Liberation Front torched five buildings and four ski lifts on behalf of the lynx back in 1998, a bit of environmental focus has fallen on ski areas. While burning building may not be the way to handle the situation, the ELF's point-that ski areas have historically put profits ahead of ecology-was not lost on the resorts. In 2000, 160 of the nation's different ski areas all signed an ‘environmental charter' pledging to protect wildlife and plot future expansion along ecologically friendlier lines.

The Whistler dam is an excellent step in this general direction.

Watching Sports Improves Language Skills, No Really...

Steven Kotler — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 05:59:33 -0700

Not too long ago, I heard an ESPN football announcer use the word: "Gi-Nor-Ma-Uge," an on-the-fly compaction of "gigantic" + "enormous" + "huge." But to fans of modern sport, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Sports' broadcasters have a tendency to do some funny things with language. In football announcing, for example, the word "defense" has become a verb, as in "he defensed that play all the way down the field."

Not that this habit has gone unnoticed. In his masterpiece of modern fiction, "Infinite Jest," the late David Foster Wallace depicts an overzealous high school tennis announcer who refuses to use the same adjective twice in the same broadcast. So instead of Peterson beating Hainsworth 6-3, 6-3 or whatever, we get Wallace's version:

"Lamont Chu disembowelled Charles Pospisilova 6-3, 6-2; Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down 6-4, 7-6...while Gretchen Holt made PW's Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever in the same room together 6-0, 6-3...''

I mention this not because I think everyone should check out AOL's fantastic (and yeah, I can't believe I just used the words AOL and fantastic in the same sentence either) and ongoing "Who's the Worst Sports Announcer" (though you should), but because of new research that helps explain some of what's been going on.

Sian Beilock, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, took a bunch of people put them inside an fMRI machine and looked at their brains while they looked at hockey. The people involved were hockey players, fans of the sport and a bunch of folks who couldn't tell a slapshot from a shot of tequila. What she found is surprising: the parts of the brain usually involved with planning and controlling actions is activated when they listened to descriptions of the sport, even when they had no intention of acting.

Okay, so this research really can't explain why anyone would think gi-norma-uge is a word, but it does show that adults have more cognitive flexibility than previously suspected. What these finding hint at is that parts of the brain that normally have nothing to do with language get involved with its comprehension during the watching of sport.

According to Beilock, these results show that playing or watching a sport builds a stronger understanding of language. According to me, while Beilock may be right, there seems to be a whole lot more going on than she's willing to say in public.

Why, for example, does this happen when watching sport and not cooking? How many other sports does it happen with? Where are the lines-does the brain actually recognize certain activities as worthy of this sort of cognitive expansion and others as unworthy? I think as these tests go along we might end up finding out that while language processing skills might be centralized in places like Broca's area, they are most likely much more diffuse than anyone previously suspected.

Are they defuse enough to explain why we "defense a play down the field?" Probably not. That may just end up being one of the great mysteries of the 21st Century.

Sports and Sexual Fidelity: A Peculiar Overlap

Steven Kotler — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:30:46 -0700

My first football experience tool place at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The Browns were playing the Steelers and the year was sometime early 70s. I was around seven years old and not much of a fan. I knew Cleveland wore brown and Pittsburgh black and that guys in the bathroom were beating the shit out of each other because of this-but that was the extent of my knowledge.

But, like damn near every other Cleveland resident, I became a fan. Dedicated, devoted, despairing. Along those lines, last night, about halfway through a miserable Cleveland Pittsburgh rematch, when the supposedly Superbowl-bound Browns were once again loosing to their Midwest rivals, I shut off the TV, swore a bunch of times and got into bed to read a book. My wife just started laughing. She's not a football fan, not a Browns' fan, not one who understands what it means to live and die with a perennial loser.

What's the big deal-she wanted to know. Well, it's a good question.Certainly, I understand the draw of rooting for the underdog (for a look at the psychology of under-doggedness check out an earlier post) but when the mutt in question is as woeful as the Browns something else might be going on.

