Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 17, 2019

… During the offseason, Cooks spoke with close friend and college teammate James Rodgers about the upcoming season.

“I told him before this year, ‘Maybe we should set some goals,’ and he said, ‘No, because that’s me putting myself before the team,'” Rodgers says. “Those were his exact words: ‘I don’t want to be worried about personal goals when it’s a team sport.'”

… Last season, coach Travis Green coddled his best two-way player by providing Horvat 30 different combinations of linemates. Thirty! The centre played at least 100 even-strength minutes with 11 wingers, which is impressive because only eight dress for any game.

Still, Horvat did not break. He didn’t even complain – even when Green invited Horvat into the coach’s office to vent. Instead, the first-round pick from London, Ont., merely set new career-highs with 27 goals and 61 points and led by example every night.

Somehow, Horvat maintained enough arm strength to shoot the puck while Green was sending him out to take an NHL-high 2,018 faceoffs – at least 500 more than all but 10 other players.

On Tuesday I was just casually watching a Yankees and Tigers game, as one does, and I was stunned that the starting pitcher for the Tigers was Edwin Jackson, who has been in the league for 17 years. Now, I understand that the Tigers are an abominable, rebuilding squad, but this is still, ostensibly, a team that tries to fill their team with at least replacement level players. Heck, it’s very possible they are the model for what a replacement level team looks like.

Yet Jackson is nothing close to replacement level. In that game alone he allowed six runs in just two innings, including a pair of home runs. After perusing his stats page and game log I realized this wasn’t even his worst start of the year, and he’s only tossed 59 innings; he allowed eight runs to Minnesota a couple of weeks ago, and ten runs to Colorado when he was back with the Blue Jays in May.

The weight room gains of dozens of current and future Jayhawks eventually will be traced back to a dog named Hunter.

Years before new Kansas basketball strength coach Ramsey Nijem became the youngest strength coach in the NBA, it was Hunter, a black lab/pit bull mix, whose digging in Nijem’s Bay Area backyard uncovered a gold chain that Nijem thought was lost forever.

While dozens of classes, three universities and countless hours in weight rooms on the west coast all contributed to the foundation of Nijem’s career, it was that chain that started it all.

Although real-world environments are often multisensory, visual scientists typically study visual learning in unisensory environments containing visual signals only. Here, we use deep or artificial neural networks to address the question, Can multisensory training aid visual learning? We examine a network’s internal representations of objects based on visual signals in two conditions: (a) when the network is initially trained with both visual and haptic signals, and (b) when it is initially trained with visual signals only. Our results demonstrate that a network trained in a visual-haptic environment (in which visual, but not haptic, signals are orientation-dependent) tends to learn visual representations containing useful abstractions, such as the categorical structure of objects, and also learns representations that are less sensitive to imaging parameters, such as viewpoint or orientation, that are irrelevant for object recognition or classification tasks. We conclude that researchers studying perceptual learning in vision-only contexts may be overestimating the difficulties associated with important perceptual learning problems. Although multisensory perception has its own challenges, perceptual learning can become easier when it is considered in a multisensory setting.

Traditional decision theory assumes that people respond to the exact features of the options available to them, but observed behavior seems much less precise. This review considers ways of introducing imprecision into models of economic decision making, and stresses the usefulness of analogies with the way that imprecise perceptual judgments are modeled in psychophysics — the branch of experimental psychology concerned with the quantitative relationship between objective features of an observer’s environment and elicited reports about their subjective appearance. It reviews key ideas from psychophysics, provides examples of the kinds of data that motivate them, and proposes lessons for economic modeling. Applications include stochastic choice, choice under risk, decoy effects in marketing, global game models of strategic interaction, and delayed adjustment of prices in response to monetary disturbances.

Ready or not, here they come: Scientists who played hide and seek with rats found that their furry subjects seemed to love the game — and they were remarkably good at it.

The unconventional experiment, described in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, sheds light on the sophisticated sense of play in these tiny rodents and the complex mechanisms at work in their brains. It also hints at the evolutionary usefulness of this type of play.

