Book Review: The Performance Cortex
Can neuroscience make us better athletes? Umm...not yet!
The Performance Cortex is a 2018 book by Zach Schonbrun. The subtitle is "How Neuroscience is Redefining Athletic Genius".
To be honest, I was pretty disappointed with The Performance Cortex. The main theme is it takes a lot brainpower be good at sports. But I'm not sure anyone I know would've disagreed with that, even before reading this book. We switch back and forth between two main threads throughout the chapters: first, a history of how we learned the way our brain controls our body's movements. Not exactly thrilling stuff if you're not a neuroscience nerd. Second, stories from the cutting edge of neuroscience-in-sports. For example, minor league baseball players doing a batting practice simulation while hooked up to a brain scanner that can determine the exact moment they decide to swing.
This is what I picked up the book hoping to find: some tips on how to use my brain to be better at sports. Unfortunately, there's not really any payoff here. Despite chapter titles like "Why Stephen Curry is a Genius" and "How Tom Brady Won Super Bowl LI", there's not really much actionable information (The closest we get to that is support for visualization exercises). We know that the best athletes use their brains to succeed, but we don't really know yet how to turn our knowledge of that fact into training programs. How did Tom Brady win Super Bowl LI? The book's answer is, more or less, "humans have certain neurons that keep track of things they've seen but aren't currently looking at". Those chapter titles were not much more than clickbait.
A few interesting notes
Although I didn't learn to be any better at sports, there's lots of brain science discussed in this book. Here are a few little things I found interesting enough to highlight:
While the Tom Brady chapter was quite a letdown, this quote (from that chapter) does a good job of highlighting the way we don't just sense things and directly perceive reality—instead, our brains are always processing sensations to calculate its best estimation of what's actually out there:
If you tap your nose and your toe at the same time, you will feel the taps simultaneously. This is an illusion—the input from the nose travels a much shorter distance than that from the toe, and therefore is perceived and processed in the brain some dozens of milliseconds earlier.
When we see a ball (or a disc) in flight, we can predict where it's going to go. In what I've read previously, it's usually suggested that we're doing some kind of mental math. But that might not be the only story. There's evidence that we're also sort of...feeling what it felt like for the thrower/shooter. The part of the brain that lights up when we make those predictions are the same parts of the brain that typically get signals from our own shooting hand. When we see a shot, we're mentally simulating what it would have felt like for us to shoot that shot, and using that information to figure out where the shot is going:
In 2008, researchers at Sapienza University of Rome studied a group of professional men’s basketball players as they viewed film of a teammate shooting free throws. The film was fixed to cut off at the moment the ball left the player’s fingertips, leaving the participants to guess whether he had made the shot or missed it. As it turned out, the players predicted the success of the shots correctly 66.7 percent of the time...When the shots missed, corticospinal excitability was also higher in the pros, specifically for the right hand muscles. It seemed there was something special about active expertise that the athletes not only saw but also, in a way, felt.
And in general, our hands are incredibly complicated. For example:
In other parts of the body, it takes a lot for the brain to notice the skin is sending signals. When 1,000 neurons are stimulated, sending signals to the brain, you might feel that. But, amazingly, it’s been shown that you can perceive when just one fingertip neuron is stimulated.
I've written previously (see my review of How We Learn To Move) about the natural variability in the motions of experts. This aside was a great example of that:
Expert pistol shooters, for instance, learn to synchronize their trigger pulls with the involuntary tremors of their noisy bodies...
Final thoughts
Every so often, I'll publish a collection of short book reviews (see here or here). Though I didn't have too much to say about this book, I wanted to publish a standalone review because athletic performance and the thinking that goes into sports is a cornerstone of the blog. So here's my recommendation: if you think brain/movement science might be interesting but don't know anything about it, feel free to give this book a try. But if you're looking to learn how to use your brain to succeed at sports, this book won't have the answers for you. Let this be one that I read so you don't have to.