No, because “brain” and “muscles” are different things. In fact, it's the opposite, it's a way to satisfy a desire which would reinforce health and weight loss, without actually reaping any of the benefits.
If I recall it was about weight lifting and mentally visualizing the lifts in tandem with actual exercise. Pretty sure just thinking by itself did nothing. So, it was three way comparison (lifting alone, visualizing plus lifting, and just visualizing).
I wrestled growing up and did some grappling. When watching MMA matches for years i could not sit still once they hit the ground. Was like I was working through the movements I wanted them to make. Would drive my wife crazy sitting beside me. It was all subconscious... usually just tensing my muscles and leaning a certain direction plus my hands would get clamy. My wife would have to point out to me what I was doing and i'd try to control myself lol
I used to play football (soccer, not hand-egg) a long time ago. When watching football, I still see my reflexes, especially on my left foot, getting into overdrive when some player is about to kick a ball without much warning.
the article is not about this kind of activity. it is about testosterone and brain activity related to winning, etc. hard to read it fully since it randomly goes on about random things.
Let's be fair. Even if those videos weren't there the chances of most people investing 15k on the hope of sticking to learning a complex skill are slim.
From the other side: watched the videos, bought a ton of stuff to have my own machine shop. Now the videos are even more relevant - it’s the little things that mean so much. (Like the fun tricks to know something is parallel or square or the different ways to measure something).
It was really expensive, and I already had a background in automotive work and woodwork to some degree, and a decent IT skill set, but damn, machining is really gratifying.
Isn't that the reverse effect? I could never watch football (soccer) as a child - why would I want to watch other people having fun when I can go and do it myself! Invariably I'd respond by going out to play [with a] football.
It appears twice in the article, along with the words neurochemicals and neuroscience. Thank goodness clippy isn't in charge of rating scholastic merits.
> And the rules don’t apply as well to casual fans, Wann cautions. “This effect is most prominent among those who are most intense. In order to really reap the well-being benefits of fan identification, it needs to be a central part of your overall social identity.” The biochemical aspects of fandom only serve to reinforce those good feelings.
It’s not just watching sports, you need to be fully invested in the experience in the first place. I think the same would be true to anything we truely engage, like a chess or shogi live streams, or really anything we intimately associate with.
Like politics (at least in the US). The similarities between fanatic sports fans and fanatic political party 'members'/voters are quite great. Voters generally want their 'team' to win, even if they know nothing substantial about the candidate on the 'team' they are voting for.
Similarly, I think that to enjoy watching baseball, you have to care about the outcome. It’s a game of anticipation. If you don’t care, it’s like gambling with Monopoly money. It just doesn’t matter.
Football, for example, is a bit different. There’s more of a guarantee of action.
It's specifically about fans though - you have to be absolutely fanatical about the sport. If you're bored to death you're not into the sport, so you don't get the same effect
What does this really contribute to the conversation, besides some holier-than-thou attitude about not participating in sports for whatever pseudo-intellectual reason there may be?
I haven't skateboarded in more than a decade, but I've noticed that if I walk by a good looking handrail or concrete ledge, my brain still automatically starts picturing 50/50 grinds, different tail-slide combinations, and more. I didn't play football in high school, but I have to imagine it is something similar that continues on.
There was a time when I was downright obsessed with co-op armed robbery video game Payday 2, and even months after I stopped playing, I could hardly enter a bank lobby or art gallery without starting to "case the joint".
I skated for most of my youth and have the same thing going on. I was very happy when someone from my area won SOTY also. I don't really see the same magnitude of fandom during SLS ever occuring. Sometimes people really hate Nyjah or really fan boy for Joslin. Maybe we'll see regional skateboarding teams in the future, but for now we can enjoy skateboarding purely being about the talent. The Olympics will definitely test the waters for this.
I think it’s more than just a combination of happy vs unhappy, I can personally confirm that the testosterone buildup from watching a sports match of a team you really care about (even on tv) is very much real. But, just as the study says, you need to not be just a casual watcher, you need to be “invested”, to have a real “feel” for the game.
