Learn why soccer players miss penalty kicks; how we estimate population sizes; and how space helps us look back in time. Pro soccer players miss penalty kicks because pressure makes them overthink by Kelsey Donk Johnson, S. (2021, May 12). Why professional soccer players choke during penalty kicks. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/choking-under-pressure Slutter, M. W. J., Thammasan, N., & Poel, M. (2021). Exploring the Brain Activity Related to Missing Penalty Kicks: An fNIRS Study. Frontiers in Computer Science, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2021.661466 Guo, Z., Li, A., & Yu, L. (2017). “Neural Efficiency” of Athletes’ Brain during Visuo-Spatial Task: An fMRI Study on Table Tennis Players. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00072 How do we know the population sizes of species when there are too many to count? by Cameron Duke Allen, S. T., O’Rourke, A., White, R. H., Schneider, K. E., Kilkenny, M., & Sherman, S. G. (2019). Estimating the Number of People Who Inject Drugs in A Rural County in Appalachia. American Journal of Public Health, 109(3), 445–450. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2018.304873 Hammond, P. S. (2009). Mark–Recapture. Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, 705–709. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-373553-9.00163-2 Krebs, C. J. (1999). Ecological methodology. Benjamin/Cummings. Mark-Recapture. (2021). Nau.edu. https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/mark_recapture/mark_recapture.html Looking Into Space Is Looking Back In Time by Reuben Westmaas Most distant object in the universe spotted by Hubble Space Telescope, shattering record for the farthest known galaxy. (2016, March 4). The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/most-distant-object-in-the-universe-spotted-by-hubble-space-telescope-shattering-record-for-the-farthest-known-galaxy-a6911096.html Cain, F. (2014, August 7). Are All the Stars Really Dead? - Universe Today. https://www.universetoday.com/113709/are-all-the-stars-really-dead/ Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free!
Learn why soccer players miss penalty kicks; how we estimate population sizes; and how space helps us look back in time.
Pro soccer players miss penalty kicks because pressure makes them overthink by Kelsey Donk
How do we know the population sizes of species when there are too many to count? by Cameron Duke
Looking Into Space Is Looking Back In Time by Reuben Westmaas
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free!
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/looking-into-space-is-looking-back-in-time
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why pro soccer players miss penalty kicks; how we know the population sizes of species when there are too many to count; and why looking into space is looking back in time.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Imagine you’re a professional athlete. It’s crunch time, and it’s up to you to make the final, game-winning point for your team. The lights are on, and everyone is watching. You line yourself up, take a deep breath, focus your mind, and … you miss.
This is not unusual. In soccer shootouts where missing a penalty kick means elimination, players miss somewhere around 40 percent of the shots they take. What’s the deal? Why do athletes who spend their whole lives training for moments like this blow it?
Well, a new, first-of-its-kind study aimed to find out. Scientists were able to scan soccer players’ brains in real time as they took penalty kicks.
That brain measurement came via a headset the players wore that used something called functional near-infrared spectroscopy. That’s a technology that uses light to measure brain activity. In the study, the players faced three different penalty-kick scenarios, each one more stressful than the last. As you’d expect, the players did worse in the second and third rounds as the pressure intensified. And the inexperienced soccer players did worse than the pros.
But what was going on in their brains?
The data showed that when kickers missed their shots, they had higher activity in parts of the brain that weren’t related to kicking a ball at all. They had a lot of activity in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with long-term planning.
Basically, they were overthinking things — thinking too far into the future, or about the long-term implications of their actions.
Generally speaking, professional athletes are pretty good at avoiding this kind of thinking. Brain scans usually show more activity in areas relevant to the sport they’re playing, and less in irrelevant areas. They’re able to get in the zone and eliminate distracting thoughts. That’s one reason they did better under pressure than the more inexperienced players.
That’s not just limited to athletes, either. There’s an idea called neural efficiency theory that says that as you become more of an expert in any field, your brain starts to become more efficient. It automates certain processes to eliminate distractions.
