The Performance Cortex is very good at making a difficult topic understandable to almost any audience. While the topic deals with groundbreaking technology for sports mostly it also educates the reader about human behavior and what can and can't be modified. I also shows that certain qualities that athletes have when referred to as "he has that very rare feel for … that can't be taught" is indeed quantifiable . While innate talent is just that, the components can be taken apart, analyzed, and taught to others in varying degrees.
A must read for sports junkies, those interested in the mind and its workings and for those who just want to expand their knowledge..
I have recommended this book to many friends and to a person have been thanked for doing so.

A scientific breakdown of what's going on in sports today, Schonbrun's book isn't a breezy read but it is a great read. The author breaks everything down in such a brilliant way. Really fascinating stuff.

Why can Humans Hit a Baseball?

It may seem pointless to ask why humans can hit a baseball. They’ve been hitting balls successfully for a long time. However, not all humans, including baseball players, are uniformly successful. When Michael Jordan tried to transfer his skills from basketball to baseball he ran up against a limitation. No matter how much he practiced his batting average was .200 or less. Jordan is a superb athlete so what made the difference? The answer lies in the body-brain connection.

That question got Jason Sherwin and Jordan Muraskin interested in developing a technique to look at how a batter processes information in the laboratory. They convinced a minor league team to let them test the players with the equipment they had developed and then used the information to track results in practice. Their neurological data was helping to pick good hitters.

Much of the book revolves around Sherwin and Muraskin and their startup deCervo. In the book, we get to know the two entrepreneurs. The story of their friendship and building the company gives a human element to what could be a rather dry scientific book.

In addition to following the work of deCervo, the author discusses other prominent researchers and their research interests. The book gets rather technical in some of these discussions, but it’s worth it to struggle through to learn new concepts. Studying the brain-body connection is in the front of neurological research today. Looking at the practical application in baseball is fascinating.

If you’re interesting in baseball and the brain-body connection, this is a great book.

I received this book from Dutton for this review.

Interested in how Neuroscience is redefining athletic genius? That's the subtitle of a new book, THE PERFORMANCE CORTEX, by Zach Schonbrun and it is filled with surprising findings and profiles of those involved in this relatively new field. Parts of this book describe the work of deCervo's Jason and Jordan, two neuroscientists who are (in the spirit of big data's Moneyball) experimenting with measuring and predicting the hitting ability of baseball candidates.

This book is full of minutiae ("the typical batter will begin his swing at 19 feet") and scientific jargon, mixed entertainingly with anecdotes (Yogi Berra saying, "How can you think and hit at the same time?") and observations about a tradition bound sport (one where managers still "make calls to the bullpen using a landline phone"). Other chapters deal with topics like theories from Daniel Wolpert ("The Real Reason for Brains"), Johns Hopkins University's John Krakauer commenting on basketball's Stephen Curry, and numerous applications related to robotics.

THE PERFORMANCE CORTEX is not a quick read, but I do think students interested in sports and science, especially if they are working on a Junior Theme, will benefit from having a look.

Link in live post:
https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains/transcript?language=en

What is it that truly defines athletic genius?

While there’s no doubt that physique and physicality play massive roles in what makes a successful athlete, there’s more to it than that. True sporting greatness springs from not just one’s body, but also that body’s connection with the brain.

In his new book “The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience is Redefining Athletic Genius,” Zach Schonbrun attempts to explore that connection; it’s a deep dive into the neuroscience behind movement that attempts to develop an understanding of the body-brain relationship and determining how the relationship impacts those performing at an elite athletic level.

(Be warned – it gets pretty wonky, loaded with jargon and some fairly sophisticated science discussion. But even when it gets REALLY nerdy, it remains engaging for the lay reader.)

Professional sports franchises are constantly on the hunt for anything that will give them an edge. However, those same franchises often struggle with any idea that in any way upsets the established paradigm. Basically, they want to have their cake and eat it too – they want to make improvements without actually changing their philosophy in any significant way.

The unofficial “stars” of this story are probably Jason Sherwin and Jordan Muraskin, founders of a startup called deCervo. Their plan? To gather neurological data that will provide insight into a heretofore unparsed question – what happens in the brain to allow a big-league hitter to actually hit a ball?

It sounds simple – and for many years, the MLB attitude was basically “See the ball, hit the ball” and that was that – but it turns out that there’s a lot happening on a neurological level during that process. And by measuring and quantifying that activity, the thought is that such information can potentially be used in a variety of ways – from improving the performance of current players to informing which future prospects are pursued going forward.

Alongside Sherwin and Muraskin’s journey to evolve their methods and develop relationships with MLB teams that are both intrigued by and skeptical of the benefits of this science, Schonbrun explores further. He offers up a bit of history behind the idea of the body-brain connection, a concept that has been subject to a surprising amount of controversy over the years … at least, when people have bothered with what many long considered an unexciting field of study.