Just as an example, I’ve had nightmares after this spring’s Real vs Juventus Champions League match which saw the Italians get eliminated in the 92nd minute after a questionable penalty call (I’m a Juve fan) and to this day my heart still feels a little contraction, so to speak, a little “what could have been?”, when thinking about how the Swedes equalized us, Romanians, in the QF of the 1994 World Cup after an error from our goalkeeper
(if he hadn’t committed that error we would have faced the Brazilians in the semis, meaning a literal dream come true for us). There have been 24 years since then but the feeling is still inside of me, and I think it will stay with me until the day I’ll walk off this planet. Sports and caring about sports can be both one of the most beautiful and one of the most painful experiences in one’s life.
This lines up well with McLuhan's revelation that the search for identity is usually correlated with violence [0]. By recognizing organized sports as a "highly-organized form of violence" (his words) you can start to see the corollary.
This isn't that crazy of a concept, to me. FIFA does achieve rather stunning results, given its breadth.
Though I do hear about conspiracies involving fixed games and about FIFA corruption from time to time, I imagine that they've done a lot more good for the world recently than the UN has.
Edit:
Sports are in general associated with some meaningful global events. The Olympics recently demonstrated this fact w/r/t North Korea.
I imagine that they've done a lot more good for the world recently than the UN has
No, they have not! I am not sure by what metric one can compare FIFA and the United Nations, but I don't think you you are familiar with the breadth of the UN's work. Selected achievements from their results page [1]:
-Every year we mobilize about $7 billion in humanitarian aid to help people affected by emergencies.
-Every year we assist over 34 million refugees and others fleeing war, famine and persecution.
-We vaccinate 40% of the world’s children, saving 2 million lives a year.
-In 2011 the UN will provide food to around 90 million people in 73 countries.
-In the past few years, the UN has expanded legal international rights to indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, migrants and their families.
The U.N. is way better at marketing than FIFA could ever dream of being. You’re assuming that all those things would not have been done if the UN didn’t exist. The good things done by the U.N. are a consequence of its funders. If the UN had never been founded other organisations would have been to do the jobs the UN does now. If the UN collapsed tomorrow the associated humanitarian organisations would rebrand and continue.
The UN is clearly the better marketer, because it needs to work much harder to justify its ongoing "good" for the world.
I wonder if FIFA has ever been discovered to be running hugely corrupt wings like UN's WIPA which keeps trying to stuff some form of ACTA/SOPA/PIPA down our throats.
I wonder if FIFA has been found to ever profit from the rape and sexual abuse of minors. Minors, who descend from some of the most war-torn and horrific places on Earth.
7 billion annually and look how little they get done each year. Capitalism is much more responsible for Africa's and Asia's escape from poverty than the UN is - and that's a rather low bar.
I laugh at the idea that the UN, and not the charities they force to go through them, is responsible for saving 2 million lives per year. I wonder how many millions they let die each year.
In terms of global politics, FIFA is rather benevolent and yet they foster ongoing positive international relations benefits. The UN is, at best, malevolent, and I am dubious that their positives outweigh their enormous negatives, not to mention their negative externalities.
That is an entire Wikipedia page about a corruption case only involving tax evasion , following an investigation by the IRS.
This is the FIFA , which decided, completely non corrupt of course, that Qatar is the best place to host a World Cup. Some people follow through on this anecdote with reasons as to why that’s a worse place to do so than actual Hell, but I prefer to prompt you to sit back a moment and think about that. Qatar. Forget about Russia: Qatar. For a sporting match. In summer. Qatar.
For context, these were the final bids for 2022: South Korea, Qatar, Japan, Australia, U.S.A.
Qatar.
FIFA is not corrupt? Sepp “football is politics” Blatter’s FIFA?
I remain unconvinced that FIFA has done more damage to the world than the UN. The kind of corruption written about here is child’s play compared to what atrocities the UN have committed.
Gladiators are 2000 years old, moreover, they didn't represent anyone.
And 'international sports' don't really go back that far, surprisingly.
The 'oldest currently active international sports competition' is actually the annual hockey game between the Royal Military College (Canada), and Westpoint - or so I'm told. There are arguments for America's cup, but that's a different kind of representation. Those are 1870's vs. 1850's respectively.
So it's really kind of a new thing, and Olympics, World Cup, Commonwealth Games are definitely created in part to build fraternity and collegiately between nations etc..