In 2006, Bizjounral, conducted a study of fan loyalty and found that the Brown's fans are the most loyal in football. While the study was slightly less than rigorous they based their decision on a few key factors: 1) The stadium ran at 99.8 percent occupancy during football games for the past seven years, despite a record of 36 wins and 76 losses in the same period. 2) The challenges confronting fans (bad weather-which C-town is certainly famous for). It is also worth noting that Browns Backers Worldwide, with 93,100 members, is the largest sports-fan organization in the US and that the Dawg Pound, the rowdy bleacher section at the stadium, remains one of the most feared places to go during a professional football game.

But this only tells us what we already know. As ESPN's Rick Reilly points out in his column this week, Cleveland will always be a Browns' town: "Name one other city that lost a team and had the league give it back. Name, uniforms, everything! If the Cavaliers left, two janitors might look up." What Reilly was pondering is why the Browns still rule the roost when the Cavs have LeBron James and a string of winning seasons.

Leonard Koppett, in his classic of sports journalism and sociology, Sports Illusion, Sports Reality, pointed out that sports are an illusion, specifically "the illusion that the outcome of a game matters." But isn't this illusion almost entirely worthless when a team is a perennial dog like the Browns?

So what's the real draw? Well, it's hard to say, but lately I've been wondering if this sort of loyalty has something in common with sexual fidelity. I raise this point because my wife, who grew up in the free-wheeling California of the 70s, saw just about every marriage around her dissolve into deceit and divorce. In Cleveland, at least the C-town of my youth, I can remember exactly one marriage I knew of ending in divorce. Now, sure this is a subjective opinion, and about as far from rigorous science as possible, but the reason it got me thinking about football was because of some new research into fidelity.

Four studies were run, all at the University of Montreal. The first looked at 145 students (mean age 23) and the second at 270 adults (average age 27) and both found a strong correlation between infidelity and people with avoidant attachment personality styles. The latter two studies looked at reasons for infidelity and while no correlation with sex was discovered (meaning, evolutionary ideas aside, men did not cheat more than women), instead everything came down to the desire to distance oneself from commitment and a partner when tiems got rough. Meaning, infidelity came down primarily to attachment v. attachment avoidance.

Since psychologists have long known that attachment (in all varieties) is mostly a trait learned from one's parents, how likely one is to cheat on a spouse and get divorced and such comes down to this one contributing factor.

So what does this have to with football fans? Well, since attachment/avoidance is a trait inherited from one's parents and sports fandom and home team relations also come down (indirectly at least) from a similar local, is it possible to extend one's interpersonal relationship styles to one's sport team identification?

After all, is it an accident that California is the divorce capital of America and Los Angeles fans have long been considered the most fair-weathered in the nation(despite fielding nearly perennial champions in the Lakers and mostly solid performances in the Dodgers)? So is this real science? Perhaps not. But it is a factor worth considering when trying to explain why Browns fans are so devoted to a cause utterly unowrthy of such ministrations.

Have We Reached The Limit of the Possible?

Steven Kotler — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 06:34:17 -0700

For years, athletes have used the notion of impossible as motivation. If it can't be done, that was all the more reason to try. And really, after skate legend Tony Hawk pulled off a 900 at the 1999 X-Games, for a few years running, doing the impossible became par for the action sport's course.

To this same end, Garrett MacNamara is one of a handful of the world's very best big wave riders. In 2006, he won the Billibong XXL (the Superbowl of big wave surfing) for paddling into what has been called "a Godzilla-like wave" at Maverick's, off the coast of Northern California. Longtime paddle veteran Peter Mel called it "the biggest wave ever paddled into" and not many have since disagreed. Last year, G-Mac, as he is called, and his tow-in surfing partner Keallii Mamala, took a trip to Alaska to become the first-and many argue the very last-to ride glacier-generated tsunami waves up to about 25 feet. Afterwards, when reporters asked if glacier surfing was a new surfing spin-off, MacNamara responded "I wouldn't recommend it for anyone. I won't be going back. This is not a new sport."

I was speaking to MacNamara earlier this week and we were talking about the level the sport has reached and he made a curious statement: "When it comes to what the men are doing in big wave surfing, there isn't that much more to be done. We've pretty much hit the ceiling."

"He's not wrong," said EXPN.com editor Micah Abrams, when I relayed G-Mac's comments. "On the men's side of this sport (the women still have a ways to go for claims like this)," he continued, "it's no longer about reaching new heights, it's just about finding new waves."

