StarTalk Radio - Making a Phenom: The Mind

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

In Episode Two of our ‘Making a Phenom’ mini-series, host Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice investigate the brain of an elite athlete with neuroscientist Heather Berlin, PhD, and kinesiologist and author Joan Vickers, PhD. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/making-a-phenom-the-mind/ Image Credit (Clockwise from top): Michael Jordan: Unknown author / Public domain; Lionel Messi: L.F.Salas / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0); Serena Williams: Hanson K Joseph / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0); Michelle Wie: Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0). Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. We've got a special series we're in the middle of, and it's called Making of a Phenom. And this is our second installment in that. I've got with me, of course, Chuck Nice. Hey, what's happening, Neil? All right, my co-host, who was not a professional athlete.

For that, we have to go to Gary O'Reilly. Gary. Hey, Neil. Maybe, Chuck, you should do a role reversal. Yeah, exactly. I can, well, no, I should do a role reversal. A role reversal. Yeah, exactly. I can... No, I've watched professional sports. That counts.

That's just as good. I've watched stand-up comedians. There you go. Gary, former soccer pro in the UK, and you've also been a sports commentator, and we're delighted and lucky to have you as my co-host here on StarTalk. So, again, this is part two of our miniseries, The Making of a Phenom.

And what we're doing is we're taking a deep dive into the mind, body, and soul of elite pro athletes. And, Gary, were you an elite pro athlete or just a pro athlete? I played with and against some players, and I did come to realize how average I could be. How average professional you were. Yeah. There are some guys are born with a penthouse at the top of Mount Olympus and those of us that scurry around at base camp. I got you.

Fascinating analogy there. But you're elite just to play professional sports, so you're at least an elite athlete. Of all athletes. You may not be an elite professional athlete, but you're at least

an elite athlete. Plus, he was hanging out on Mount Olympus at all, right, even if he was scurrying around the base of the penthouse. There you go. That's right. So, one of our important go-to people throughout this whole effort to unpack what it is to be an elite

phenom is Heather Berlin. Heather, long-time friend of StarTalk. You've been with us almost from the beginning. I've got your neuroscientist and assistant professor at the ICON. Carl Icahn. Carl Icahn. I-C-A-H-N.

Carl Icahn School of Medicine at, of course, Mount Sinai. And you're also, you were once with us as a StarTalk all-star and an all-around science communicator. So delighted to have you on. Are you an elite neuroscientist? I'm not an elite professional neuroscientist, but I'm an elite, yeah, I'll call myself an elite neuroscientist. It's a pleasure to be part of this gang, this elite gang.

Elite. Elite. So let me ask you, Heather, you've studied brains before with MRIs, fMRIs, right, functional magnetic resonance imaging. It's where you're poking around in the brain in real time while the person is alive, telling them to think and not think. So this gives you extraordinary power over people. Great power comes great responsibility.

Oh, look at that. It does. Spider shrink. Spider does. Spider shrink. Spider shrink. Spider shrink. Okay. Oh, yeah. Go ahead.

Go ahead. So let me just ask you, what might we expect to see were you to probe the mind of an elite superstar athlete? Is it concentration? Do they have extra firings in one part of the brain or the other? Or general, what part of the brain would be feeding this talent? Right. Well, it depends on what task they're engaged in at any particular time. So when we put people in the scanner,

we have them engage in a particular task to kind of probe a skill. I just like that sentence. We put people in the scanner. That just sounds so... Exactly. Put them in the scanner. Just line them up. Put them in the scanner.

I have a feeling that when they put people in that scanner, they also give them a false memory of being abducted by aliens. Oh, no. And Heather has the most obedient husband anyone has ever seen. So we're pretty sure she's got that one covered. Generally, what happens when you put me in a scanner like an MRI, I fall asleep. Come visit me at work.

I just want you to try something. Test something out. Just out in a few minutes so funny i'm sorry i'm very sorry to interrupt yeah no that's okay um so well first of all when you're in the scanner you can't move you have to lay perfectly still so it's not the ideal circumstance to actually test a player when he's engaged in actually playing the sport so some things we can do is have them imagine um you playing, which is not as good as the real thing. You're not going to get the same kind of activation of the motor areas of the brain that you would see in real time when they're actually playing. But what you get is activation of these pre-motor areas, these supplementary

motor areas where they're planning to make movements. And what goes on in the mind, They're planning to make movements. And what goes on in the mind, obviously it depends on the sport, but one key factor is their ability to make predictions based on input, let's say from other players. So if you can predict what the other player is going to do a few seconds before, let's say, your opponent, you have an advantage. And then you can make a quicker decision about how you're going to respond to that. So it's not just about how fast you can make a decision.

There's the trade-off between speed and accuracy. But the element of being able to have sort of theory of mind, to predict what your opponent is going to do a few steps ahead. It's kind of like playing chess, too. The further you can predict into the future, the better your current move will be. So a lot of that decision-making process. Yeah. I never fully appreciated how important that role would be. If I'm guarding someone in basketball or in team sports, team against team, if you know a split

second in advance of your opponent, you just won that exchange, whatever that exchange is. opponent, you just won that exchange, whatever that exchange is. That's, oh my gosh. That is the whole purpose, though, of watching film on your opponents, and all professional sports teams do that because every player, much like in poker, has a tell.