I think it's also fair to question the term 'violence' because maybe it's really a matter of 'competition' at a physical, visceral level, i.e. 'dominance'. But it's a good point.
Of course their did. People had their favorites. Community had champions.
Besides, 11 people representing a country is just a ploy to entertain people. There is zero level of relationship between the players and the rest country.
Anyway, the point is moot. It doesn't change the basis of the mechanism: entertaining the mass so that they divert they aggressiveness.
> Besides, 11 people representing a country is just a ploy to entertain people. There is zero level of relationship between the players and the rest country.
Aside from the legal requirement that they be citizens of the country they play for, and that once a player represents his country in a competitive match, they are bound to represent that same country for the rest of their lives, barring some extraordinary situation where the country itself breaks up or ceases to exist.
"who are you" implies I should have some special status to give my opinion.
But the fact remains that they don't run after the ball themself. They don't make any effort in this competition. They don't even have any personnal relationship with the players.
No, the whole concept of national identity is very recent, starting from early 1800s for some parts of Europe. Longer than that you had tribal factions or regional identities and that is it.
which era are you refering to? ancient greece was not a unified state. the common denominator what the city. Athenians were clearly not considering themselves like belonging to the same group as Spartans.
> No, the whole concept of national identity is very recent
No, it's not, though some current national identities are. The idea of Israel as a nation (distinct from either a state or regional identity), for instance, is at least as old as the Old Testament.
You mentioned Olympics but you missed out on the original Olympics which were very much all about that international (sort of as they were city-states) competition with a truce set up to allow for a relatively safe event.
>The 'oldest currently active international sports competition' is actually the annual hockey game between the Royal Military College (Canada), and Westpoint - or so I'm told.
International cricket pre-dates that. The first official international was between Canada and the United States in 1844, with 10 - 20,000 spectators. The K.A. Auty Cup is still played from time to time.
Perhaps a case could be made for cricket helping prevent nuclear war, as India and Pakistan manage to play each other in the various forms of cricket, though there isn't any love lost between the fans.
The ancient Greek Olympic games lasted for close to 1200 years. Unless your definition of ongoing is longer than that, I think they qualify.
The ancient Olympics carried a truce enforced by Zeus, unless your definition of international doesn't include "independent political entities who engaged in war" I think they qualify.
Medieval jousting and single combat had international tournaments for hundreds of years. From before The Hundred Years War in the 1300's through to the 1600's at which point the events started morphing into what would be recognised as modern equestrian sports.
You're from the UK so it must have hit close to home for you when he called a British ex-pat a pedo. You guys probably have one of the most backwards cultures when it comes to the mental illness of pedos. You treat them like they aren't even human beings regardless of whether or not they have harmed anyone. Pitiful.
For the non-soccer fans: Michels was the trainer who invented the Total Football playstyle and was named coach of the century by FIFA in 1999[0]. Although I just learned from Wikipedia that the above quote is taken out of context, I always thought it was an insightful one: football is ritual warfare. And as the article suggests, we're probably better off for its existence, because those tribal instincts are still in our DNA, and they need to come out one way or the other.
And I say that as someone who really dislikes football, partially because of the tribalism.
I don't think there's any particularly good reason to believe that giving tribalism an outlet through sports is healthy. It might as well be that giving tribalism an outlet leads to more tribalism. Kind of like how expressing emotional anger might make you angrier[0]
Yeah people don't die. But there's a chance that energy gets dispensed through other forms. I mean there is so much money in sports. There is so much money in just exerting dominance. So much to gain. Notoriety. Plus, I can't even begin to imagine the mental destruction that goes on in these players. Depression, Ego Inflation to the point of psychosis. Why can't we transcend domination and go back to play?
Both studies were of groups as a subset of larger groups. That is, these fans were not individuals home alone. I'm curious to know how that might effect their body's reactions.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadEdit: this is not that study but, along the same lines .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14998709/ pretty tiny sample though
There also was a great book about this which is oriented more to athletic skills.
https://youtu.be/nslkvLsupJU
Except you didn't actually burn the calories...
It was really expensive, and I already had a background in automotive work and woodwork to some degree, and a decent IT skill set, but damn, machining is really gratifying.
