Sport: the individual and the team

I have little interest in sport other than casually kicking a ball round a field with friends or family, using coats on the grass as goal posts, and am fully aware that I’m in a minority.  Sport is so important to so many people in so many countries that it can’t be ignored by anyone purporting to want a peaceful world.

Here are some interesting facts from the world of sport which I recently came across (Prospect, Dec 2011). They set the scene for the thoughts I express after listing these facts, and which you will no doubt find less interesting.

• In the 18^th century gentlemen thought that training was not in the spirit of sport.
• Since 1997 the world record for the 10,000 metres has been broken five times, dropping from 26 min 31.32  sec to 26 min 17.53 sec, each time by a Kenyan or an Ethiopian.
• The National Sports Centre at Bisham Abbey (30 miles west of London) has a large room that can simulate high altitude conditions, so that athletes can raise their red blood cell count. The World Anti Doping Agency deems this legal while banning the use of drugs to get the same effect.
•  The major Olympic teams are assisted by physiologists, nutritionists, massage therapists, coaches, biomechanicists, lifestyle instructors and performance analysts.
•  105 world swimming records were broken in 2008, mostly by swimmers wearing the Speedo LZR Racer suit made of a high tech drag reducing fabric tested in NASA wind tunnels. Successors to these suits were banned in 2009 because of their enhancement of performance.
•  International athletes typically have running shoes made to measure and costing $10,000.
•  Football boots today (as opposed to a few decades ago) make it significantly easier to control and shoot the ball, and as players get fitter the pitch seems to get smaller.

Why do people compete?  To assert themselves, perhaps; or to test their abilities against each other and grow spiritually by accepting the limitations that competition reveals. Why is being a spectator so popular? I don’t know but people like to watch sport and talk or argue about it. Watching and following sport is evidently a pleasure, bonding strangers together in a way no other pass-time can do. It gives spectators the chance to hone their analytical skills, to feel excitement and to admire human skill and endurance. International occasions like the 2012 London Olympics help to raise awareness that we all live on the same planet.

As an outsider I am becoming aware of two complementary trends.

1. Individuals are playing a growing role in team sports.
2.  Teams are playing a growing role in individual sports.

Team sports like soccer, American football, baseball and rugby are enormously popular and it seems to me they have the potential to help weld society together and drive it forward as the power of cooperation and competition are demonstrated in front of millions. It also helps break down racial, cultural and national barriers, if only by bringing them into the open as fans misbehave. Unfortunately, in recent years there has been a tendency for individual stars to be paid enormous fees and to bask in the media limelight, which counteracts these beneficial affects of group competition. And as the pressure to win intensifies for financial reasons competition not infrequently escalates into on-pitch conflict or verbal abuse between individual players.

So individual behaviour is becoming a problem in team sports.

In events where one individual is pitted against another, as in athletics or motor racing, there is an increasing necessity to have a whole panoply of expertise, technology and support behind each competitor. This is inevitable. The runners have to run and the drivers have to drive ever faster, the high jumpers have to jump ever higher, to the limits of human ability – concentration, will power, endurance, self control, strategy, reaction time and skill are tested to the limit, with speed records being broken by tiny fractions of a second and high jump records  by millimetres.

Thus the runner has a host of helpers. Experts are needed to design, develop or advise on shoes and clothes to maximise traction and aerodynamic efficiency, to personalise altitude tents to boost haemoglobin levels in the blood and recommend regimes to improve aerobic efficiency and cardio-respiratory function.  Legal advice is needed to ensure that he or she does not become disqualified by inadvertently breaking some rule or eating a substance which, after metabolisation, could lead to a false drug test result. (See also above list.)  

In fact a modern athlete is becoming akin to a Formula 1 racing car driver. In Formula 1 racing there are large teams involving expert mechanics, R&D engineers, materials scientists, financial managers, PR officers and probably others I can’t think of.

Are teams a problem in individual sports?

 For the competitor perhaps, in that he or she has to go through an increasingly stressful and complex regime of preparation as well as face the gruelling test of the event itself. The competition is indeed becoming a team event, with the individual sportsman becoming the front person of a team, albeit the one who has to work the hardest and take the greatest risk.

So in conclusion one could say that individuals are becoming a problem in team events while in events between individuals the co-opted teams are altering the nature of the competition. One more way in which the world is changing.

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Expecting the unexpected

Exponential change is  fundamental to many processes in nature and in human society. See this youtube video to understand what it really means.

Here are some examples of exponential growth which you may find interesting. (They are approximate but easily checked on the web. Also, the ‘time to double’ does of course assume that the growth rates will continue. GDP stands for gross domestic product, which is normally applied to a particular country, and is a measure of economic output).

World population growth = 1.1 %  p.a. 
Time to double = 64 years
 

World GDP growth = 4.2 % p.a. 

