Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans

By: Gordon, Dan

Book Overview

White Sox fans were overcome with euphoria when their beloved team won after eighty-eight years of failure, and the long-suffering Red Sox Nation finally received their vindication in 2004. Now the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932594280
• ISBN13: 9781932594287
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Dana Press, The
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Your Brain on Cubs explains all of those brain questions and actions you always wanted to know about

I enjoyed reading this book and I think it explained actions in the brain in a scientific way that would still be interesting to neuroscientists and hard-core baseball fans alike. I found this book, which was put together by a life-long cub fan, to be extremely interesting and informative. It did an excellent job of describing a basic event in baseball like a batter preparing to hit a pitch and explaining how this event happens in the brain through the use of things like the mirror system. The sections of the book and my summary/opinion of them are listed below. For the most part, the chapters open up with a Cub's game that is a good example of what is going to be discussed about. After the example, such as a fan's emotion or a baseball player's slump, is mentioned, the explanation for the neurological mechanism responsible for this event is followed by other research done by others, possibly psychologists or anthropologists, who back up the neurological mechanism. Chapter 1: The Depths of Loyalty: Exploring the Brain of a Die-hard fan Begins with the author talking about his experience growing up as a Cubs fan and how a brain for a fan of a perennial losing team works differently than the brain of fan whose team is doing well in the way that the "losing brain" is trained to delay gratification because winning is rare. Furthermore, this chapter mentions common behavioral framework that is relevant for a Cubs fan such as structured event knowledge stored in the frontal lobes and emotional states represented in the brain-stem and limbic regions. Overall, pretty basic brain information meant to just ease the reader in to both the fandom of the Cubs and the working of the brain. Chapter 2: Developing Talent: Expertise and the Brain About how the key to doing something well is not genes but actually practice, somewhere in the realm of 10,000 hours of practice to master something like hitting a curveball. Comparisons between expert and novice violinsts showed that experts required less brain volume to complete a task. Using a fMRI, it was shown that practice also strengthens the connections between different areas in the brain. I found this part to be one of the more interesting areas of the book because they wrote about how focus and practice can make one good at almost anything through the brain rewiring itself. Chapter 3: Why Did Casey Strike Out? The Neuroscience of Hitting About how hitters use their brain and things like the mirror system, which is something in the brain that recognizes a movement when preformed by others, in this case a pitch, to hit better. I thought this was extremely interesting because I had never heard of the mirror system before but it does make some sense because the possible greatest hitter of all time was also a pitcher. Chapter 4: Curses! Mentions how the believe in superstition, which is abundant in baseball, is due to the brain being "stubborn" and demanding to fill in missing information in a cause-effect

Perfect for both sports and health libraries.

YOUR BRAIN ON CUBS: INSIDE THE HEADS OF PLAYERS AND FANS blends medical science with insights on how the Chicago Cubs offers a method for understanding brain functions and ballpark attractions. From issues of loyalty and illusion to how viewers become experts, sports here is used as a foundation for considering brain functioning, game controversies from drugs to perception, and more: perfect for both sports and health libraries.