By L. Jon Wertheim, Sam Sommers
This is Your mind on Sports is the publication for activities enthusiasts trying to find a deeper realizing of the video games they watch and the folks who play them. Sports Illustrated govt editor and bestselling writer L. Jon Wertheim groups up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild trip into the internal global of sports. throughout the prism of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, they display the hidden affects and marvelous cues that motivate and derail us—on the sector and within the stands—and by way of extension, in company board rooms, workplace settings, and our day-by-day lives.
during this impossible to resist narrative romp, Wertheim and Sommers usher us from specialist soccer to the NBA to Grand Slam tennis, from the psychology of athletes self-handicapping their functionality within the boxing ring or the realm sequence, to a proof of why even the glimpse of a end line can raise us past usual actual limits. They discover why Tom Brady and different beginning NFL quarterbacks all seem to appear like type versions; why lovers of groups just like the Cubs, Mets, and any franchise from Cleveland love rooting for a loser; why the simplest avid gamers make the worst coaches; why hockey goons (and enthusiasts) may really struggle at domestic than at the street; and why the sector t-shirt cannon has whatever to educate us approximately human nature.
This is Your mind on Sports is an enjoyable and thought-provoking trip into how psychology and behavioral technological know-how collide with the universe of wins-and-losses, training adjustments, underdogs, and competition video games.
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William Hill activities publication of the yr Nominee (2013)
This can be Your mind on activities is the booklet for activities lovers trying to find a deeper knowing of the video games they watch and the folk who play them. activities Illustrated government editor and bestselling writer L. Jon Wertheim groups up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild experience into the internal international of activities.
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Extra resources for This Is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, the Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon
Sample text
All the contestants have to do is run, jump, throw and swim ever faster, ever further! Athletes’ bodies in consequence are increasingly subjected to a regime of permanent training, of early specialization, of the extreme visualization of bodies deformed by sustained effort in a restricted range. ’ This principle lies at the heart of Olympic ideology. It aspires to place Olympism on the level of the other human rights recognized by sovereign nations. In the case of competitive sport, this is absolute nonsense.
At that already remote time, the very idea of objecting to the increasingly globalized reality of sport, or suggesting a critical understanding of it, seemed outrageous to many, for sport was a social phenomenon that did not permit reflection, let alone thought, and aroused absolutely no opposition. For although in the post-May ’68 period most of the main institutions (school, army, family, art, justice) had been subjected to uncompromising criticism, sport seemed to have escaped opprobrium and was regarded as above suspicion, despite the participation of a few sportsmen in, for example, the occupation of the French Football Federation (FFF) headquarters.
The new sporting order Obviously, sport is not quite ‘as old as the world’. It was born in England, the ‘classical’ place of origin (according to Marx) of the capitalist mode of production, now planetary in scope. Originally a class practice, sport developed during the nineteenth century in tandem with the consolidation of imperialism. The different sports (rugby, cricket, soccer, athletics) spread to other countries and took root in new territories often colonized through military conquest. Competitive sport owes its rapid development to reduced working hours, the rapid expansion of cities, the establishment of good transport networks and latterly the deployment of an immense media infrastructure.