The results of this study are evidence for neural efficiency theory. Focus and automation help experts perform. But when pressure gets too high, even experts start to choke.
Unfortunately, the study authors don’t have a solution for overthinking things. But the study could help us have more empathy for our favorite athletes when they choke under pressure.
Have you ever heard a fact like, “there are 40,000 elk in Yellowstone,” and wondered how they know? It’s not like it’s practical to count all of them, so how do scientists estimate large populations of animals?
Those estimations can be critical for all sorts of things. For instance, it’s important to know how many individuals of a species there are when you’re trying to figure out how to protect them. But like I said, counting them can be wildly impractical and time-consuming. Instead, biologists have a different method. And it’s actually pretty simple.
It’s called mark-recapture, and here’s how it works: Let’s say you want to estimate the number of deer in a national park. The first thing you would do is set up a harmless trap to catch some deer. Every deer you catch gets some sort of identifying mark before you release it again. If you catch, mark, and release 50 deer in your first survey, then you know that there are 50 marked deer roaming the park.
A week later, you set the traps again. This time, you trap another 50 deer, and 10 of them have markings from the week before. From this, you can estimate the number of deer in the park.
If each deer in the park had an equal chance of being caught both times, then we can think of the ratio of marked to unmarked deer in the second survey as the ratio of total marked deer to the total number of deer in the park. So, if there are ten marked deer out of the fifty you caught the second time, that’s 20 percent. Given that there are fifty total marked deer out there, that should be roughly 20 percent of the whole population. That means there are probably 250 deer in the park.
To make the measurement more accurate, you can just repeat the process. You’d mark all the animals you capture each time and adjust your totals accordingly.
Methods of marking will be different for different species. In the case of an animal with naturally distinct markings, like zebras, scientists can just photograph and catalogue them during surveys. Birds, on the other hand, will often get little metal ankle bracelets.
This approach is handy for more than just counting animals, too. Similar techniques are used by public health officials to estimate the number of drug users in a given area, so they can determine how to distribute resources.
Good thing scientists paid attention in math class. I sure wouldn’t want to count thousands of elk by hand.
Have you ever wished that you could go back in time? Unfortunately, traveling to an earlier time period is probably impossible. But looking back in time? That’s easy. All you need to do is look up at the night sky. That’s because looking into space is literally looking back in time.
It’s true: every time you look at a star in the sky, you’re looking at it as it was, not as it is. Actually, that’s true of everything that you see, but light moves pretty fast, so it doesn’t usually make much difference when it comes to looking at things that are closeby, like your phone or a city skyline. But if what you’re looking at is one light-year away, then what you see is what was there one year ago.
So when you see really distant objects? You’re seeing way back in time. The farthest star that can be seen with the naked eye is in the constellation Cassiopeia — not to be confused with the champion from League of Legends — and the light that the star produces takes no less than 4,000 years to reach us. That means that we’re looking at the star as it was when woolly mammoths still roamed the planet. Once you start to factor in high-power telescopes, that time gap grows exponentially. Today, the farthest object we’ve spotted is a galaxy approximately 13.4 billion light-years away, meaning that our image of it is older than the Earth itself.
Of course, something that was around that long ago might not be there today. Actually, are any of the stars we see at night still there? It seems like most of them could have gone supernova hundreds of years ago and we wouldn’t know it yet.
The bad news is that there are almost certainly some stars that have sparked out but that we still see twinkling. The good news is that most stars are still there. Stars live a long time — some as long as trillions of years — so a couple of thousands of years is just a drop in the bucket. And anyway, there are stars being born in the distant universe all the time that we can’t see yet, but they’ll take the place of whatever “dead” stars we currently wish upon in due time.
So no need to mourn the dead stars you might see. The night sky is full of new life, too.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Kelsey Donk, Cameron Duke, and Reuben Westmaas.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. And, just do it automatically; don’t overthink it — we don’t want you to accidentally miss us.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!