The Perception lecture took place on 14 January at Charterhouse. Professor Vincent Walsh (Royal Society Industry Research Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL) spoke on ‘Why Sport is the Best Education’. Review by Anastasia Kolomiets (Year 12):
After the Christmas holidays, it’s time to come back into the routine and regain the pace. And Perception has not been an exception. Even the continuation of the Pre-U, A-level and IB mock exams did not stop Dr Balasubramanian (Chair - Perception) from arranging a new exciting lecture, the first in 2016.
Professor Vincent Walsh (Royal Society Industry Research Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL) was invited to speak about “Why Sport is the Best Education”. He is a passionate believer that sport is the ultimate example of human creativity and has the power to advance human brains; he argued that it is a much more complex form of cognition than the traditional academic ideal and prepares us better for the challenges of the 21st century.
Professor Vincent Walsh is a Professor of Human Brain Research at UCL supervising over 30 PhD students across various fields including memory, time perception, dyslexia, decision making and stress in sport. He continues to serve on committees such as the European Commission, The Royal Society, The Medical Research Council and the Bioscience for Society Strategy Panel (BBSRC). He currently holds a Royal Society Industry Fellowship allowing him to spend 50% of his time supporting ‘real world’ research.*
Professor Walsh interrelated three core concepts: sport, creativity and the brain. The agenda of the lecture was that sport is the most complex form of brain activity and that it is at least no less, if not more beneficial for our brain than academic studies. Professor Walsh especially frequently used his favourite example - chess, traditionally considered one of the academically most challenging games that only the intellectually able can play well, claiming that the game is a result of simple mathematical calculations and the most difficult thing that our brain needs to do is to coordinate the movement of picking up and placing of a chess piece on the board.
Specific evidence about the effect sport has on the brain was delivered first, with a mention of some of the research projects that Professor Walsh was undertaking; these included investigating decision making and risk facing with the British sailing team, sex differences and stress and emotions during sport. As it seems, sport truly sculpts the brain. The brains of ‘experts’ differ from the average ‘sportsmen’ in their organization: connectivity in certain parts of the brain increases and sometimes new connections develop. For example, fighter pilots have increased thickness of the area of the brain focused on eye to hand coordination. This means, even though our brain is not a muscle, it works like one: the areas of the brain that we train develop more and faster.
But is that all to the story? Of course not, it is just the beginning. What is so significant about sport is that it requires the sportsmen to be creative, to have strategy, to react quickly and be able to make fast high-impact decisions and not be put off if they do not produce the desired outcome, to be resistant to criticism from their peers and the public (in the form of the relentless omniscient press) and to be able to take up responsibility for the wrong decision. I don’t know about you, but to me, that sounds like something good enough for a superhero, or at least for a confident political leader, lawyer or banker.
One of the keys is creativity, which provides strategy and decisions. It consists of 4 component stages: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Preparation is the searching of ideas, incubation is when, when we rest or sleep, neurons that have been previously busy performing other tasks are able to 'communicate' information with each other, 'digesting' it and providing new connections, illumination - the so-called ‘eureka’ moment and verification - a rational analysis of the initial idea.
Professor Walsh’s example of the ultimate show of creativity was Muhammad Ali. Not just because Professor Walsh is really passionate about boxing, but also because Ali’s fight vs George Foreman was a demonstration of his bold thinking and clever strategy. In 1974, thirty two year old Ali faced the younger and stronger Foreman, heavyweight champion with zero defeat record. Ali let Foreman punch him on the arms and body while leaning over on the ropes, which have become less hard due to the humidity of the air. Eventually Foreman got tired and Ali was able to deliver fast jabs to the face and at the end won the fight, becoming the new heavyweight champion. His tactic worked, even though it must have disappointed his fans first to see their hero being punched at the edge of the boxing ring.
How can we investigate how the creative process works in a sportsman’s brain? The true challenge here is acquiring the required data. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of a sportsman’s brain activity proves difficult and the results are inaccurate, as the sportsman is always moving quickly and this affects the readings. Is there an alternative?
Interestingly enough, sport can be compared to the improvisation in a jazz concert. Here, just like on the football pitch, the musician has to make quick decisions that will either produce a good outcome or will go down in a horrible dissonance. Now, even though the musician is only moving slightly, recording the brain activity of a drummer with an EEG while performing is not exactly the way of the lab…
Then what is? Riddles and word challenges provide the unexpected solution. Try one for yourself: what word links ‘actor’, ‘falling’ and ‘dust’? How about ‘broken’, ‘clear’ and ‘eye’? Before you come up with an answer, your brain is actively searching for it. The EEG records the first 2 seconds of brain activity before the answer is found; this allows to scientifically investigate creativity. In fact, during the 'creative process', the area of the brain that is concerned with social self-monitoring, is deactivated, which means that you have to be a little bit 'crazy' to come up with great ideas, as proposed in the Insanity Hypothesis by Caitlin Thomas.
Apart from being slightly out of your mind, there are other ways to boost creativity. Here Professor Walsh gave a helpful tip for his audience in providing a list of the main factors. Here are the eight pieces of advice according to Professor Walsh:
1.Have a brain (as long as you have a brain, you are capable of creativity)
2.Be a little crazy
3.Sleep a lot (helps the incubation process)
4.Be an expert (thorough knowledge of something is the basis for creativity about this something)
5.Dare to be simple (some of the simplest ideas are often the most powerful)
6.Have courage
7.Experiment and improvise
8.Be beautifully wrong (because if the decision was a wrong decision, it is still better if it was a beautiful one than a 'dumb' one)
The need for constant creativity is not the only challenge that faces our incredible sportsmen. They plan, they work on their motor skills, they memorise, they train and make sacrifices, they improve their body awareness and awareness of others, they receive varied feedback and public judgement, their actions bear immediate consequences, there is stress and after fully immersing themselves in sport for twenty years of their youth, they have no other choice but to retire.
Professor Walsh concluded that sport seems to be the most complex form of brain activity. To illustrate his final point, he showed his audience a video of robotic football: a pitiful sight showing robots moving slowly towards the football, missing it when trying to kick it and colliding with each other when trying to get to it. Computers have learned how to beat any person in chess, but they have not yet learned how to play sports. This says a lot about the extent to which sport is the best education available for us.
* As cited in GSK Human Performane Lab; available online at http://www.gskhpl.com/expert-science-community/meet-the-experts/vincent-walsh/
