by Sian Beilock
Action therapy can also help healthy folks, especially when it comes to learning and understanding foreign languages. When listening to someone speak in an unfamiliar language, we often can’t tell where one word ends and another begins; sentences flow together, sounding like one big word. Linguists have hypothesized that one reason we have a hard time making sense of foreign languages is because we have never made the mouth movements needed to produce the sounds. When you practice producing a properly accented foreign language, rather than just listening to someone speak, your motor practice facilitates your understanding. Having experience producing foreign words yourself helps you understand the language. Even after a relatively short amount of practice, a hundred sentences or so, you can see the benefit.18 Our understanding of language is grounded in action, particularly those actions we can perform fluently ourselves.
Taking It Literally
One of the most amazing things about language is that we can use it to communicate literal things and actions as well as abstractions that we can’t see or do. Since our ability to understand language is based on connecting to actions the events about which we read and hear, how do we make sense of things we can’t see, hear, or touch? For example, how do we comprehend emotional concepts such as “giving” or metaphors such as “up in arms.” The answer is that our body takes these ideas literally.
Think of a boy trying to break up with a girl. They may have been fighting a lot; their relationship has been bumpy, and the boy wants out. The girl thinks they can make it work, but to the boy the relationship is over. At a coffee shop one afternoon, in a public place where he hopes the backlash will be minimized, he tries to cut things off. “We’re at a crossroads in our relationship,” he says, and explains that he thinks they are “headed in different directions.” Abstract concepts such as love are often described metaphorically, in terms of something tangible, like a road along which two lovers are traveling. The way we come to understand the abstract is by grounding it in the literal. As his girlfriend breaks into tears, some of the bits of her brain used to enact movement may actually be registering the metaphor and simulating movement away from her boyfriend.19
Admittedly, many metaphors are tied to action, so it might not be surprising that we would come to understand a variety of abstract ideas by grounding them in our physical world. For instance, sayings such as “grasping the concept” and “kicking the bucket” are abstract ideas but include the nonabstract verbs grasp and kick. However, our body is also involved in the processing of language with less clearly associated physical acts. When people are asked to respond to a sentence such as “Travis phoned you with the news” or “You told Liz the story” by pulling a lever toward them if the sentence makes sense, the content of the sentence affects how long it takes them to respond. People are faster to judge that sentences about receiving information make sense when they have to pull the lever toward them. The opposite is true too. If people are instead asked to push a lever away from them when a sentence makes sense, it takes them longer to do so when the sentence is about receiving news compared to when the sentence is about giving news to someone else. This is because even the abstract idea of transfer, of giving, is grounded in the actions of giving and receiving ourselves. And when there is a match between the abstract idea and our actions, performance improves. Exchanging ideas is seen as an extension of exchanging objects and therefore is linked to many of the same motor and perceptual processes. During language comprehension, the motor system is activated when language implies that something is being transferred, whether or not it is physically moving.20
We understand the abstract by mapping it onto the tangible. Just think about the concept of time. We often talk about time as space and use spatial metaphors to do so, for instance, “He moved the meeting forward two hours.” We take the abstract concept of time and play it out concretely in terms of our bodily movements. Sentences such as “I am looking forward to our date on Friday” and “I am thinking back about dinner last week” show how we evoke something with parameters or boundaries, like space, to make sense of something that is harder to comprehend, like time. Yet we rarely talk about space as time. It would be odd to say “This place is a long time” to refer to a large amount of space. But you might say “The time is short” to refer to an impending deadline. When people standing in a lunch line were asked when a meeting scheduled for Wednesday would take place if it were “moved forward” by two days, those customers who had moved farther forward in line were more likely to respond that the meeting would be on Friday (rather than Monday) than customers farther back in line.21 How we move through space influences how we think about time. Because we can physically navigate through space but not through time, we tend to use the former to think about the latter and not vice versa.
Even when people recall past events or project events into the future, their body seems surreptitiously to play out the metaphor of time as space. When people think about events in the past, they lean backward slightly, and when imagining the future they lean forward. These are small shifts, only several millimeters in one direction or the other, but nonetheless they exemplify our inclination to translate time into how our body moves through space.22
Experience Matters
LeBron starts off the game with a crippling slam off a Thunder turnover.
LeBron dribbles the ball to the top of the key, drives the lane, and finger-rolls over Kevin Durant for two.
If you are a basketball fan, and especially if you play in your free time (or even if you laced up your high-tops once upon a time in high school), these sentences make perfect sense. Your spectating brain is also likely playing off what you are hearing as if you were LeBron. That’s right, to some extent your brain thinks that you are part of the Miami Heat on the court. Of course, you might also be an Oklahoma City Thunder player at one point in the broadcast—not so fun when you are playing against the Heat in the 2012 NBA Championships.