So, you know, you know when you're, like you said, guarding, perhaps. So when Michael Jordan sticks his tongue out? You know you're about to be embarrassed. You are about to be embarrassed when Michael Jordan takes that tongue

and starts licking the bottom of his chin. He's really licking his tops and how delicious it will be to make you look silly. The other thing is you go into a phase in your mind through having seen tape, through having done an analysis on an opponent or a team. And, Doctor, please, Heather, tell me, pattern recognition.

I'm not conscious and all of a sudden I am. So does my brain start actually processing and making decisions before I'm conscious of it. Because all of a sudden something's taking place, a pattern of play, and all of a sudden I'm moving. But it's only a pattern if you've seen it before. Isn't that right? So there's got to be some life experience credits that's going on in there. Isn't that right, Heather? Yeah. Yeah. So basically it's all about first you consciously taking the input and that's kind of the studying part, right? Where you're learning different plays different patterns and also not only that but what you should do if a given pattern let's say is occurring right so not only recognizing it but knowing then

what to do in response to it so in that way you're taking that in consciously so that over time again what makes an elite athlete is that they've internalized those that they can then process that information unconsciously. Your brain will pick up on it automatically, tell your body what to do, and you won't even have to take the time to think about it. And we see, not even just in athletes, but in regular people, that we can predict up to 10 seconds ahead of whether you're going to decide to say go left or right before you're even consciously aware of what your decision is going to be. You said 10 seconds? 10 seconds using fMRI. So we can sort of

look at the blood flow in the brain and say to somebody, you know, decide whether to go left or right. And by kind of using a process where we can, mathematical formulas to look at these probabilities, we can, with about 80% accuracy, predict up to 10 seconds ahead based on blood flow to different parts of the brain whether you're going to go left or right before you're even aware. Heather, you're saying your brain is deciding for you without you even knowing it. That's what you just said. Yes, pretty much. Yep, yep, yep. So there's no free will is what you're saying. Yeah, it's an illusion of free will, right? The perception of free will is an important one,

but usually we're the last to know. But it's also... That's life. That's so funny. I have free will, I just don't know it. Exactly. But it's an important illusion to have because studies show that when we tell people

there's no free will and then we give them subsequent tests, they're more likely to cheat on an exam, to behave unethically. So given that we're social creatures, this illusion that we have sort of autonomy and over our behaviors makes us behave in moral ways, even though our brain's really deciding before we're conscious of it. Like one of the reasons, one of the theories of consciousness is that it evolved particularly so that we can predict others behavior in advance and that that would help us survive better.

So it was a survival skill that now has been kind of parlayed into, you know, elite sports players. But those who could predict, let's say, an aggressor who's coming in advance and can make a move to sort of save themselves. And so over time, that those who had more conscious perception survived more. And that's a theory of how consciousness evolved. All right, let me put this into context from an athlete on a team sports point of view. As a player on defense, if I see certain patterns, they equal danger. That equals a team scoring a goal against me. I don't like that. That's bad.

So what I do is position or I organize my team unit to position so as we stop, thwart, detonate that. On the offensive side, if I see a pattern of play and the object is for me to score, I will now maneuver myself to be in a position to receive the pass so as I can score. So it's the sense of danger. Correct me if I'm wrong, please. Sense of danger and the ability to gain reward. Oh, the reward.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's those two ends of the spectrum. Brains like rewards, right? They do indeed. And there's the motivation, right? So if you feel like you're under threat, let's say you recognize a pattern, it signals to your brain danger, it's going to motivate you. And part of that is the reward network is active just in the sense of being motivated to make a move. The more danger there is, maybe the harder you're going to push your body

to let's say defend or to run. And so there's a lot going on all at the same time. Fear can trigger motivation and can trigger better performance in many ways. So you want that motivation, you want that dopamine and a little bit of a threat to get you going. If you weren't in danger, maybe you'll be too lax and you won't perform as well. That's like when

often in sports games and, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but like when you're doing really well and it's halftime, the team that's, you know, in the lead can get a little bit more relaxed and then ends up, you know, the other team starts to take over, right? Because they're more motivated at that point. So, you know, there's these group dynamics that are occurring as well. So sometimes a little threat is better for your performance. Yeah, that's the whole idea behind, I hate to bring him up, but Tom Brady's. You're loud, Chuck. I hate to bring this guy up, but his philosophy is always play like you're losing.

