Tonight is the Superbowl. I assume most people watch it because they want to see the commercials, or because they actually care about who wins. That’s not me. (Partly because I don’t actually watch it.) (Don’t get me wrong – I’m a New Orleans Girl at heart, and want to see Peyton win, but really, if the Saints aren’t playing, I don’t care.) I do think a lot about professional athletics, especially football, but not in the typical “care about sports way”.
OK, after last week’s post, you may be thinking that I focus on the head injuries and future cases of CTE. That’s reasonable, since I am working with a doctor who has healed brain injuries. But that’s not it either.
I think about the difference between #1 and #2. In professional sports, there is very little difference. Every one one field, whatever the sport, is one of the elite in the field. Why does one team win? Why does the other team lose? (Other than that, eventually, one will win and one will lose.) Everyone has good days, everyone has bad days. That’s part of it. The ability to work as a team is another part of it (training, interpersonal issues, etc).
But I think a big part of it is cognitive – and this is never really tested in professional sports. (Yes,th the combines use the Wonderlic. But teams, from what I understand, pretty much ignore the scores. They have not been predictive of a player’s performance.) What kind of cognitive skills does a professional athlete need? He (or she) needs the ability to read the field – the opposing team, their own teammates – and react. Quickly.
What cognitive function does this? Well, possibly several. But one of them is Working Memory Capacity (WMC).
WMC is a cognitive processing capacity system responsible for maintaining focus (attention control) on a given set of items (short-term memory), retrieving relevant information (long-term memory) related to those items, and manipulating the relevant information to apply to those items. It is correlated with intelligence, language comprehension, multitasking, attention control, situational awareness, problem-solving, impulse control and decision-making.
WMC very well may make the difference between #1 and #2 on the sports field.
It also may make an even bigger difference on the battlefield. Where all “players” are not elite, where US troops already have the advantage of training and materiel, using WMC as a characteristic will likely provide those troops an increased advantage over the opposing forces, who have the advantages of knowledge of the terrain and going home to their families each night.
More on WMC in the coming weeks.