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.