Yeah. He actually views the game only from a losing perspective. So even if you're up 21 points, his motivation is, well, I got a score because you could get 21 points and then I'll lose. So yeah, that's definitely a great motivator. But can't we distinguish, Heather, between team sports, like as Gary was saying, where you have to sort of navigate a threat pattern,

versus solo sports like sprinting, for example? No one is against me, but if I'm behind another runner halfway, that's motivation, of course, but I don't feel threatened by it. So for those that don't feel threat, but they still rise, what are they drawing? What are they drawing from? Yeah, that's a slightly different mentality. And basically they're competing against themselves. So it's this idea of, I need to beat my own time. I need to, you know, they have to set up in a sense, their own goals. And it's less about the competitors. Although obviously when, when you can see, let's say a runner in sight and you're about, you know,

you're just behind them, you're about to overtake them. That's going to trigger some adrenaline and some motivation. But if it's just you alone running a distance or, you know, let's say it's a long jumper or somebody doing a solo sport, it's about beating themselves. And it's still motivating. It's just in a different way. But in both cases, they're taking in information from the environment. They're performing, they're getting feedback, whether it's from themselves or from other players, and then they're revising their performance accordingly. So it's just the classic kind of performance feedback revision, whether it's solo or with teams. But I think with teams, it's just the psychology is slightly different,

and it's more about others than focusing on yourself as the competitor. So pick up on something Chuck said about Tom Brady. You can't let it rest. You've got to keep bringing it up.. I got to go there because this is something that's been eaten away in my mind. We learn more from losing. We are taught that. We always hear about it. Yet when an athlete wins, wins, wins, how do they learn? How do they? I mean, because this is the whole thing about being a phenom. I'm the best. You don't beat me. You don't learn from anybody because you're better than everybody ever was.

I know. And then that's the Achilles heel scenario. And I think Heather Berlin is going to tell me there's another name for that. Well, when you let down your guard and you become, even like for anything, for a comedian, you know, if you're not getting that adrenaline rush when you're about to get out in the audience, you're probably, your performance is going to start to go down, right? So, but I think with the best athletes, first of all, you know, that's saying it takes like, you know, years of hard work to become an overnight success, right? So the people who are winning now, they weren't always winning, right? It took them a long time to get there. And I think those that really achieve at the highest levels

are never really satisfied or never at the point where they're like, okay, I'm the best now. I'm good enough. I can, you know, they're always wanting to do better, better, better. And it's interesting because you need a lot of self-esteem to, you know, to get to these levels. But at the same time, there's always a little bit of vulnerability, a little bit of insecurity that continues to push you and push you. I mean, I even know it as an academic, you know, I'm always like, well, I have to, I didn't write enough papers. I need to keep going. I have to write a book. I have to, you know, it's never enough. And that's what continues to propel you. So I think even if they're winning, even if they won three Super Bowls, it's like, well, I didn't get, you know, I need to win a fourth. I need to break the world record. And it just keeps going on and on like that.

So I don't think they ever feel like they fully won. So what about, there's some cases, take Michael Phelps, for example. He was very public about therapy that he had, but I think that was after he had stopped winning medals. I don't know if he did it before, but in either case, for people to come to know

themselves better in any cases, that surely would have value, right? Not to bring more business your way, but I'm just asking. Yeah, everybody needs it. That's what you're going to tell us, right? Yes, everyone can do with a little therapy and self-awareness. No, but I do think that in particular with athletes, the amount of pressure that they're under and, and, you know, some of it is a little bit obsessional, right? I mean, like someone like Michael Phelps, like he's talked about, you know, having to swim in the pool for hours and hours and hours a day, but in a way it was his therapy in a way it was a way to kind of escape some of his mental demons. So, you know, it's one question is,

do people with mental health issues, are they more likely to go into these sports that require a type of obsession? Or is it being an elite athlete can create some of these mental disturbances, like the anxiety from all the pressure? There's also the, you know, sensation seeking when you're at the top and you're really succeeding. You know, I was speaking with Lindsey Vonn about this,

who's an Olympic gold medalist skier, said, now that I'm retired, like I am depressed because that excitement, I no longer have it. Now, where do I find that? And that is an issue with athletes. It's like, where do you go from here? Or, you know, Buzz Aldrin, who went to the moon, I spoke to him and he's suffered from depression. He said, well, after you go to the moon, you know, what's left? What is there? Mars, Mars, Mars. I got this. Okay. I'll recommend that to all my patients. Aim for Mars. Are there any clinical medical condition, mental conditions that could actually in some instances be advantageous for an athlete?

Yeah, I would say a little bit of obsessive compulsive disorder, perfectionism. I mean, those kinds of qualities, not to the extent where it becomes debilitating, but having that singular focus and perfectionism, no, I have to shave off just a millisecond from my time probably is helpful not that it's the most healthy mentally but so your field which is very big on naming conditions of human behavior and of mind and having to revisit those names over the decades. Yes. If some aspect of compulsive behavior can improve one's performance, then we shouldn't

keep calling it a disorder. It's just somebody's different. Right, right. And the only thing, you know, obviously the DSM, which is the Diagnostic Statistical Manual that names all these disorders, which does revise and change over the years. statistical manual that names all these disorders, which does revise and change over the years. But what we define as being a disorder is that if it causes disturbance to your life, if it, you know, if your perfectionism is interfering with your relationships and with your emotions. And so it's really subjective. There's no clear line that marks this is now a disorder.

I'm just saying if I'm that way and you don't like it and it interferes with you but I'm the best in the world, it's not a disorder even if it interferes with relationships. It doesn't interfere with this other thing. There's a couple of exceptions though. So usually it has to subjectively it has to disturb you.

