Sportsmania
When our brain sees an action that we had similarly taken in the past, say, playing basketball and swishing a three-pointer, our brain’s mirror neurons are stimulated to a significant degree and our excitement level gets elevated as if we were taking the shot ourselves
What does “mania” mean? The dictionary unkindly refers to it as a “mental illness marked by periods of great excitement or euphoria, delusions, overactivity.” Wow, does that mean the Filipinos are mentally ill for loving basketball so much? According to Google Search, the Philippines’ rating of 71 ranks second only to the USA’s 100 out of 110 countries in Regional Popularity data collected from 2007 to 2011.
Well, I suppose we are no worse off than the 3.5 and 4 billion people worldwide who are agog with soccer, especially with the World Cup around the corner. I guess that goes as well for all those UAAP fans who go out in droves to watch their favorite school teams battle it out are all nuts, including yours truly!
The best proof of my “mental illness” as far as I am concerned, given my senior citizen health vulnerabilities to possible Covid-19 infection, was when I threw out of the window all sense of prudence when I braved the packed crowd at the Arena to watch the UP-Ateneo hoops first round showdown at the invite of my frat brothers also trying to experience once more the adrenaline of watching live instead of just watching it on the boob tube in the safety of my home. Of course, my silly excuse was YOLO or FOMO… for the golden ager out there, that’s teen slang for “you only live once” and “fear of missing out!”
Note: from the picture below you will see I did observe a modicum of precaution, a Blue Eagle jacket over a UP Maroons Championship T-shirt… my daughter, however, went ballistics because I wasn’t wearing an N95 mask!
Why do we go bonkers for sports? Presume there are a lot of theories out there but let me share an interesting article I saw on the internet. In the early 1990s, some neurophysiologists at the University of Parma in Italy researched how monkeys react to a stimulus when shown a peanut to help brain -damaged humans recover hand functions. With the aid of electrodes attached to the monkey’s brain to detect what caused the firing of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex, the part of the brain that controls the movements of voluntary muscles, they discovered that in a healthy cortex, other than the monkey eating a peanut triggering their brain’s neurons to fire when the monkey sees the sight of a human eating a peanut, the monkey’ neurons were also significantly triggered. What does this mean in simple terms? Remember the saying, “monkey see, monkey do?” Long story short, when our brain sees an action that we had similarly taken in the past, say, playing basketball and swishing a three-pointer, our brain’s mirror neurons are stimulated to a significant degree and our excitement level gets elevated as if we were taking the shot ourselves. It was discovered that there is a sliding scale of mirror neurons that allows our brain to react in varying degrees depending on similar experiences in the past even when we have not actually played basketball before but have performed similar actions such as throwing a crumpled piece of paper in a wastebasket or even watching a player or a team we admire.
For example, I had a good night’s sleep even if it was already 2 a.m. after watching Gilas finally turn a page and play a great game against Jordan. Neurophysiologists call it “broadly congruent” sensory feedback, meaning your brain strongly associates with the action you are seeing or even sounds you hear because of past experiences. Even more interesting is the theory that the motor cortex’s increased excitability could make you feel younger. Hmm… I guess that explains why thousands of diehard alumni troop to the games year after year.
Well, I suppose we are no worse off than the 3.5 and 4 billion people worldwide who are agog with soccer, especially with the World Cup around the corner.
Ok, that gives me a great excuse to watch the next UP-Ateneo live, assuming that is, I can wrangle another ticket!
Until next week… OBF!!!