The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius

by Zach Schonbrun

Overview

“A must-read for the cerebral sports fan . . . like Moneyball except nerdier. Much nerdier.”
—Sports Illustrated

Why couldn’t Michael Jordan, master athlete that he was, crush a baseball? Why can’t modern robotics come close to replicating the dexterity of a five-year-old? Why do great quarterbacks always seem to know where their receivers are?

On a quest to discover what actually drives human movement and its spectacular potential, journalist, sports writer, and fan Zach Schonbrun interviewed experts on motor control around the world. The trail begins with the groundbreaking work of two neuroscientists in Major League Baseball who are upending the traditional ways scouts evaluate the speed with which great players read a pitch. Across all sports, new theories and revolutionary technology are revealing how the brain’s motor control system works in extraordinarily talented athletes like Stephen Curry, Tom Brady, Serena Williams, and Lionel Messi; as well as musical virtuosos, dancers, rock climbers, race-car drivers, and more.

Whether it is timing a 95 mph fastball or reaching for a coffee mug, movement requires a complex suite of computations that many take for granted—until they read The Performance Cortex. Zach Schonbrun ushers in a new way of thinking about the athletic gifts we marvel over and seek to develop in our own lives. It’s not about the million-dollar arm anymore. It’s about the million-dollar brain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101986356
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	496,923
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Zach Schonbrun  is a senior editor for business & technology at The Week and has been a longstanding contributor to the New York Times. He has also written for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fast Company, ESPN The Magazine, Newsday, The Washington Post, SB Nation, VICE, and other outlets. He is the author of One Great Shoe, which was selected as one of the best Kindle Singles of the year in 2015. He lives in New York City with his wife and their son.

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Excerpted from "The Performance Cortex"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Zach Schonbrun.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Decervo: "How Can You Think and Hit at the Same Time?" 7

2 The Movement Chauvinist: Why we have a Brain 47

3 The Motor Hunter: Why Stephen Curry is a Genius 77

4 "From Mind to Muscle": How the Motor Cortex was Found 119

5 The Neurotech Space: Out of the Lab 153

6 Searching for the Motor Engram: The Intelligence in Our Skin 187

7 Embodied Expertise: Watch and Learn 225

8 The Body in Space: How Tom Brady Won Super Bowl Li 259

9 A Paralyzed Man Who Moved: The Future of Movement 293

Acknowledgments 317

On Sources 321

Selected Bibliography 323

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

Advance Praise for The Performance Cortex

“A must-read for the cerebral sports fan . . . like Moneyball except nerdier. Much nerdier.” 
—Sports Illustrated

Axios’ 2018 Leadoff Beach Read

“Fans of sport science, sport psychology, robotics, and neuroscience will find this to be informative and inspiring.”
—Library Journal

“A revealing tour of the minds of winning athletes . . . Readers interested in the applications of neuroscience to everyday life will find plenty of value here.” 
—Kirkus Reviews

“Poised to guide the sophisticated sports fan in such examination, Schonbrun lucidly explains the fascinating new world of neuroathletics. . . . The stereotype of the dumb jock may not survive this explosive jolt!”
—Booklist

“One of the most intriguing aspects of elite sports is that the athletes themselves have no idea how they do much of what they do, because it occurs beneath their conscious awareness. Schonbrun’s deep dive into the cutting-edge science of human movement gives the reader X-ray vision (or, really, fMRI vision) into the brains of the world’s greatest performers. It will enthrall anyone who has watched a sporting event and asked: How do they do that?”
—David Epstein, author of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene

“To use a voguish sports catchphrase, The Performance Cortex is ‘next level.’ We’ve heard a lot about ‘mental toughness’ and ‘hard-wiring for success,’ but now Zach Schonbrun reveals the latest science on how elite athletic feats are actually accomplished. Fans will understand the genius behind all sports more clearly after reading this book. And they can, with pleasure. Schonbrun has mastered the art of writing gracefully about dense—and potential groundbreaking—material.”  
—L. Jon Wertheim, executive editor of Sports Illustrated and coauthor of This is Your Brain on Sports and Scorecasting
 
“Zach Schonbrun’s The Performance Cortex is full of insight into the next wave of athletic training, the relationship between the mind and the body, and the cutting-edge neuroscience that seeks to explore and exploit this interaction to create better athletes. This accessible account will leave every reader wishing they had known all this before.”
—Glenn Stout, author and series coeditor of The Best American Sports Writing

“The brain is the last untapped resource for athletes, the final frontier for sports analytics. Zach Schonbrun’s riveting look inside of how players’ minds truly work and how that knowledge is being used to reimagine the games we play, fires with the efficiency and efficacy of a synapse.”
—Jeff Passan, national baseball columnist for Yahoo! Sports and author of the New York Times bestseller The Arm

From the Publisher

2018-02-20
New York Times contributor Schonbrun takes readers on a sometimes-tangled but revealing tour of the minds of winning athletes.A baseball player at bat has a few milliseconds to decide whether to swing at a pitch. Some of that decision will hinge on experience, on the neural pathways telling the batter that this is the sort of thing the eye has seen and the brain has processed before. But in the end, the heavy lifting is being done in the fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that "picks up baseballs like bird-watchers spot a warbler in the bush," or other parts of the brain that govern perceptions and especially the timing of our responses to them. Schonbrun's principals in his sometimes-science-thick, sometimes-jock-talky narrative are tasked with scouting and training promising athletes. This is no easy matter, especially given that neuro-training, so to speak, isn't something that coaches and managers have adapted themselves to—yet. But more, they and other sports-oriented neuroscientists are "tracing the essential correlates of a skill," using imaging and scientific method alike to chase down the ineffable—e.g., the workings of the mind of a star athlete like, say, Stephen Curry, who "was considered to be too slow-footed and unathletic by scouts that many teams passed on him in the NBA draft." In studying anticipation, decision, and response, some scientists fall back on the old notion that it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something, which occasions a problem. "No one has any idea why it takes so long," Schonbrun writes, "because no one knows what it actually means to be skilled." But even so, researchers are constantly gaining insight, and their findings are likely to figure prominently in how athletes are recruited and trained for optimal performance in the future.It's not quite in the same league as Moneyball, but readers interested in the applications of neuroscience to everyday life will find plenty of value here.

Kirkus Reviews