If it doesn't then it wouldn't be a disorder. A couple of exceptions. For example people with narcissistic personality disorder. I was just about to say. They don't have a problem with this, but everyone else does. I'm a complete and total a-hole, but I don't care

because I'm great with me. But everybody else is suffering. I just win, win, win. We got to take a problem. I just win, win, win. Right, but not that. All right, we got to take a break. We have another guest coming forward. But Heather, can you come back for segment three?

Because that's when we shoot the shit. And you're really good at that. We hear you have incredible aim. Lucky I stopped up on his toilet paper. All right. No, no. Sorry. She no no sorry she went there she went there just just to distinguish it from being full of shit that's a different segment that we're doing but shoot the shit we just we spend the third segment just uh exploring um nuances that wouldn't normally come up in a formal conversation so thanks if you come, we'll make sure to tap you some more.

All right, this is StarTalk Sports Edition, Making a Phenom. We'll be right back. We're back, segment two out of three, StarTalk Sports Edition, The Making of a Phenom. We now bring in a person with a particular specialty that many people didn't even know existed. We have Dr. Joan Vickers. She's professor of kinesiology

at the University of Calgary, Calgary in Alberta, Canada. And she's an emeritus professor. So she's been at this a long time. Author of the book, let me get it here, Perception, Cognition, and Decision Training, The Quiet Eye in Action. And so, yeah, so elite athletes, their vision, their brain-eye contact is real,

and it's probably better than all the rest of us. And I think we've got the person to talk to about this. Joan, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Excellent. So can you tell us exactly what you mean by quiet eye? And how do you like quantify how that might be important for athletes? That's the hardest thing for people to get right at the very beginning. How do you record the gaze of someone when they're looking, you know, 10, 15, 20 feet away?

And I brought along a little eye tracker here, just so people can see what's used. So this is one of many eye trackers out there today, but one that's been used extensively. And so this fits on the athlete, just like a pair of sport glasses. It's outfitted with a couple of cameras this camera here is going to be taking this camera here this is taking the scene no matter where the person looks this camera here is actually shooting against this mirrored monocle down here because I want to get the video right off of the eye, right off of the

cornea of the eye. And so then by the optics that are in here, what you end up, I brought an example of this. I don't know if you folks can see that. It's a guy taking a foul shot. Yeah, this is a guy taking a foul shot. Let's see if I get this right. So he's actually wearing the eye tracker here. All right. And what I just described, the eye tracker is taking this image over here. And on, do you see the hoop?

Yes, it's seeing what he's seeing, the hoop. Right. Now, you see that little black spot there? It's seeing what he's seeing, the hoop and... Right. Now, you see that little black spot there? It's inside of the rebound or the backboard square. There's a tiny little black spot. Yeah, it's right actually on the front of the rim.

It's on the front of the rim. In the very center of the front of the rim. That's right. That's the quiet eye in basketball shooting. Okay, so what does that mean? And how did you even know it exists? To me, it's just the front of the rim. Well, these systems give you a video of the person's gaze, in this case, the quiet eye, the fixations in space, every 33 or 16.66 milliseconds. In other words, it's good enough in terms of determining what the brain is actually

processing and what it's actually seeing. And then what makes what we do unique, if you could see the video on the side, we couple the movements of the person at the same time. So we have perception-action coupling. You're able to actually know exactly when that gaze is used at a particular phase of the movement. Whoa. Well, just to be clear, so the number of times you sample what they're seeing per second, as long as it's faster than the rate at which the brain will act on information, then you can get totally inside what they're doing, right? Exactly.

If you were sampling it once per second, stuff went on in that second, you just missed it, right? That's right. So that's why that matters. I just want to make that clear. Oh, it's a huge thing. And some of these eye trackers are extremely fast today. But this has unlocked the answers to a lot of the mystery that we had

in terms of what do people actually see? How's the brain processing that information? And the quiet eye variable came out because I started doing all of my research with elite athletes. I thought, well, you know, if I was going to put an experiment in a laboratory, I'm not going to get the hundreds of thousands of trials,

practice trials in an experimental setting. But the minute you put an eye tracker on an elite athlete, you've got someone who's trained 10 years, 10,000 hours, millions of trials in some cases. And so you've got a very special brain and visual system that you're accessing right off the top. So- I'm sorry, because you're working with elite trackers.

I'm just curious because you're working with elite trackers. I'm just curious because something popped into my head just now where I read a study about how we don't ever see what we actually see. Like there's too much data to take in for the brain. So what you're actually seeing is what your brain tells you, fills in the information. So are you actually seeing the filled in information that they are seeing indeed? That's right, we are. Wow. Yeah, but there's a caveat on that. The human visual reaction time is about 250 milliseconds to 300 milliseconds. That's about 10 frames, video frames recorded by one of these. And the brain needs that amount of time in order to actually make sense about what's being viewed, in this case, the front of the hoop.

