re: Brainy Empathy on the Basketball Court

ghostman — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:20:53 GMT

I'm far from an elite basketball player, but as someone who has played all my life, including at the college level, this study makes a lot of sense. I think most players who have taken a lot of shots in their lives, and who have played in a lot of games, have long noticed their superiority in predicting the outcomes of specific basketball events, such as whether a given shot will go in or not. They wouldn't have attributed it to empathy, necessarily, but rather to the much simpler idea of intuition — that practice, practice, practice leads to a deeper (almost subconscious) understanding of the game and its patterns. Because that's what this really is: a confirmation that elite players are highly skilled at predicting the unfoldings of patterns, some of which, like posture or the shooting hand's finger placement on the ball, are so subtle that non-players don't even see them, let alone draw predictions from them.

Dennis Rodman was one of the best I've ever seen at predicting such patterns. An opposing shooter would shoot the ball, and before it even left the shooter's hands Rodman would be running across the court like a crazy man... only to have the ball bounce off the rim and fall in his lap a few seconds later. Rodman wasn't a shooter himself, which makes his case all the more interesting, but perhaps his natural ability to empathize was more pronounced (he was, after all, also fond of wearing dresses). In any case, Rodman's predictive talent manifested itself on defense as well, where his basketball clairvoyance, if you will, made him one of the league's all-time great defenders.

Really, it's a shame that only free-throws were studied. I would love to see what exactly is going on in the brains and bodies of great passers like Steve Nash and Jason Kidd, for example, who beyond all comprehension pinpoint openings and angles that are often difficult to see even in slow motion replay. The empathy conclusion is intriguing, and I'm sure we could learn more by studying athletes' predictive powers in other situations, and also in other sports. Taking it even further, what might we eventually learn about empathy and intuition in social settings, or economics, or politics, etc.?