Edit: also biochemistry, biochemical...
> And the rules don’t apply as well to casual fans, Wann cautions. “This effect is most prominent among those who are most intense. In order to really reap the well-being benefits of fan identification, it needs to be a central part of your overall social identity.” The biochemical aspects of fandom only serve to reinforce those good feelings.
It’s not just watching sports, you need to be fully invested in the experience in the first place. I think the same would be true to anything we truely engage, like a chess or shogi live streams, or really anything we intimately associate with.
I was going to say, maybe my brain doesn't work like it's supposed to... but maybe I just never got into it.
I didn’t fully appreciate football growing up until I played. Now I’m so zoned into little details...
Football, for example, is a bit different. There’s more of a guarantee of action.
Fortunately haven't been forced to do sport since I was 14.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/generative-processes...
Someday if I decide when its time to get kids, I want to be in a position where I can have as much time as I want for the kids.
First link from searching "why kids like unboxing videos":
https://www.mother.ly/parenting/science-explains-why-your-ki...
But if AlphaGo and Google Duplex have had a ML/AI child and they're being tested on HN I'm pretty excited about it!
I got some unbelievable memories though. I honestly do not believe some of them.
0. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/brain.2013.0166
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-rea...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuros...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10744879/Are-yo...
Just as an example, I’ve had nightmares after this spring’s Real vs Juventus Champions League match which saw the Italians get eliminated in the 92nd minute after a questionable penalty call (I’m a Juve fan) and to this day my heart still feels a little contraction, so to speak, a little “what could have been?”, when thinking about how the Swedes equalized us, Romanians, in the QF of the 1994 World Cup after an error from our goalkeeper (if he hadn’t committed that error we would have faced the Brazilians in the semis, meaning a literal dream come true for us). There have been 24 years since then but the feeling is still inside of me, and I think it will stay with me until the day I’ll walk off this planet. Sports and caring about sports can be both one of the most beautiful and one of the most painful experiences in one’s life.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULI3x8WIxus
Though I do hear about conspiracies involving fixed games and about FIFA corruption from time to time, I imagine that they've done a lot more good for the world recently than the UN has.
Edit:
Sports are in general associated with some meaningful global events. The Olympics recently demonstrated this fact w/r/t North Korea.
No, they have not! I am not sure by what metric one can compare FIFA and the United Nations, but I don't think you you are familiar with the breadth of the UN's work. Selected achievements from their results page [1]:
-Every year we mobilize about $7 billion in humanitarian aid to help people affected by emergencies.
-Every year we assist over 34 million refugees and others fleeing war, famine and persecution.
-We vaccinate 40% of the world’s children, saving 2 million lives a year.
-In 2011 the UN will provide food to around 90 million people in 73 countries.
-In the past few years, the UN has expanded legal international rights to indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, migrants and their families.
FIFA is merely better at marketing...
[1]http://www.un.org/en/strengtheningtheun/results.shtml
I wonder if FIFA has ever been discovered to be running hugely corrupt wings like UN's WIPA which keeps trying to stuff some form of ACTA/SOPA/PIPA down our throats.
I wonder if FIFA has been found to ever profit from the rape and sexual abuse of minors. Minors, who descend from some of the most war-torn and horrific places on Earth.
7 billion annually and look how little they get done each year. Capitalism is much more responsible for Africa's and Asia's escape from poverty than the UN is - and that's a rather low bar.
I laugh at the idea that the UN, and not the charities they force to go through them, is responsible for saving 2 million lives per year. I wonder how many millions they let die each year.
In terms of global politics, FIFA is rather benevolent and yet they foster ongoing positive international relations benefits. The UN is, at best, malevolent, and I am dubious that their positives outweigh their enormous negatives, not to mention their negative externalities.
Surely, surely you’re joking?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_FIFA_corruption_case
That is an entire Wikipedia page about a corruption case only involving tax evasion , following an investigation by the IRS.
This is the FIFA , which decided, completely non corrupt of course, that Qatar is the best place to host a World Cup. Some people follow through on this anecdote with reasons as to why that’s a worse place to do so than actual Hell, but I prefer to prompt you to sit back a moment and think about that. Qatar. Forget about Russia: Qatar. For a sporting match. In summer. Qatar.
