The Playing Field

Sport and culture through the lens of science

by Steven Kotler

The Real Deathapalooza

It's been a good month for death. Michael Jackson has left us and left us to ponder the eternal question-what is the sound of one glove clapping. He has also left us to ponder and even bigger question: why do we care so much? Thousands of people filled the streets of Los Angeles and New York after his overdose. Read More

The Paradox of Eco-Choice

In his 2004 The Paradox of Choice, Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz lays out an idea that is difficult to understand for most modern Americans. Read More

The Lie of Miles-Per-Gallon And Other Things I'm Starting To Dislike About The Obama Administration

Two weeks back, there was a rousing bit of good news out of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. According to work done by 240 independent researchers (analyzed by the folks at Yale), severely damaged ecosystems don't take as long to recover as previously suspected. Read More

Should We Tell Our Children That Reality Is A Lie?

I got an interesting email this morning from Peder Johnson. Johnson, a now-retired University of New Mexico cognitive psychologist has been promoting a constructivist epistememology since he first became acquainted with Piaget's work back in the 1970s. It's an epistemological position somewhere between objective realism and solipsism. Read More

Why Nations Have Become A Bad Idea

Let me ask you a question—tomorrow you have to go to war with New Zealand. I know, Kiwis are lovely people, but still, there's no getting out of it. But you have a choice-you get to have one ally. You can have a) Bulgaria or b) Microsoft. Country or corporation-take your pick. Read More

How Much Affection Is Normal?

Affection might be natural, but how much is natural is the question? Read More

Is Happiness Heritable—And, If So, Heritable From Whom?

The latest issue of Bioscience Hypothesis contains an article by Dr. Alberto Halabe Bucay of the Research Center Halabe of Darwich, Mexico which suggests that the hormones and neurochemicals resulting from our mental states can profoundly effect germ cells.

These effected germ cells then express differently and that difference effects the moods of the child-to-be.

Literally. Read More

How Twitter Makes You Stupid

Not too long ago, a man by the name of Victor Davich, wrote what has since become one of the best-selling books on meditation. It's called "8 Minute Meditation" and, exactly as it sounds, it's a collection of concentration exercises that are meant to be practiced eight minutes at a time. Read More

What Do We Mean By Justice?

Last Friday, after 19 years on the bench, Chief Justice David Souter announced his retirement. Since then, in the flurry of resultant media attention, we've learned quite a bit about the issues that will soon decide the next nominee's fate. Read More

A Little Hope For the Furry and the Four-Legged

Saving the animals: one changed perception at a time. Read More

Would Darwin Sanction Torture?

As of late, the question of torture prosecution has been on everybody's minds.

Over the past few months, guys like Keith Olberman has made very passionate cases for throwing the book at that whole sorry crew of Cheney-esque offenders. Yesterday, in the New York Times, Roger Cohen made a good case for why we should hold back. Read More

Overcoming Writer's Block

Next week, the "Soloist" hits theaters. It's something of a true story. Robert Downey Jr. plays LA Times journalist Steve Lopez who fought through a bad case of writer's block by telling the story of Nathanial Ayers, a homeless man Lopez befriended. Read More

When Insanity Becomes The Best Defense

I'd like to offer an alternative view of cold war history that's little discussed but critically important to understanding a great deal of past politics, current politics and, well, high school. Read More

The Psychology of Bracketology

Oh glory be that is basketball, the blessed NCAA tournament is again upon us. All over the land, the faithful will be filling out their brackets, science will be applied. And yes, once again, all over the land the faithful will be wrong. Read More

The Price of Hope

They say that sports are an on-going story, that that's the thing that separates our games from other forms of entertainment. A movie is over and done with in two hours, but today's ballgame is informed by yesterday's game, and its outcome will inform tomorrow. This ongoing story is only sexy from the outside. Read More

My Head Hurts: The Growing Problem of Brain Injury in Sports

On February 10, the Concussion Panel, an assortment of hockey experts including ex-pros like Eric Lindros and specialists like Dr. Charles Tator, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Toronto, gathered together to review the problems of long term brain injury in their sport.