And they need not only that amount of time to perceive it, but to organize the movement and initiate and carry out a very simple movement, actually. So, Doctor, the sooner I see it and the longer I can hold that quiet iron moment. That's right. But I think major events in sports, team sports, a tennis game, happen in hundreds of a second. Exactly. So how am I trying to get over this particular warp in time? The big surprise for my program, I think,

was the work we did with ice hockey goaltenders. Ooh. And, you know, everyone said... It's Canada. It's Canada. Yeah, well... Canada. Yeah, well... Canada. Yeah, we... Good point. Just to be clear, of course it's ice hockey, right?

It's not golf. Yeah, yeah. Although we've done soccer, goaltending as well. But ice fishing wasn't in the... That wasn't part of... Actually, we've done fly fishing. Oh, really? You did?

That's okay. Yep. The world champion, actually. Oh, wow. That's great. Anyway, but the big thing, the big surprise for us is that the quiet eye of these elite goaltenders occurred as the shot was being prepared.

Right. In other words, the goaltenders occurred as the shot was being prepared right in other words the goaltenders reading not the body believe it or not um but they're reading the stick and they're reading the movement of the puck on the stick and i don't know if you know what an ice hockey player can do with a hockey stick it's just magical. The control and the ability they have. Well, soccer players do it with their feet, right? Yeah. They also can do the same thing. The point is they're not just slapping the puck.

They're actually manipulating the hoop ring. Yeah, these are curved sticks, and they can do amazing things with them. And so what's unique about our program is that we have people in this ice hockey experiment shoot until 10 goals and 10 saves were made. So we're able to say what actually happened when there was failure in this situation. And what happened was that the amount of tracking, or not tracking, the fixation, the quad eye fixation, on that movement of the stick as it was executing the shot was almost a second long. And there was indeed a bit of tracking right at the very beginning that was very important, but it wasn't a major part of it at all.

Right. So basically what the goaltender is doing then is it's – I can't think of an elegant way to say this because it's not a guess, but it's an anticipation. Absolutely. So they're looking at the stick and because of their pattern recognition, the amount of times they've done this over and over and over again they know when the stick hits the ice and the puck at a certain place and book that instead of tracking the puck which would be damn near impossible at the speed that it's going they literally just position their glove at the point where that anticipation calculation has been made you You got it. Yeah. They predict the future.

They predict the future. Unbelievable. But baseball players do that. Ice soccer goaltenders do that. Tennis players do that. In all of these receiving serve, that pattern showing up right across the board. And fly fishermen, apparently.

No, no. Now, fly fishing is like shooting basketballs, right? You have to place the fly very precisely on a place and they use hula hoops in their competition, actually. You know what the athletes have done, particularly soccer players and basketball players? You know what they've done because they know people like the professor here are working on quiet eye training. They do the no look pass. So they're taking- Yeah, the deception.

Yeah, they're taking away some of the data that you can analyze to make your decision. Exactly. Absolutely. Wait, so if I know you are quiet eyeing, I just have to do something different, and then I'll fool you. You have to figure it out. You have to do exactly what Gary explained. I've got to have a loud eye coming. Yeah.

The obnoxious eye. Oh, that's what you detrain. Oh, that's what you detrain. How long, if you put someone, an athlete, into a program of quiet eye training, how long before you see the proper definitive bump in their abilities to absorb process and anticipate? I've done a lot of training in basketball shooting. And if a person comes to me, and golf actually,

and if a person comes to me and they're technically got very good bike mechanics, we can make a difference overnight. Really? That long? Yeah. What kept you? Whoa. Yeah, because the way we do the training,

we actually show the athlete their gaze, their quiet eye. Well, first of all, we show them what an expert does. Pardon me, we test them. We show them then what an expert does. Then we bring up their video, their quiet eye video, and they go back and forth and they compare what the best in, you know, 85, 90% shooter does and what they do sitting there at 56% and they just figured out just like that. They walk back on the

they still have this on. They walk back on the line and they change it instantly. Now if they're like a Shaquille O'Neal for example. Oh then they're hopeless. In a free throw. Only in a free throw. He was taught a technique that would allow him to see the basket the whole time.

But really good basketball players bring the hands up through urine. Yeah. And they shoot, and they actually occlude the hoop. He was taught, like people who have trouble, especially with free throws, they actually learn a whole mechanical biomechanics of the shot that completely gets them in more trouble so professor okay that's my execution of my skill in that particular moment but what if i do have as you say good biomechanics i do execute that skill with good technique. What if I've got the yips as a

golf putter? Can things like quiet eye training roll out and sort of level that out and not make that the mountain I can't ascend? Wait, what are the yips? It's when your brain is all messed up. You're in the dull, what's it called? A slump. I'm on the crest of a slump. That's a thing, huh? A yip. Okay, I've never been in a yip. Good for you, sir.

Not knowingly. Knowingly yipped. Have you ever seen a golf tournament where the guy just putts and it's like that, he made that putt look about three foot away and you know it's 18 feet away and they're total control and then you got a guy with a three foot putt who misses by six feet right you know the yips there's too much in here too much going on in here okay so Joan you can fix yips actually we we've just done that it appears right. I've been working with an LPGA.