For context, these were the final bids for 2022: South Korea, Qatar, Japan, Australia, U.S.A.
Qatar.
FIFA is not corrupt? Sepp “football is politics” Blatter’s FIFA?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp_Blatter
Surely you’re joking?
"Panem et circenses" is hardly a new concept.
And 'international sports' don't really go back that far, surprisingly.
The 'oldest currently active international sports competition' is actually the annual hockey game between the Royal Military College (Canada), and Westpoint - or so I'm told. There are arguments for America's cup, but that's a different kind of representation. Those are 1870's vs. 1850's respectively.
So it's really kind of a new thing, and Olympics, World Cup, Commonwealth Games are definitely created in part to build fraternity and collegiately between nations etc..
I think it's also fair to question the term 'violence' because maybe it's really a matter of 'competition' at a physical, visceral level, i.e. 'dominance'. But it's a good point.
My point, exactly.
> they didn't represent anyone.
Of course their did. People had their favorites. Community had champions.
Besides, 11 people representing a country is just a ploy to entertain people. There is zero level of relationship between the players and the rest country.
Anyway, the point is moot. It doesn't change the basis of the mechanism: entertaining the mass so that they divert they aggressiveness.
Aside from the legal requirement that they be citizens of the country they play for, and that once a player represents his country in a competitive match, they are bound to represent that same country for the rest of their lives, barring some extraordinary situation where the country itself breaks up or ceases to exist.
Oh I so dare you to go to Brazil and say Neymar doesn't matter. Actually, don't, I don't want to be (indirectly) responsible for your maiming...
People have a strong illusion their connection is real
But the fact remains that they don't run after the ball themself. They don't make any effort in this competition. They don't even have any personnal relationship with the players.
I don't deny it's fun.
You should have fun.
But it's no more real than a movie.
See: mother + newborn.
That said, you're right that it wasn't "international", but then again "nations" themselves aren't that old.
Or better yet, invent football and do the same.
Nationalism didn't exist at the time, but ethnocentrism certainly did :)
Nations are, nationalism and nation-states (which are different but related phenomena) aren't.
No, it's not, though some current national identities are. The idea of Israel as a nation (distinct from either a state or regional identity), for instance, is at least as old as the Old Testament.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-roc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Olympic_Games
That said, medieval jousting for example had what amounted to a multi national sports. It's just the nations where tiny.
International cricket pre-dates that. The first official international was between Canada and the United States in 1844, with 10 - 20,000 spectators. The K.A. Auty Cup is still played from time to time.
Perhaps a case could be made for cricket helping prevent nuclear war, as India and Pakistan manage to play each other in the various forms of cricket, though there isn't any love lost between the fans.
I guess we have civilized quite a bit.
Yeah that never happened.
That's absurd. Google "Olympic games" and then Google "peloponnesian war".
Ongoing international games as we understand them are a new phenom, dating back to the mid 19th century, and then only a few games.
The modern Olympics are not that old.
There were almost no such games for most of antiquity until late into the Enlightenment.
The ancient Greek Olympic games lasted for close to 1200 years. Unless your definition of ongoing is longer than that, I think they qualify.
The ancient Olympics carried a truce enforced by Zeus, unless your definition of international doesn't include "independent political entities who engaged in war" I think they qualify.
For the non-soccer fans: Michels was the trainer who invented the Total Football playstyle and was named coach of the century by FIFA in 1999[0]. Although I just learned from Wikipedia that the above quote is taken out of context, I always thought it was an insightful one: football is ritual warfare. And as the article suggests, we're probably better off for its existence, because those tribal instincts are still in our DNA, and they need to come out one way or the other.
And I say that as someone who really dislikes football, partially because of the tribalism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinus_Michels
[0] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102344...
Shadi Shuda Zindagi Khushgawar Banane Ke Liye Nabvi Nuskha https://www.sherekhudahazratali.com/2018/07/shadi-shuda-zind...
> bodily motions made in a usually unconscious effort to influence the progress of a propelled object (such as a ball)
next up, you lose weight by watching people run. although i think believe someone has shown that already.