Over the weekend, Mark Sanchez, University of Southern California's star quarterback, had something of an amazing football game. His team defeated Virginia by the monster score of 52-7, while Sanchez himself completed 26 of 35 passes for a career high 338 yards, including three touchdowns. The reason this is "amazing" isn't because three weeks ago he dislocated his knee in practice and hadn't played a down of football until last Saturday, but because the media blitz that surrounded his knee made it seem like this guy was going out on the field two hours after open heart surgery.
For the past three weeks, just about every major sports commentator has spent at least ten minutes on the subject. A quick Google search (Sanchez + Knee) produces over 1.29 million results (which, by my math, is almost 62,000 posts a day for the past 21 days). But what's actually interesting about this is that, at least for pro-caliber athletes, which Sanchez most definitely is, four weeks recovery from a dislocated knee is right around the general healing ballpark (the healing time is roughly 1-3 months if you do nothing but sit on the couch)-a fact pointed out by Sanchez himself in a post-game interview.
All of which raises a simple question: what was all the fuss about? And this question doesn't just cover Knee-gate, but just about every other potential injury around. Yesterday afternoon, during the halftime segment of ESPN's coverage of the Kentucky v. L'ville football game, they spent most of their time discussing the potential impact of Ohio State's running back Chris Well's foot injury.
Here's the thing-Wells hurt his foot in the middle of the third quarter of their opening game. By the fourth quarter end, Wells was hanging out back on the sideline, and by game's end, according to OSU
Coach Jim Tressel, "the x-rays were negative." Which is to say, there's no story here.
But still, the next day, ESPN did ten minutes on the possibility of possibility. They didn't show any other college football highlights (which is amazing considering this was a halftime show during the only football game on yesterday, which, oh yeah, also happened to be the opening weekend of college football). Somehow the tantalizing possibility of what could should maybe just might happen sometime soon replaced WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED!
So again, what's all the fuss about?
Psychologists like to talk about the pleasure of prediction-which is a fancy way of describing what is fast becoming (if it's not there already) a national gambling addiction. There are 36.7 annual visitors to Las Vegas and while only 5 percent of those visitors claim they're coming to Sin City for the thrill of the dice, an astounding 87 percent of those visitors end up rolling them anyway. Did you ever wonder why?
To understand our desire to gamble (or our desire to predict the future) we first need to understand a bit of evolutionary biology. While they didn't have football games or slot machines out on the African veldt, they did have hunger. And it was the need to find our next meal that helped shape our need to predict the future. For millions of years, our progenitors lived in a state of constant threat, taking exceptionally big risks primarily in pursuit of food and sex. Those who's big bets paid off in extra calories became our forbearers, those whose didn't died off. Risk-taking behavior began with foraging-and foraging is all about pattern recognition and pattern attribution.
Pattern recognition is the term cognitive neuroscientists use for the brain's ability to lump like with like, thus allowing us to remember that flipping over chunky rocks often reveals tasty grubs, while flat stones can often hide poisonous snakes. This is an attribute that helps us make sense of all of our experiences. It is a capacity that, as NYU professor of neurology Elkhanon Goldberg points out in his book on the subject The Wisdom Paradox, "is fundamental to our mental world . . . Without this ability, every object and every problem would be a totally de novo encounter and we would be unable to bring any of our prior experience to bear on how we deal with these objects or problems. The work by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and others has shown that pattern recognition is among the most powerful, perhaps the foremost mechanism of successful problem solving."
So fundamental is the need for pattern recognition that it's tied to the body's need/reward system. When we recognize patterns our brain releases a chemical that make us feel a little better so that the next time we confront the same patterns we'll remember them. It is this system that accounts for things like the tiny rush of pleasure that comes from noticing the dealer's latest up card pushes him over 21. And the pleasure chemical in question is one of the brain's primary feel-good drugs: the neurotransmitter dopamine.
To give you an idea of how pleasurable that dopamine rush feels we need only to turn to cocaine. That rush that users get from snorting up Bolivian marching powder is actually dopamine. What cocaine really does to the brain is cause dopamine to be released and then block the receptor sites that allow for its reuptake (much in the way that anti-depressants like Prozac block the reuptake of serotonin). So the reason the comic Robin Williams once said "Coke makes me feel like a new man, and the new man wants some also" is because it was dopamine that was conferring that amazing feeling.
So amazing is that feeling that 50 years ago neurobiologist Jim Olds found that if he put an electrode in the dopamine-releasing pleasure center of a rat's brain, then connected it via wires to an electric current generator, and gave the animals a switch to stimulate their own brains they would do so without pause. They would neglect all other activities-including eating-for this little rush. Rats would rather starve to death then walk away from dopamine.
Now, a few years back, my fellow blogger, Emory University's Greg Berns, discovered that dopamine is not released after you've gotten the thing you so desired, but rather when you take the risk to do the thing that gets you what you desire. Meaning-we make a prediction, take a risk, and get the drug.
Because the brain also forms schemas (a fancy way of saying a long chain of patterns to be recognized) predicting the future has been, especially in the world of sport's journalism, linked with the pleasure of predicting the predictions. When those ESPN half-time reporters spent ten minutes on the non-story of Well's foot, the topic of conversation was "tell us what this means if it happens to mean anything." It was a prediction about a prediction about a prediction. It was nonsense-but this is the nonsense we've become addicted to.
And I do mean "we." ESPN is in the TV game. They like good ratings. And, considering how omnipotent that network has become, they're very good at this particular game. As it turns out, at least judging from all the Sanchez/Wells/Etc. hoopla, ESPN has figured out that the American viewing public is more interested in vague psychic predictions of the possible future than they are in the recent past or the actual present. And no one, perhaps excluding the writer of this blog, seems to care.
Sanchez's knee was fine. Did anyone hold the LA Times (eight articles in three weeks on the subject by my count) responsible for a month's worth of non-news? In fact, there are now several hundred thousand Heisman hopeful lists floating around the sport's world, just as there were last year. In a rational society, we would have looked over last year's lists, figured out who missed and who was accurate, and only allowed those who were accurate to make predictions this year. But it doesn't work that way. We are so addicted to the possible future that any sense of accuracy (and, perhaps this may be a stretch, truth in journalism) is now our sacrificial lamb.