We understand words like throw because we have learned to pair throwing actions with throwing words. Words like throw or dribble derive their meaning, in part, because of our previous experiences. Does this mean we can’t understand what we are reading if we have never done the action we are reading about? Not necessarily. If you have never used chopsticks, you can still understand the sentence “Mila picked up the wonton with her chopsticks” by extrapolation to familiar activities like eating with a fork or holding a pencil in your fingertips. Nonetheless being able to call upon an experienced motor system can aid your understanding.
Knowing that your experiences acting in the world influence what you understand helps explain why athletes and sports fans alike mimic plays they see on the field or on television or hear on the radio. In a study conducted in my psychology laboratory at Miami University several years ago, we took a look at this mimicry. If you follow professional football, you probably know that Miami University is not in Florida, but in Oxford, Ohio, a small rural town about forty-five minutes northwest of Cincinnati. You probably know this because Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, played college ball there. Miami also houses a top-ranked ice hockey team. When I was on Miami’s faculty, Brian Sipotz, one of the team’s star defensemen, worked as a research assistant in my psychology laboratory, so I saw them play often.
Brian was convinced that playing hockey made him a different kind of hockey fan from his nonathlete friends; he believed he was better able to comprehend what he witnessed on the ice. When he watched a game he felt almost as if he were playing, involuntarily twitching and moving as he assumed the identity of the player with the puck. This feeling wasn’t limited to watching a game: Brian felt just as much a part of the action when he audio-streamed his favorite NHL match-ups on his computer. Could Brian’s experience on the ice have changed how he understood the athletes he followed as a fan? We decided to test Brian’s hunch by inviting his hockey teammates and another group of guys who weren’t athletes to have their brain scanned while t
hey listened to a simulated audio broadcast of a hockey game. Afterward we quizzed everyone to see how well they had followed what they had heard.
The hockey players’ motor system (specifically the premotor cortex) came alive when they listened to the hockey broadcast. This wasn’t the case for the guys who didn’t play hockey; when listening to the broadcast, the fold of cortex responsible for choreographing movement was relatively idle—it wasn’t as active as it was for the hockey players. Because the hockey players were hockey players, they were able to closely simulate in their brain the behavior of the players in the game they were listening to. And, the harder the premotor cortex worked, the better people were at following the action.23
Our work with hockey players provides a new understanding of what happens in the minds of sports fans as they sit on the couch or in the stands, or even just while listening to a game. Their brains are playing along. They might even mimic the movements of the athletes they are watching or listening too. This mimicry might just seem like eager fan behavior, but it’s actually related to the fans’ own skill. When we observe or even hear about others’ actions—especially if we have done something similar in the past—we aren’t just watching; at least, our motor cortex doesn’t just sit idly by. Rather, in our brain we act out what we are watching, as if we were one of the players ourselves.
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Capoeira, a Brazilian art form that is a cross between dance and martial arts,24 was created by the descendants of African slaves who had been transported to Brazil to farm the land and harvest sugar cane. The slaves were overworked and underfed and lacked even basic material comforts. Capoeira developed as more than a dance—it was a way to express anger and frustration and was also a fighting style that could be used if a slave needed to defend himself.
Today Capoeira is practiced all over the world and appears in popular movies and video games. The 1993 martial arts film Only the Strong showcases it, and the actor Mark Dacascos uses it as a way to mobilize youth in his gang-infested hometown of Miami, Florida. One of the main characters of the video game Street Fighter fights in the capoeira tradition. It has even shown up in neuroscience research as a way to demonstrate how important our own experiences are for understanding the actions of others.
When experts in capoeira watch it being performed, their brain circuits for capoeira movements become highly active. The brains of classical ballet dancers who watch the Brazilian art form don’t tune in to it in the same way. Interestingly, this perking up of the motor system is really about motor experience, not simply being familiar with the dance style. When ballet dancers watch moves from their own repertoire and moves that the opposite sex performs but they don’t, their motor circuits react to what they can do, not what they have watched. Having an internalized copy of what you are watching helps you understand what you are seeing.25
Getting your motor system into the game (or dance) has some real advantages. For example, it allows you to predict the outcomes of other people’s actions before they have actually been performed. This is beneficial on the sports field as well as when you are simply trying to follow a game. Referees and sports writers could benefit from having played the game themselves.
A few years ago a group of neuroscientists from Rome conducted an experiment in which they asked basketball players, sports journalists, and folks with no experience playing the sport to watch film clips of basketball players attempting free throws. The clips were stopped at various time points throughout the shot, and people were asked to predict whether or not the ball would eventually end up in the basket. Not surprisingly, the players were better predictors. But what was most interesting is that the players showed a real advantage early on in the shot action. Even before the ball had left the hands of the shooter, the players were out-predicting the journalists and basketball novices. Experience gave the players an edge in understanding how a shot they were watching was going to end up.26
As people watched the shots, the scientists watched for signals from electrodes they had placed on their subjects’ hands and forearms to see if there were any evidence that the body was getting ready for action. Although the motor signals being sent from all the viewers’ brains to their arms and hand muscles perked up somewhat when watching the shots, it was only in the players that the extent of the motor excitement in the hand muscles controlling the pinkie finger predicted whether the shot was going to be made or missed. And there was more finger activation when the player in the film clip bounced the ball off the rim and missed the shot.