I and also one of my students who's a sports psychologist, we've been working with an LPGA player who has the Ips. And she just was struggling terribly. And so we taught her the quiet eye and how to execute it. And when we started working with her, this would be three years ago, even counting this mid-season, she wasn't qualifying. As a younger player, she was qualifying. You have to sit golfers when they tend to be older.

You know, they're just worn out by the stress of competing under all that pressure all the time. Wow. Anyway, she actually got back qualifying. She had some really good finishes last year. She started making some really good money, which, of course, is the measuring tool in professional golf. And she's just so excited to be playing this year.

And, of course, it's been wiped out, which is really such a shame. Oh, and I'll tell you what she says. What she says is that before I'd stand over the ball and technically I was going through all of the millions of technical things. She was even given some crazy information about dominant eye and she was trying to, you imagine, you're trying to control all these degrees of freedom in this very complicated skill.

And then what she found when she learned the quiet eye, which is very task-focused, it's external attention, it's into the task. Then all of a sudden she found she wasn't experiencing the anxiety, the yips anymore, and she was out there going through this quiet eye routine. So, yes yes it can help so Joan we have to wrap up this segment in a few moments but let me just slip this in here if we have time uh your research uses the term the efficiency paradox what is that uh actually the neural efficiency um hypothesis came out of 1988, actually, with research called HIRE. And he did intelligence tests, and he found that people with very high IQs and chess players as well, they just finish the performance of whatever they're doing extremely fast.

So he also used PET scans scans and the brain was working, but not only very quickly, but also efficiently. And so the neural efficiency hypothesis came out. Now here's the quiet eye with what 30 years of research showing you need this long duration quiet eye if you're an elite performer. And that's called the quadi neural efficiency paradox. So your research created the paradox? Yeah, it did, actually.

Thank you for shortening that up for me. But here's why. You see, a lot of people, the fallacy that came out of the neural efficiency hypothesis is that if you're doing a really quick movement, the assumption is you've got a quick eye and you've got a quick body. No, that's not true. You've got really blistering fast movements. There's no question.

But this thing up here is so darn complex, it needs time to get organized in order. The visual brain, the visual brain, the visual neurobrain is really, really complex, as you know from your previous guests and many other guests. And it just takes a long time to organize the billions of neurons that underlie skills like this. Joan, this is fascinating. And I've never told anyone this before because the occasion hasn't arisen. But when I was in middle school, I found a book in the library on kinesiology and I read it cover to cover. And I said to myself, if I were ever something other than an astrophysicist,

it would be a kinesiologist. Yeah, because back then it was the unknown, right? As an astrophysicist, you wanted to be the unknown. I didn't tell you how far back that was. I didn't tell you how far back that was. Did I say how far back that was? I read your bio. That was back before we knew we even had muscles. I'm deeply and eternally fascinated with your field, and this is my first conversation with a professional in it.

So I'm delighted to have you on the show and maybe get you on again it's a lot more about the kinesiology of everything else as well so joan thanks for joining us when we come back a third segment of star talk sports edition the making Phenom, when we return. We're back on StarTalk Sports Edition. We're trying to get inside the head and the body, but mostly the head of sports phenoms. And, of course, we had Heather Berlin in segment one, and we're bringing her back for segment three. There you are, Heather. Welcome back.

It's a pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. So I just, generally in our third segment, we just explore the topics that were raised formally in the first two segments and just say what we're thinking and say what we're wondering. You'll have a lot more to say. Heather's going to have a lot more to say, seeing as though she's a neuroscientist. Heather, is there going to be one of you hired by every sports team going forward? Let's hope so. Good answer, good answer. Heather's a free agent. She's negotiating her $10 million contract.

Exactly. I actually did get a call from a professional sports team, a basketball team who I won't name, but the trainer was really interested in actually the effect of fame on their brain when these players are suddenly skyrocketed into fame and how that might affect them and how they can predict certain personality types that might be most affected by this

and how to prevent any unforeseen negative consequences of it. So what's worse, the fame or the money in terms of its negative impact? I know they go together, but they don't have to. Yeah, not necessarily. I think I would have to say, and there's no evidence to support this,

but I'm predicting that the fame will have more of an impact. Yeah, the fame. There's no way because you can be as rich as you. There are guys right now who are walking around with millions of dollars in the bank in New York City, and you do not know it. I mean, seriously, go to any bar in lower Manhattan. If you get down to the tip of the island and down by Wall Street and you go into any bar on any given evening, there are millionaires.

All throughout that bar. I mean, everybody in that bar is a millionaire. Is that the bar called Millionaires? But my point is this. You can have a lot of money and it means nothing depending upon where you live, right? So in New York City, you're a very rich person.

It means nothing. But you're a real housewife of New York City. And people are like, oh, my God. And it's just like, really? But there's something about fame. You mean from the show? Yeah, from that show. Yeah, right.

So it's a currency. Fame is a currency. It's even more so than money because money is a kind of secondary reinforcer. It's not reinforcing in itself. It's just what it can get you. It's symbolic. But if money had no meaning, it would just be a piece of paper.

