While the remote control is mine alone, I watch replays of the skating, skiing and snowboarding competitions at the Winter Olympics. It seems that my fascination is with defying gravity with jumps, pirouettes and spins in mid-air.
Then my husband arrives, an American who grew up wearing blades under his feet, and takes over, keeping me company while I finish preparing for the next day’s class. His schedule is hockey, which he played as a child, and different versions of tobogganing, the charm of which I had never understood. Going down a frozen pipe at more than a hundred per hour, holding on to the luge’s fragile bed that offers zero protection, with your feet forward, or even worse, offering your head to hit the walls first, in the skeleton? No way. On the other hand, it seems so easy: they go straight down the slide, which can be difficult enough to make it an Olympic sport?
The moment came to me when I watched, out of the corner of my eye, a competitor do particularly badly. Her toboggan swayed back and forth, in a zigzag pattern — exactly as my car did on the screen, the first time I played the Grand Theft Auto video game, crashing from guardrail to guardrail.
I stopped preparing the evolution class and paid attention to what was happening on the screen: it was a neuroscience class.
It’s easy to think that the brain is a machine for responding to events, but on the contrary, the trick is learning to anticipate them, building an internal model that guides actions. Without this model, a zigzag trajectory is all the brain can do: it moves the body away from the plumb line there, but it’s too much, so it “corrects” with an action that brings the body here and past the point again, then it “corrects” there again…
And so the car and the toboggan zigzag on the track, the squat on the unstable platform in Pilates makes you tremble, the body wobbles when the newborn quadruped tries to stand. Learning to maintain plumb and direction is to build that internal model that governs actions, eliminating the connections that cause noisy actions, full of deviations away from plumb, and maintaining the others.
As practice reduces sensory noise and it becomes easier to maintain your balance and make turns with stability, you have mental resources left over to pay attention to other things, such as the hockey ball, or strive for ever greater perfection. In the case of tobogganing, the more the brain can avoid variation around the straight line, which is the shortest trajectory down the pipe, the less friction the blades encounter against the ice, and the more speed the toboggan develops.
The talent of tobogganing, then, is to cultivate the cerebral ability to anticipate the minimum adjustments necessary to keep the vehicle aligned and stable along the curves and bumps in the track while gravity accelerates the car, which starts off driven by the competitor and reaches over 120 km/h at the end of the track, right before it is necessary to brake to enter the tighter curves that end the race.
The cool thing is that, in this modality, the experience is not so overshadowed by age: the score rewards consistency, not random exceptionality, and Kaillie Humphries and Elana Meyers Taylor, competing for the USA after the age of 40, continue to give the girls a boost.
Now that I’ve gained a new appreciation… I’m a fan!
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