Elite athletes in other sports can predict performances too. Skilled badminton players watching films of players about to hit a birdie can predict the landing position of the shots even when they can’t see a majority of the opponent’s arm and racquet. Beginners, on the other hand, need all that information to make the same predictions.27 In baseball, batters often start their swing before the ball has left the pitcher’s hand because they can start predicting where the ball is going to go by the movement of the pitcher’s body. An experienced brain can pick up on what others are doing, mirror their actions, and send the appropriate signals to the body so that it knows what to expect and where to move before an event has been fully played out. That’s why skilled performers always seem to be two steps ahead: their brain has been rewired to play out actions before the actions have happened in reality.
The key to this ability may be grounded in a neural circuit called the forward model, which helps our brain predict the outcomes of our actions (and the actions of others) before they have happened. When we decide on an action and our brain signals the muscles to perform it, a copy of this command is created that estimates the end result of the movement. It gives us feedback from our senses before we have actually completed the action. When you move your hand from one place to another, the brain estimates its new position and what is going on before any feedback from the outside world arises. These predictions are one reason why, when you touch a hot stove, you might move your hand before you have actually felt your skin burn. You predict what is going to happen before you register the pain. When the actual feedback comes in, the burning sensation can be largely ignored if it matches what your brain has already predicted.
Scientists think they can see these forward models in action. For instance, the cerebellum, a wad of tissue on the back underside of the brain, is important for controlling the timing of movements (among other things). How neurons fire in the cerebellum of cats can be used to predict the trajectory of a moving target. The cat’s cerebellum can predict the motion of the target before it lands, and likely the more experience cats have seeing things move, the more accurate their prediction.28
Think about a gymnast performing on the beam at the Olympics. Doing several back-to-back flips across this 3.9-inch wooden block means that she has to know exactly where she is going to land before she does so. It’s the only way to prepare for her next move. This need for anticipation extends to most sports where you have to produce actions too quickly to get feedback from the environment. In tennis, players often have to start moving before the ball has left the opponent’s racket; in skiing, racers have to think at least two gates ahead to have time to set up for their turns. Experts’ brains must anticipate the future of actions before they have completed them so they can act fast and adjust when needed. Because of their immense amount of practice and experience, elite athletes are able to take what they see or what they intend to do and form a good picture of how it will turn out. Experience means you don’t need to reason step by step through your actions or even the actions of others. Rather you are able to start to play out what will happen in your head before you have to actually perform it.
Though skilled players don’t need to use the racquet to predict the landing of the birdie or use the ball to predict where it will go, they think they do. Athletes are not always aware of all the cues they use to anticipate actions. Perhaps this is one reason why the best athletes don’t always make the best coaches. They can’t i
ntrospect on what they do to teach it to someone new to the sport. Perhaps this is the case with Wayne Gretzky. After years of dominating on the ice, Gretzky has struggled to put together a winning team, whether it’s at the Olympics or in the NHL. As a player, Gretzky seemed to anticipate what an opponent was going to do before the other player knew himself, but this ability is hard to teach.29
It’s pretty obvious that our thoughts can drive our behavior. But a lot of what we know about the world comes from being able to move around in it. The body influences the mind too. Perhaps that’s why people say you have to have had some piano playing experience to truly appreciate Stravinsky’s Petrushka and why the most passionate sports fans were once athletes themselves. In short, what we do physically dictates what we understand mentally. What we do physically also dictates how captivated we are by what we see and hear around us.
CHAPTER 7
Tearjerkers
EMPATHIZING WITH OTHERS
The movie Love Story may be one of the greatest tearjerkers of modern cinema. Set on the Harvard University campus in the early 1970s, the movie tells the tale of students Oliver Barrett IV and Jennifer Cavalleri, who meet at the Radcliffe library, where Jenny is working her way through school. Despite the fact that they come from different backgrounds (Oliver is a Harvard Law student from a wealthy family, while Jenny is a Radcliffe art major from a modest, working-class family), they are instantly drawn to each other. After long walks in the park, romantic dinners, and study dates, they decide to marry, but Oliver’s dad doesn’t approve of the union and severs all ties with the couple, including much-needed financial support.
The newlyweds struggle to make ends meet. While Jenny works long hours as a private school teacher, Oliver graduates third in his class and takes a job at a top New York firm. When the couple tries to find out why Jenny is having difficulty conceiving, they discover that she is terminally ill. Beside himself with grief, Oliver once again finds himself in dire financial straits from the staggering hospital bills that have accrued during Jenny’s illness. Swallowing his pride, he goes to his father to ask for help, but he is too proud to tell his dad that Jenny’s illness is the reason he needs the money. Instead Oliver confirms his dad’s accusation that the money would be used to help another woman he has gotten pregnant.