So it's a secondary reinforcer. Whereas adulation and people coming up to you and saying how great you are, that's almost like a primary reinforcer. It's much more exhilarating for the brain than actually just having wads of cash. So what did you tell them? What was your advice? Oh, I actually said there are certain personality tests that you could give these players when you recruit them to predict who is going to be most sensitive to the sudden rise in fame. Who's going to be the biggest a-hole?

Yeah. You said it politely, Heather, but I think that... Right, exactly. That's standard practice. I mean, I know soccer players that were bought from one English team by another. They put a private detective on the case because they were spending an awful lot of money. So these psych tests,

most certainly, it's different here in the US where you can draft and interview players. But if you get that psychological analysis, you will understand what situations, because you've got a locker room of certain characteristics and with certain needs and if you're bringing in there a grenade without a pin there's no surprise there's an explosion very soon so heather is there any way that can anyone take these tests or do you have to be like an administered by a professional or do you have to pay for them or is there a way to find it i'd be so interested to see yeah i mean I mean, look, there's certain tests that you can just pull up on the internet

and take and get some sort of like, you know, read out raw score, but really to have them interpreted by a professional. And some of them have very subtle measures in them. For example, there's this very well-known personality test called the MMPI, which is given both to criminals or to people who are, let's say, job applicants. And

inherent, there are certain ways that you can see if somebody is either faking good or faking bad. So some people, like if it's, let's say, for a job applicant, you know, they want to put on a good face. And certain questions where, you know, like, have you ever stolen anything in your life, even a piece of gum, right? Usually, chances are, the answer is yes. Of course. Yeah, so there are hidden questions where, like, you would just always, you know, endorse what you think they want to hear. And then there's also faking bad, like, let's say, to get out of being drafted. And so there's more that a psychologist can interpret in the test than if you just were to take one online.

Yeah, faking bad, first of all, that sounds like a great AMC TV show. Right, I'm serious. But also it's what I've always been fascinated with how they find out if you're doing that for jury duty because nobody wants jury duty. So everybody comes into jury duty looking for a way to get out of it.

And the thing is, do you think you can be objective? And it's just like, I mean, I said no. They were like, well, what do you mean? I was just like, I hate black people. No. Chuck. Heather, we spoke earlier on in the show. Wait, wait, wait, Gary, Gary.

I still want more about your question that you asked because if she does the analysis, right, and finds out that, yes, you're about to hire someone in the draft who's a pin, a grenade, I love your analogy, a grenade with no pin, why is that always bad? And I ask that, Heather, I'm a native New Yorker.

I'm a Yankee fan. Me too. In 1978, the Yankees were notoriously dysfunctional. Notoriously dysfunctional. Fights in the dugout. But on the field, they won. And they kept winning. Can't say that, the existence proof,

that a well-behaved team does not have to be a prerequisite for a winning team. Yeah. Well, there are different personality traits. So a person could, say, be very annoying, narcissistic, whatever, have personality traits that are not pleasant to get along with in the locker room. But if they're a good team player, you know, that's the most important in terms of how they are in the field. So there are ways you can sort of say like,

how well does this person play with others? So they might be, I don't know, neurotic, you know, or prone to aggressive outbursts or a number of other things that would make them interpersonally unpleasant, but playing with the team. Can you know that in the sandbox when they're a child? That's a good question. So there are things we can look at in terms of temperament, like a fussy child or a well-adjusted child that do tend to continue throughout the lifetime. So yeah, there are certain things that are genetic predispositions to being people, let's say, who are unperturbable, you know, and nothing really tends to bother them.

They're easygoing, you know, or a type A person. Those traits tend to last throughout your life and they're very hard to change. But you can change your behavior. You can know what your predilections are and try to sort of adjust for them so that you can be a good, let's say, team player, for example. Everyone's watched The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan doc, right? On ESPN, ESPN streaming. Except for me. Well, okay. Most people.

Except for me. Well, okay. Most people. For certain games, he would have to have something to rub up against to get angry, to bring his better game forward. And that is something coaches realize. And sometimes they have a team that's really quite good, but it's full of nice guys. So they go and recruit them.

They go to the Wild West. They find the worst baddie they can, and they drag them in and stick them in this team, and they get a different dynamic. All of a sudden, the sort of eons in the atmosphere of the locker room change, and stuff goes on, and it becomes a really good team becomes a really great team. Just a translation to the American here.

He said eon. He meant ion. Yes, sorry. Yeah, I'll be your translator for this. Thank you. I'm trapped in English and I'm learning to speak American. But this is American, Jack. You're going to speak American on this show, Jack.

That's not with a Q, is it? I mean, I would liken it to like even personal relationships, right? When, you know, some people say, oh, I don't know. How's your marriage going? Oh, everything's fine. We never fight. You know, it's great. Okay.

That's kind of status quo. But sometimes a little friction can cause a bit more passion. You know, you have a little bit of friction, but then it causes more excitement and you need that. It's healthy if it's not too much, right? So if you're at the point where guys are beating each other up in the locker room, you know, that's going to be too much regression. That's not going to be conducive, but just enough friction to kind of, again, get their motivation going is probably better than everyone just, you know, getting along all the time. And singing Kumbaya.