Which is just about the truth. Unless someone discovers a 200 foot wave breaking in some secret spot somewhere about the globe, the sport of big wave surfing has reached something of an apex.

Now this in itself may seem peculiar. After all, big wave and tow in surfing didn't really become part of the mainstream consciousness until the late 1990s. So in just about ten years we've already reached the sport's limit. But this isn't the only sport where things are trending in this direction.

Earlier this morning, I got an email from longtime Canadian ski industry veteran Steven Threndyle who was describing a recent mountain bike contest in Whistler where a Spanish contestant pulled off a double back-flip that absolutely demolished the entire competition. Meaning no one there could come close to that trick and no one even wanted to try.

I'm not saying a double back flip is the ultimate in mountain biking tricks, but I am saying that we are starting to head towards a direction where adrenaline sports and the basic laws of physics are working against one another. This is an entirely strange idea in the land of things extreme-that there might, in fact, be a glass ceiling and that some of our competitors are actually starting to reach it.

Why this is interesting here is that the notion of ‘impossible' has long been an anathema to athletes. In fact, Adidas ran an ad campaign not too long ago with the tag line "impossible is nothing." But, as it turns out, the athletes themselves are starting to disagree.

It used to be that the impossible we're talking about was akin to Bannister breaking the four minute mile or Yeager flying through the sound barrier-more mental blocks built on superstition than actual physical limits.

But this newer version seems to be more in line with changing the rate of falling objects from thirty-two feet per second per second-which is the fundamental law of gravity atop the planet earth.

What this seems to mean is that the impossible we're now scratching at often comes with death as the consequence of success-meaning we've hit a real limit. What strikes me as interesting is how this is going to affect athletic motivation. For the first time in sporting history, we may have arrived at a place where "no" actually means "no" and how the athletes react and what happens next will be anyone's guess.

The Relationship Between Fandom and Personality

Steven Kotler — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 07:09:25 -0700

It’s only rock and roll, but I like it. Actually, as it turns out, it may be more than rock and rock—it may be a glimpse into who you really are.

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, led by psychologist Adrian North, just completed a global poll of 36,000 people to determine if there was any link between what kind of music people like and their personalities. Participants in the study rated 104 genres of music and answered a host of standard profile questions along the way. What they found is that teenagers have been right all along—what you listen to is a direct reflection of who you are.

Like the Blues? Well, you’re creative, gentle, out-going, at ease and have high self-esteem. Country and Western fans are hardworking and creative. Reggae lovers are also creative, but—no real surprise here—not quite so hardworking (though, as a hard working reggae fan I dispute this particular claim). Indie rockers get the real short end of this stick. Turns out if you’ve had the soundtrack to Garden State in heavy rotation ever since the movie came out, you’re suffering from low self-esteem, not very hard-working, not gentle—though you are creative. Rockers have low self-esteem, are not outgoing, at ease or hard working, but they are creative and gentle.

I mention all of these things in a blog about the science of sport because North’s study has got me wondering about a very understudied corner of psychology: the relationship between sport and personality.

For a long time, the only real studies on sport’s fandom were done about things like the effects of fandom. The best example being the relationship between fans and traits like violence and aggression (a lot of these studies were done in relationship to soccer hooligans). In the past ten years, things have opened up a little bit and we now have studies that examine fandom through identity theory and social identity theory—but again these are very blunt tools and I’m interested in a finer distillation.

What I want to know is there a relationship between the one’s favorite teams and one’s personality. Is there a link between favorite sports (to watch, not to play) and personality? Is there any truth to the rumor that fans of the Dallas Cowboys were actually raised by Wildebeests (as I was taught growing up)?

For a better example, do fans of the perennial losers, the Los Angeles Clipper, have low self-esteem?

Do fans of traditional blue collar teams like the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cleveland Browns have better work ethics than fans of, say, the high flying, pass first, St. Louis Rams?

Is there a personality difference between baseball fans and basketball fans? Football and hockey?

Is any part of one’s team identification genetic?

I’m asking these questions not because I have any answers, but because I’ve decided to start looking for some. So if any one has ideas about how to properly construct a fan identity and personality profile questionnaire please send them my way. Over the next six months or so I’m going to try and develop a decent survey which I’ll then post on-line and try to get to the bottom of this peculiar puzzle.

