Last Monday night, the Cleveland Browns got their asses handed to them by the New York Football Giants. Maybe there's nothing too startling about this loss. After all the Browns-despite all the pre-season hype-missed the playoffs again last year and the Giants are, well, the reigning Superbowl champions, but the wow factor is not in the fact of the loss, but in the how of the fact.
While football is the greatest of team sports, the Browns were beat less by an entire team and more by one man: wide receiver Domenik Hixon. Hixon's performance was nothing if not remarkable. No, he's not one of the Giants' starting receivers. In fact, the only reason he got so much playing time is because Plaxico Buress, Amani Toomer and Steve Smith-the big three in New York's receiving corps-didn't suit up.
Until Monday night, Hixon was a back up's back up. He was drafted in the later rounds out of Akron University, not a school known for producing pro-calibur players, only to be cut last year by Denver. He was one of those pie-in-the-sky pick ups-meaning his chance of success with New York is about the same as a slice of peach cobbler appearing over the horizon.
But what makes all of this even more curious is a few recent discoveries in the field of visual psychophysics-which is a fancy way of saying the study of why people catch things and drop things and other similar kinds of hand-eye coordination concerns.
Scientists working in this field understand that the reason a football player can catch a pass is the same as the reason why a falcon can turn a smaller bird in flight into a mid-day snack. It's called "visually guided behavior" and to do it properly, for a football player that is, requires combining ball trajectory infortmation with information about the player's own positioning. This positioning info requires both a complicated initial calculation and a constant update as the play progresses.
But, researchers at a number of different institutions have recently figured out, these updated calculations are often severely hindered by our modern world. While most think of today's society as fast-paced, the truth of the matter is that very little around us moves (our city's are mostly static environments) and this has a significant effect on how we catch a moving object.
As Dr Andrew Welchman, a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences expert at the Max Planck Institute, puts it: "We may think we live in a hectic world, but statistically our environment moves slowly. Apart from the odd speeding car, buildings, landscape and walls around us all move past us at slow and predictable speeds. Our brains are constantly building up a statistical picture of the world around and, based on experience, it is a statistically slow world. When an object moves quickly - be it a football or, for our ancestors, a spear - our brains have to interpret the movement rapidly and, because our brains draw on experience, it's often biased by what it already knows. The less certain we are about what we see, the more we are influenced by the brain's statistical assumptions, which means in some circumstances we get it wrong."
The reason this makes Hixon's performance that much more startling are numerous:
1. He played at Akron, where the speed of the game was significantly slower than say those who played at USC.
2. He spent most of last year either on the bench or out of the game, so there aren't all the many recent examples of fast moving objects flying towards his head for him to draw up.
3. This was his first serious playing time in quite a while, further lowering his familiarity with objects in flight.
Scientists find these new discoveries exciting. They are surprised that something so seemingly vital (from an evolutionary perspective) is not an inborn skill, but rather so drastically effected by trail and error. But since Cleveland has to play New York again early in the season, Brown's fans are not quite so titillated.