Exactly. That'd be good in the locker room, but maybe not as good on the field. But again, it's moderation. You don't want too little, you don't want too much. Just the right amount, and you'll get that magic that makes that perfect team dynamic. I think a lot about fields that are in high transition, and

fields that are in high transition are ones that will tell you wow, the greatest discoveries are just in the last few years. We've come a long way. Those fields actually haven't, okay? Because if you're in the moment riding on great discoveries, it means the next few years, all of the thing you know now is going to be overrun, right? It's when you sort of start to level off where you realize, okay, we're there. Now we're onto a different problem.

My question is, can you foresee a day where you are who stands between an average athlete and an elite athlete? It's the psycho dimension of who and what they are and nothing else. Can you, is that a day that is waiting to come? This is the thing. As far as we've come with our understanding of the brain and how it relates to human behavior,

it's still very difficult to predict how people will behave in any given situation because there's so many variables and so many factors. Heather, the planets were difficult until Isaac Newton came along, and then he wrote down one equation. Then they weren't difficult anymore unless you didn't know math. So the planets were difficult until Isaac Newton came along. And then he wrote down one equation. Then they weren't difficult anymore, unless you didn't know math. So that's part of my point. You're at a cusp where everything looks complicated because of how many variables. But maybe you need an Isaac Newton neuroscientist to say, here's how it works.

Yeah, we haven't quite cracked the code. And one of the issues is because brains are not always so complex, but they're so different in many ways. Each one is wired up in a very different, slightly different way. So even though like the laws of the universe, the laws of physics are these universals that can apply anywhere. They're going to apply to every solar system in the universe. And every galaxy. Somebody had to discover that fact. And until that happened, every planet was doing its own thing.

And it was whimsical. But here's the problem. Every planet had a separate rule and everything was separate. And this fell and the moon was there and everything had its own explanation. Until somebody came around and said, no, it is simpler than all of that.

And I'm waiting for that to happen in neuroscience. Because you're in a young field, Heather, right? Maybe that doesn't exist in neuroscience because maybe biologically, the fact that we are so wired so differently from individual to individual that you won't get that kind of baseline where you can make the kind of assertions that Newton-

Chuck, that's negative talk. You shouldn't be in negative- Okay. That's negative talk. I can quantify this Heather how old is neuroscience as a field how old it's it's 30 years old at most. I mean well cognitive neuroscience which is the idea of linking the physical mechanisms of the brain to cognition and thought because Because there was just the field of psychology and then just the understanding of the brain. But linking them, I would say, you know,

maybe 40 years old. Maybe 50, 50, pushing it. Physics, as we now think of it, is 500 years old. So we've had 500 years of waiting for brilliant people to jump in and help us move forward. So I'll give you another 300 years. All right, let me put it this way. Maybe our Sir Isaac Newton moment comes through AI, because AI has been invented to deal with the complexities. Now, we've spoke with Dr. Stuart

Kim in the first Phenom show about the genetics and just how many variations are available and how complex that is. We're having a similar storyline here with Heather. Now, this seems tailor-made for AI to be able to come in and process this and maybe, maybe come up with a solution. I don't know that there is a solution because I'm nowhere near qualified to comment. Gary, AI, the way you described it, would replace Heather. And Heather won't have that. No, never, never. No, no, would replace Heather. And Heather won't have that. No, never, never.

No, no, no. I'm not having that. This is the problem, I think, is that you have the genome, and we can map that out. And let's say we can, which is complex in itself, but let's say we figure out the exact genetic sequence of what makes somebody physically able to be the best at a sport. And then the last tip of that is the psychological aspect. But there's the genotype and then there's the phenotype, how those genes are expressed. And that varies depending on how the person interacts with the

environment. And so once you bring in that amount of unpredictability in many cases, because there's so many variables in so many different ways from the way you were brought up, you know, to the different hours of practice and types of practice that that becomes hard to predict. So even if we take two people who have the perfect sort of athletic genomes, the way that they express themselves is going to vary. And there are, and the other thing I want to say about this, there are universals in terms of how our brain works and how the mind works.

But at the same time, because each brain is like a thumbprint and there's slight variations, again, how they are expressed at the individual level, there's not enough precision in which we can predict behavior at this point. You're bumming me out here. I want you to get along. Try to move that field forward, Heather. Maybe you'll be the one. I'm working on it. You could get back to work on that. Guys, we've got to end it there. This has been our second installment of The Making of a Phenom on StarTalk Sports Edition. And I want to thank Dr. Heather Berlin, friend of StarTalk, as well as Dr. Joan Vickers.

We're going to have to get her back on to talk about her research because that was fun listening to how the eye connects to the brain in all of her work, her lifetime of work in kinesiology. For part three of Making of a Phenom, guess who we're going to have on? We're going to have Pete Carroll. Good. He's a friend of mine. I just want you to know.

Me and him are like that. I'm just saying. Head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. That's because I bailed out his ass one time on social media, so he owes me. And I've also got psychologist Angela Duckworth. So we're going to totally get into the subject, and there's more to come.

So this has been StarTalk Sports Edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.