Prediction Addiction

Steven Kotler — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:22:59 -0700

Over the weekend, Mark Sanchez, University of Southern California's star quarterback, had something of an amazing football game. His team defeated Virginia by the monster score of 52-7, while Sanchez himself completed 26 of 35 passes for a career high 338 yards, including three touchdowns. The reason this is "amazing" isn't because three weeks ago he dislocated his knee in practice and hadn't played a down of football until last Saturday, but because the media blitz that surrounded his knee made it seem like this guy was going out on the field two hours after open heart surgery.

For the past three weeks, just about every major sports commentator has spent at least ten minutes on the subject. A quick Google search (Sanchez + Knee) produces over 1.29 million results (which, by my math, is almost 62,000 posts a day for the past 21 days). But what's actually interesting about this is that, at least for pro-caliber athletes, which Sanchez most definitely is, four weeks recovery from a dislocated knee is right around the general healing ballpark (the healing time is roughly 1-3 months if you do nothing but sit on the couch)-a fact pointed out by Sanchez himself in a post-game interview.

All of which raises a simple question: what was all the fuss about? And this question doesn't just cover Knee-gate, but just about every other potential injury around. Yesterday afternoon, during the halftime segment of ESPN's coverage of the Kentucky v. L'ville football game, they spent most of their time discussing the potential impact of Ohio State's running back Chris Well's foot injury.

Here's the thing-Wells hurt his foot in the middle of the third quarter of their opening game. By the fourth quarter end, Wells was hanging out back on the sideline, and by game's end, according to OSU Coach Jim Tressel, "the x-rays were negative." Which is to say, there's no story here.

But still, the next day, ESPN did ten minutes on the possibility of possibility. They didn't show any other college football highlights (which is amazing considering this was a halftime show during the only football game on yesterday, which, oh yeah, also happened to be the opening weekend of college football). Somehow the tantalizing possibility of what could should maybe just might happen sometime soon replaced WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED!

So again, what's all the fuss about?

Psychologists like to talk about the pleasure of prediction-which is a fancy way of describing what is fast becoming (if it's not there already) a national gambling addiction. There are 36.7 annual visitors to Las Vegas and while only 5 percent of those visitors claim they're coming to Sin City for the thrill of the dice, an astounding 87 percent of those visitors end up rolling them anyway. Did you ever wonder why?

To understand our desire to gamble (or our desire to predict the future) we first need to understand a bit of evolutionary biology. While they didn't have football games or slot machines out on the African veldt, they did have hunger. And it was the need to find our next meal that helped shape our need to predict the future. For millions of years, our progenitors lived in a state of constant threat, taking exceptionally big risks primarily in pursuit of food and sex. Those who's big bets paid off in extra calories became our forbearers, those whose didn't died off. Risk-taking behavior began with foraging-and foraging is all about pattern recognition and pattern attribution.

Pattern recognition is the term cognitive neuroscientists use for the brain's ability to lump like with like, thus allowing us to remember that flipping over chunky rocks often reveals tasty grubs, while flat stones can often hide poisonous snakes. This is an attribute that helps us make sense of all of our experiences. It is a capacity that, as NYU professor of neurology Elkhanon Goldberg points out in his book on the subject The Wisdom Paradox, "is fundamental to our mental world . . . Without this ability, every object and every problem would be a totally de novo encounter and we would be unable to bring any of our prior experience to bear on how we deal with these objects or problems. The work by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and others has shown that pattern recognition is among the most powerful, perhaps the foremost mechanism of successful problem solving."

So fundamental is the need for pattern recognition that it's tied to the body's need/reward system. When we recognize patterns our brain releases a chemical that make us feel a little better so that the next time we confront the same patterns we'll remember them. It is this system that accounts for things like the tiny rush of pleasure that comes from noticing the dealer's latest up card pushes him over 21. And the pleasure chemical in question is one of the brain's primary feel-good drugs: the neurotransmitter dopamine.

To give you an idea of how pleasurable that dopamine rush feels we need only to turn to cocaine. That rush that users get from snorting up Bolivian marching powder is actually dopamine. What cocaine really does to the brain is cause dopamine to be released and then block the receptor sites that allow for its reuptake (much in the way that anti-depressants like Prozac block the reuptake of serotonin). So the reason the comic Robin Williams once said "Coke makes me feel like a new man, and the new man wants some also" is because it was dopamine that was conferring that amazing feeling.