They then suggested the essentially unthinkable: that fighting should be banned from hockey. Read More

The Five Year Ban Part IV: Ecopsychology and the End of the World

I have been discussing population for the last few posts, and on my last installment in this series, I wanted to discuss the psychology behind why many of my readers still have difficulty grasping the message.

I don't mean this in a disrespectful manner. In fact, there is now an entire branch of psychology that deals with this sort of problem. Read More

The Five Year Ban Part III: Psychology and the Population Bomb

Since the topic at hand is population, I thought it would be helpful if I provided some numbers and some insight to back up what I’ve been calling a crisis.There are currently 6.7 billion people on the planet. Another 350,000 are born each day, another 150,000 die each day. Read More

The Five Year Ban: Global Over-Population Part II

So I made a lot of people very angry with my last post-understandable. The facts are scary and the truth uncomfortable. That said, a great many of my new fans have managed to skew what I wrote into incredibly peculiar directions. For error correction purposes, I'm going to devote my next few blogs to different aspects of this topic. Read More

The Five Year Ban: Because A Billion Less People Is A Great Place To Start

Want to hear an unpopular opinion: I think we should put Nadya Suleman in jail. Perhaps you don’t recall the name. Perhaps you don’t even believe a crime has been committed. Perhaps you think I should be locked up along the way. Fine. But someone has to start saying things aloud, so here goes:STOP HAVING CHILDREN.Nadya Suleman had 14. Read More

Psychic Dogs, Eco-Psychology and Complexity Theory

I run a dog rescue with my wife in Northern New Mexico and part of running a dog rescue means running the dogs. Luckily we have a ton of great, high desert BLM land surrounding our property, and this provides ample opportunity for getting lost and staying lost. To this end, we followed very simple rules, in that there really weren’t any. Read More

Self-Deception, Over-Confidence and Disposable Men: A Risky Proposition

In my last post, I brought up the topic of cognitive biases-which are a fancy way of describing our ability to lie to ourselves. Specifically, I was examining the case of quarterback Kurt Warner. Read More

Lying To Yourself, It's Not Always A Bad Idea

Sports psychologists describe self-confidence as "an athlete's expectation of success," but what I find more interesting is its relationship to what cognitive psychologists call anchoring.

Normally, anchoring (or what some folks call focusing) is seen as a negative trait. It's our heavy reliance on one piece of information, while ignoring all the others. Read More

Fear and Flow

There’s a problem in football. The problem is that owners want to win and they want to win yesterday. Unfortunately, not everyone gets to win. In fact, only one team does—which is, as they say, why they play the games.And while not everyone can win, everyone really can be fired. Read More

The Superbowl of Mind Control

Tune into almost any sports radio show and they're filled with TV talk. Same thing with their television cohorts. Sports journalism has become de-facto advertisement for the rest for television, a shame since the thing that makes sports so wonderful is they're one of the only forms of spontaneous entertainment left. Read More

Doublespeak

I had a chance to listen to a Senior VP at the Boeing Corporation speak this week and it again dawned on me-as it does most every time I hear the song of the Fortune 500-that these guys make no damn sense.

Not a freakin' lick.

And this, perhaps more than anything else around, can explain the sorry state of our economy. Read More

Who Says Golf Is Not A Sport

Golfers love to talk about their game as a sport. Tiger Woods, after all, weight trains like a fiend. But the critics will not be moved. It's a pastime says, well, almost anybody with a pair of eyes and a brain. Read More

Come On Baby, Just Sell Me Your Soul!

It's Bowl season again in college football and once more we are reminded that greed is good and commonsense be damned.

In part, what I'm talking about is a lack of a playoff system. If you've been living in a cave in Turkmenistan than perhaps you haven't heard that there's no playoff system in football. Read More

Greed and Games

Money's been a bit of a hot topic as of late.

It seems some of us have more than others and recently, at least in the world of sports, the news about the haves has smothered the facts about the have-nots.

The story of the year in basketball seems to be whether or not LeBron James will remain as a Cleveland Cavalier after the 2009 season. Read More