Time to double = 17 years

World GDP per capita growth = 2.6 % p.a.

 Time to double = 27 years
 

World scientific, technical and medical knowledge growth = approx. 5% p.a.

 Time to double = 14 years
 

The most steeply rising parameter is knowledge, measured by the number of peer-reviewed academic papers published in journals and on the web. In a sense you can't measure knowledge but this is the best guide we have.

Increasing literacy, female emancipation, breaking down of cultural barriers, adoption of English as a world language, internet communication between labs, independent of distance, and possibly new ways of thinking encouraged by electronic media, are probably largely responsible. The rate of knowledge growth could even increase. So in the next decade or so humanity’s knowledge of nature and how to use it could have increased by as much as in all previous history. This continues a growth that started in northern Europe 400 years ago and since it does not depend much on economic growth or environmental exploitation or large amounts of energy, there is no obvious reason for it to stop short of a failure of faith in the underlying order of nature.

As mentioned in a previous post there could be game-changing advances in our understanding of nature; and the GDP and population trends could be radically altered by the type of knowledge which is unveiled. Here are just a few possibilities to make the point:

• A new type of pollution-free energy could allow us to spread to, terraform and colonise other planets; and this would allow, possibly encourage, faster population growth as well as huge increases in GDP.  
• Breakthroughs in biotechnology and medicine could extend and enhance human life as well as wipe out all diseases and boost eco-friendly food production, thereby causing population to grow within the confines of our biosphere.
• New production technology could emerge which would vastly increase the rate of GDP growth per person without using more natural resources or which allow a greatly increased cottage industry worldwide, thereby allowing local production of goods as efficiently as is possible today only by using mass production and cheap labour.

At the same time that knowledge is racing ahead the debt burden is fast catching up with a capitalist world operating in a spiritual desert. When it does so it could force western society and its financial system to reform itself completely and this again would affect GDP, population and knowledge growth.

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that such radical discoveries or reformations will be made but given what previous doublings of knowledge have yielded, such as the unleashing of the power of the atom and the discovery that germs come from germs, rather than spontaneously create themselves from nothing, it does not seem an unreasonable assumption.

What is certain is that no mathematical model can possibly predict what lies ahead. Expect the unexpected.

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Body and brain: one system

Neurological research is uncovering new mysteries about our thinking and consciousness.

A sense of self, emotions, language , mathematical thinking, mental tendencies, willpower, rational thought and intuition all are associated not just with the brain but with the body. The associations and information transfer mechanisms are extraordinarily complex and many time-synchronised neural impulses in different parts of the brain-body system seem totally unconnected by neural pathways.

It is not, in my view, possible to understand the overall reality of what is happening when a person interacts with the surrounding world, in a reductionist way, considering various subsystems in isolation. Each subsystem interacts with innumerable other subsystems in a miraculously complex way to result in one system  - a human being - which itself is related to other systems, including other people, the myriad living systems of nature and perhaps the whole universe.  (I hold the belief that our ultimate self is the soul: transcendental and beyond science and beyond mind.)

Nevertheless, some of these subsystems within us are fascinating. Here are some examples from a recent article in the New Scientist (Your Clever Body by David Robson, p.35-38, Oct 15, 2011).  

• A basic map of the body appears to be located in one part of the brain (the right temporoparietal junction). Sensory data from the body enters two different centres in the brain – the parietal cortex and the premotor cortex.  Each centre also receives data from the body map and compares the two types of data. The processed data from these two centres then stream into a 4^th area called the insular cortex and it here that a feeling of embodiment is somehow generated.

• The insular cortex is also responsible for interoception, which is the ability to become aware of bodily processes such as the heart pulse and intestinal activity. Emotional processing also occurs here.

• Creativity and lateral thinking are affected by certain bodily movements, e.g. extending your left arm in front of you or bending your right arm at the elbow, or moving your eyes from left to right across the field of vision.

• We associate experiences of loneliness and friendliness with feelings of coldness and warmth.

• The physical sensation of smiling can cause a feeling of happiness, as well as vice versa.

• Walking backwards or tensing muscles can increase your will power; and folding your arms can make you more persistent at a task.

• When people are asked to think of random numbers they think of smaller numbers when looking down to the left, and vice versa when looking up to the right.

• People learn and remember better when they play-act or are encouraged to gesture while reading. It is thought that movements somehow activate an implicit understanding of the material.

There is also the  fact of mind over matter in healing or overcoming apparently impossible tasks in athletics. There is absolutely no doubt about this. The placebo effect is as much a fact in medicine as helping bones to heal by using plaster. Even more startling is the recent research which shows that neural impulses associated with, say, raising our arm, occur before we are conscious of the decision to do so.

The more we find out about the workings of the brain-body system the more mysterious it becomes and I thank the Lord for it.

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com