SPECIAL TOPIC
perform better on cognitive executive
functioning tasks. What is less clear
right now is which aspects of sport
support these cognitive benefits. In
HCI we have an opportunity to do this
primary research to help more of us
engage in sport as play (vs. profession)
and to translate the brain-body benefits
of these practices from the sporting field
to the rest of life.
TRAINING FOR
COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE
There is so much more to sport than
physical activity when imagining
benefits for wellth creation. To make
these connections, it may help to
formalize some of the differences
between sport and physical activity.
Whereas anything that elevates one’s
heart and requires effortful muscular
contraction at some level of intensity
is physical activity, sport as a game
also adds rules to this effort. Sport has
an end in mind, driven by a particular
target: to win the game/the contest/
the competition.
Winning requires physical
movement skills as well as cognitive
skills for strategy and tactics. There
is often also a high demand on visual
processing to coordinate physical
awareness. Vision—or perceptual
cognition—is highly demanding
information processing that to be
effective in sport requires rapid intake
and an understanding of the physical
and dynamic state of play—reading
the field and being able to find and
deliver the appropriate strategy
and tactics (a deep knowledge of
one’s playbook, for instance) to map
teammates’ skills and positions with
opportunities to advance toward the
goal. The fastest or strongest players
are not always the quickest.
There is, as we can see, tremendous
mental processing along with physical
exertion happening in sport. Watching
a long tennis match among skilled
opponents foregrounds how tactics
and endurance ebb and flow between
each other. When both players are
in great physical condition, we see
that an older, more experienced pro
can defeat a stronger, younger, highly
skilled but less experienced opponent:
The older player may be quicker,
having more experience with rapid
pattern selection for dealing with
known problem types. The truly great
can also break their own patterns and
which lead to a variety of physiological
problems including type 2 diabetes.
ARE WE DESIGNING
OURSELVES TO DEATH?
Most people reading this article fall into
the knowledge-worker camp. We may
even be reading this while sitting down.
According to the Whitehall Cohort
study, if we are reading this sitting
down, we’re not getting smarter—we’re
getting thicker (and not just physically).
Our highly digital environments have
so far mostly contributed to making
us less resilient and less brilliant: The
more networked our information
tools have become, the less we move.
We don’t even need to get up to grab
a book; we just search online. This
lack of movement also seems to affect
access to the nonverbal parts of our
brains that process the information that
often leads to our aha moments. From
Susan Goldwin-Meadow’s observations
that our hands are speaking from
our nonverbal or pre-verbal past, to
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s assertion
that movement is thinking, much
current scholarship indicates that our
increasingly disembodied knowledge
work may be cutting off opportunities
for insights.
In other words, just by sitting so
much, we’re making ourselves less
swift of thought and more vulnerable
to disease: The brain and the body
are connected. Physiologically, sitting
uninterrupted for over an hour creates
fundamental changes in muscle
tissue, which results in changes in
normal signaling for fat processing
and associated hormonal signaling
that affect cognitive processes. As our
bodies slump forward at our desks, that
flexion tells our nervous system to be
more protective of us. It’s a reflexive
signal: Protect the squishy bits. Add
a little stress to this mix without any
movement to respond to that signal,
and the brain goes into an increased
threat/stress response, shutting down
peripheral vision and focusing more
exclusively on what’s immediately
salient. This is no place to be creative.
The longer this stress experience
continues, the more debilitating the
effects on the brain-body connection.
For instance, chronic stress reduces
our sleep—which is where a lot of
learning, memory building, skills
uptake, and insight processing occur,
to say nothing of tissue repair. Poor
sleep also impacts fat burning, which
in turn has a hormonal cost, which in
turn affects our ability to be creative.
It’s a vicious cycle. Sport as skills-based
structured play actually helps address
each of these states.
DESIGNING SPORT PRACTICES
FOR WELLTH-BASED
KNOWLEDGE WORK
When we think of sport, most of us
think of activity that privileges physical
over mental processes. When we think
of knowledge work, we may imagine
it as sport’s antithesis: the epitome of
cerebral practices.
And yet, this separation between
sport as fundamentally physical, on
the one hand, and knowledge work
as exclusively cerebral, on the other,
reveals a grave mischaracterization of
how we excel at cognitive activity. It is
an error born of a culture that desires,
it seems, to ignore that the brain is part
of the body, constructing the body only
as an inconvenient carrier of the brain
from one sedentary location to another.
However, evidence from physiology
and neurology shows unequivocally
that when we connect the brain and
the body, our cognitive performance
improves. Ratey and colleagues show
that the longer one is involved in
physical activity—effectively elevating
heart rate over time—the better one
performs at school. And introducing
physical activity means better cognitive
performance immediately, as well.
Studies have shown that people who
have just performed a bout of 20
minutes on a stationary bike at 65
percent of their maximum heart rate
Evidence from physiology and neurology
shows unequivocally that when we
connect the brain and the body, our
cognitive performance improves.