According to a recent study published inNature Neuroscience, theelite basketball playersThey can predict whether a player will score by looking only at their body position at the time of shooting. Using a technique calledtranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), Salvatore Aglioti and his colleagues from the University of Rome also found that the brain of basketball professionals is activated as if the muscles of the hand and forearm move while watching photos and videos of other players’ shots. Excellence in sports, they concluded, could be associated withanticipatory brain mechanisms of fine modulation.
Something similar happens to tennis players, baseball batters or soccer players. Their brains are more used to detecting fast-moving objects, and they caninterpret the movement and predict the trajectory of the ballwith greater precision than ordinary mortals. Especially when the object approaches in a straight line, as Andrew Welchman of the Max Plank Institute (Germany) has shown.
Although when it comes to strengthening the mind, you don’t even need to exercise. Just be faithfulsports fansso that our brain capacities improve. This is what the authors of an investigation published this week in the journal PNAS affirm. After a series of experiments with hockey players and amateurs, they have concluded that “the experience of playing and watching a sport has lasting effects on understanding because it incorporates the motor areas of the brain and transforms the neural networks responsible for understanding” . Or in other words, it only takeslisten and intervene in conversations about our favorite sport so that our brain is stimulated.
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