Dr. Susanne Schweizer is a neuroscientist investigating the development of emotional regulatory processes and their role in mental health across the lifespan.

… The Emotional Toll of Cognitive Labor

Daminger notes that the abstract nature of cognitive labor – its resistance to spatial and temporal boundaries – “prevents the laborer from experiencing the satisfaction of accomplishment that follows the completion of many physical tasks. With no real beginning or end, cognitive work can feel like a conveyer belt without an off button (Daminger, 2019).”

Cognitive work is also invisible (Daminger, 2019). As our family members, friends and colleagues interact with us, they are not aware that our minds are unceasingly anticipating, identifying, deciding and monitoring various aspects of our chronic illness. They may wonder why we seem tired and preoccupied. In fact, our cognitive labor may be invisible even to ourselves.

… We are constantly told how to live well, happily, adventurously or spontaneously. An army of experts are instructing us to wash our faces, to be a badass, and to say yes.

This #inspiration strategy works because humans are wired to want significance and meaning. But what does “living fully” really mean in the age of Instagram, when anyone can wear matching yoga pants as they stand, arms outstretched and back to the camera, soaking in whatever scenic background they’ve found that day?

For years CIRM and others in the stem cell community (hello Paul Knoepfler) have been warning people about the dangers of going to clinics offering unproven and unapproved stem cell therapies. Recently the drum beat of people and organizations coming out in support of that stand has grown louder and louder. Mainstream media – TV and print – have run articles about these predatory clinics. And now, Google has joined those ranks, announcing it will restrict ads promoting these clinics.

“We regularly review and revise our advertising policies. Today, we’re announcing a new Healthcare and medicines policy to prohibit advertising for unproven or experimental medical techniques such as most stem cell therapy, cellular (non-stem) therapy, and gene therapy.”

Early reintegration to training and match play following injury increases the risk of reinjury. However, having key players available benefits the team.1 Practitioners must balance these two components of the return to sport (RTS) process, combining evidence and clinical experience to estimate this risk, then plan and adapt RTS accordingly.1 Quantifying and monitoring training load is key in guiding this process while managing reinjury risk,2–4 and global positioning systems (GPS) provide a valid measure of external running loads.5 However, as practitioners, we should focus on both quantitative aspects of running load progression and qualitative characteristics of movement in competition. This includes highly variable, spontaneous and unanticipated movements (the conditions of ‘chaos’) reflecting the unpredictable nature of the sport.

In this editorial, we present the ‘control-chaos continuum’ (CCC) (figure 1), interlinking GPS variables, while progressively incorporating greater perceptual and reactive neurocognitive challenges.6 7 This framework moves from high control to high chaos, and is based on more than a decade of rehabilitation and RTS in the demanding setting of English Premier League football. [full text]

… Fun fact in case you missed it—the only difference between brown and white eggs are that brown eggs come from chickens with brown feathers and white eggs come from chickens with white feathers. Other than that, their nutritional makeup is identical: 6 grams of protein, 5 grams of fat, 5 percent of your daily vitamin A needs, and 10 percent of your vitamin D needs.

But egg shopping today, however, isn’t so easy or straightforward.

An organization that chooses to see talent instead of gender, the Bills pride themselves on finding the best person for the job in their supporting staff. [video, pre-roll + 4:00]

… Narratology is, broadly, the study of narrative structures and the way in which humans perceive, create, and are influenced by them. It’s a type of literary theory, and like most literary theory, it is full of terms that can seem overtly and deliberately obscure. (Why, for example, do we need the term focalization when we’ve already got the perfectly good and fairly explicable concept of point of view? There are some reasons, but most of the time I’ve found that point of view works just fine, especially when I’m speaking as a practitioner—a writer—rather than a literary analyst or critic.) But what narratology does—especially in its newer forms, like ‘cognitive narratology’—is give us tools to think about not only the patterns in a narrative but how narratives are part of how human beings understand and interpret events which happen to them in their everyday lives.