Schonbrun also spends time with a number of prominent current figures in the field, which allows for a depth of intellectual engagement that you don’t always find in this kind of ostensibly pop-science work. He’s unafraid to challenge you a little; it gets pretty – forgive the phrase – inside baseball at times. It’s a bit rigorous, but it’s really satisfying to put in a little work and gain actual insight as opposed to keeping things on the surface level.

And of course, there’s plenty of overlap with the athletic world. We get to see the direct connection between research and players a la operations like deCervo. But we also get to do some indirect exploration in terms of considering what role the brain plays in this kind of brilliance. How does Tom Brady do what he does in the way that he does it? Stephen Curry doesn’t have the elite athletic gifts of some of his peers, so how does he outperform them? Why did Michael Jordan – a consensus all-time great athlete – struggle so mightily when he moved from the basketball court to the baseball field? The science at play in “The Performance Cortex” doesn’t fully answer these questions, but it offers some thoughtful hypotheses and loads of useful context.

There’s a freewheeling style to Schonbrun’s work here that seems as though it should be a less-than-ideal fit, and yet – it works. The writer does a remarkable job flipping back and forth between jargon-laden academic conversation and the laconic flow of the locker room. The blend of nerdese and jock talk is reminiscent of a happy ending in a college comedy – two great tastes that surprisingly taste great together.

“The Performance Cortex” isn’t a book that is going to float everyone’s boat. Schonbrun goes in a lot of different directions and simply expects you to follow along – that’s not going to work for every reader. However, anyone with an interest in the brain-body connection – whether it’s on the playing field or in everyday life – is going to find it utterly fascinating.

Over the last few decades the athletic world has seem arms races across various disciplines as teams attempt to gain an edge on their competition. Understanding the complex linkages between the mind and the body is one of the biggest new frontiers for sports teams, and in The Performance Cortex Zach Schonbrun of the New York Times explores the territory and provides a surprisingly science-heavy account of the connection between neuroscience and sports.



The Performance Cortex is effectively two books in one. It oscillates between chronicling the exploits of deCervo, a start-up founded by two Columbia neuroscientists designed to aid baseball players and explaining the science behind the motor system and examples of how athletes are leveraging neuroscience to improve performance. The Decervo sections were engaging and it was interesting to see how the product evolved and sold itself to teams. It also provided Schonbrun with the opportunity to share research around the remarkably complex action that is hitting a fastball. It takes approximately 400 milliseconds for a 95 mile-per-hour fastball to cross home plate from the pitcher's mound, and in that time a batter has to anticipate a pitch, identify it, decide whether to swing, and put bat to ball (should he decide that to be a sensible decision) all within that lilliputian time-frame. deCervo eventually evolved into a program that allowed baseball players to assess and improve their pitch recognition skills. The firm's founders discovered that there was considerable variation in players' abilities to quickly recognize pitches, and that recognition skills were a large driver of success. deCervo billed itself as a valuable talent-assessment tool for teams and after gaining traction with college teams the company met with over 25 MLB teams to tout their product. The notion that baseball players are better at identifying pitches and faster isn't groundbreaking. But what was useful is it gave managers an objective measure that appeared to explain variations in performance in teams.The use of a similar program called Neuroscouting encouraged the Red Sox to take a risk on an obscure outfielder from Tennessee named Mookie Betts in 2011, which seems to have worked out pretty ok for the franchise.



The non-deCervo chapters explain the various ways the motor system impacts sports and the current scientific research on the topic. These are science-heavy and primarily rely on summarizing boatloads of research studies. Sometimes these can be interesting, such as the finding that increased touching through behaviors such as high-fiving and chest-bumping early in the season were correlated with team cohesion and future success later on in the campaign (though you would think that a better team would have more opportunities for such celebratory behavior than a bad one) and the theory that the prevalence of right handedness a result from mothers holding babies near their hearts because it helped them sleep. Shonbrun also does an excellent job distilling concepts into digestible prose for the lay reader, such as likening neurons sending signals to the spinal cord to tourists attempting to navigate Times Square. There is a lot for Schonbrun to cover (this is a far more popular research topic than the psychology of fandom I wrote about in my Superfans review) and readers will learn about the speed-accuracy trade-off, great localization debate and other major areas of motor skills research. Schonbrun will sometimes link research findings to their practical application and how players such as Neymar utilize them to their benefit, but sometimes Schonbrun will go in-depth into research around theories such as lateralization that were eventually debunked. This was one of the most science-oriented "psych/neuroscience applied to popular subject" books I read and Schonbrun really did his research and delved into the literature. This led to some dry sections, but it also meant that I learned way more than the average pop psych book.



Schonbrun focuses solely on the motor system. There is nothing on genetics or concussions as those topics have already been covered in-depth in other books. I appreciated this decision as it made the book feel more focused and original. There are a few books touching upon somewhat similar subject matter, such as Brandon Sneed's Head in the Game, but none with at much scientific rigor. Sometimes this makes the book drag in parts, but overall The Performance Cortex is an illuminating book that greatly improved my understanding of and appreciation for the motor actions involved in sports.

7 / 10