It’s not quite in the same league as Moneyball, but readers interested in the applications of neuroscience to everyday life...
New York Times contributor Schonbrun takes readers on a sometimes-tangled but revealing tour of the minds of winning athletes.
A baseball player at bat has a few milliseconds to decide whether to swing at a pitch. Some of that decision will hinge on experience, on the neural pathways telling the batter that this is the sort of thing the eye has seen and the brain has processed before. But in the end, the heavy lifting is being done in the fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that “picks up baseballs like bird-watchers spot a warbler in the bush,” or other parts of the brain that govern perceptions and especially the timing of our responses to them. Schonbrun’s principals in his sometimes–science-thick, sometimes–jock-talky narrative are tasked with scouting and training promising athletes. This is no easy matter, especially given that neuro-training, so to speak, isn’t something that coaches and managers have adapted themselves to—yet. But more, they and other sports-oriented neuroscientists are “tracing the essential correlates of a skill,” using imaging and scientific method alike to chase down the ineffable—e.g., the workings of the mind of a star athlete like, say, Stephen Curry, who “was considered to be too slow-footed and unathletic by scouts that many teams passed on him in the NBA draft.” In studying anticipation, decision, and response, some scientists fall back on the old notion that it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something, which occasions a problem. “No one has any idea why it takes so long,” Schonbrun writes, “because no one knows what it actually means to be skilled.” But even so, researchers are constantly gaining insight, and their findings are likely to figure prominently in how athletes are recruited and trained for optimal performance in the future.
It’s not quite in the same league as Moneyball, but readers interested in the applications of neuroscience to everyday life will find plenty of value here.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98633-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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