So amazing is that feeling that 50 years ago neurobiologist Jim Olds found that if he put an electrode in the dopamine-releasing pleasure center of a rat's brain, then connected it via wires to an electric current generator, and gave the animals a switch to stimulate their own brains they would do so without pause. They would neglect all other activities-including eating-for this little rush. Rats would rather starve to death then walk away from dopamine.

Now, a few years back, my fellow blogger, Emory University's Greg Berns, discovered that dopamine is not released after you've gotten the thing you so desired, but rather when you take the risk to do the thing that gets you what you desire. Meaning-we make a prediction, take a risk, and get the drug.

Because the brain also forms schemas (a fancy way of saying a long chain of patterns to be recognized) predicting the future has been, especially in the world of sport's journalism, linked with the pleasure of predicting the predictions. When those ESPN half-time reporters spent ten minutes on the non-story of Well's foot, the topic of conversation was "tell us what this means if it happens to mean anything." It was a prediction about a prediction about a prediction. It was nonsense-but this is the nonsense we've become addicted to.

And I do mean "we." ESPN is in the TV game. They like good ratings. And, considering how omnipotent that network has become, they're very good at this particular game. As it turns out, at least judging from all the Sanchez/Wells/Etc. hoopla, ESPN has figured out that the American viewing public is more interested in vague psychic predictions of the possible future than they are in the recent past or the actual present. And no one, perhaps excluding the writer of this blog, seems to care.

Sanchez's knee was fine. Did anyone hold the LA Times (eight articles in three weeks on the subject by my count) responsible for a month's worth of non-news? In fact, there are now several hundred thousand Heisman hopeful lists floating around the sport's world, just as there were last year. In a rational society, we would have looked over last year's lists, figured out who missed and who was accurate, and only allowed those who were accurate to make predictions this year. But it doesn't work that way. We are so addicted to the possible future that any sense of accuracy (and, perhaps this may be a stretch, truth in journalism) is now our sacrificial lamb.

Then again, dopamine is addictive and stupidity has always made for good television so maybe all that's happening here is one more annoyed blogger just shouting at the rain.

Football and Learned Helplessness

Steven Kotler — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:26:32 -0700

In his recent post "Deconstructing Consumer Confidence" my fellow blogger Dan Ariely put up a pretty fascinating post about the relationship between learned helplessness and the recent 40-year low in consumer confidence. While Arliey's points about American spending habits are insightful, I'm interested in applying his ideas to a entirely different and, at least from my perspective, far more important topic: football.

I'm not going to go far into learned helplessness here (you can click here and read Dan's blog if you want the full experimental rundown), but the very short version is it's a psychological condition in which a human or animal has learned to behave helplessly in a particular situation even when they have the power to change their situation.

In football the best example of this phenomena may be the "Superbowl Hangover." The hangover has been especially prevalent in recent years. Going back to 1993, of the thirteen teams that have made it to the big game only to lose the big game, only three actually made it back to the playoffs the following year and of those three none advanced beyond their divisional round.

Now, I don't think the 1994 Bills or the 1995 Chargers were suffering the hangover per say (only because the hangover had yet to become the media darling it has since become), but for any of these teams that came afterward, it seems more than likely that this form of learned helplessness was playing a part.

In other words, because football is such a high intensity game and because most of the teams in the NFL are so evenly matched (this isn't just my opinion, then entire free agency scheme was dreamed up to help establish far greater parity), it seems like once things start going badly for a post-Superbowl loser, the team in question may adopt a stance of learned helplessness based less around the facts of the games and more around the fact that the Superbowl hangover has become a large part of contemporary football mentality.

Maybe an even better example of this idea would be the Oklahoma Sooners. They've appeared in four BCS bowl games in the past five years and have lost all four, including title games against both LSU and USC.

In interviews about this topic, coach Bob Stoops has told reporters "there isn't any one good answer. In the end, too, I think it's obvious: you're playing another championship team and if you're not at your best, you're not going to fare too well."

And while Stoops may have been correct for the first one or two of those losses, it seems safe to assume that the memory of those earlier losses may have come into play in the follow two defeats-with the outcome of that memory being none other than a sense of learned helplessness and another defeat.