[GKR9900]

So a few months have passed since the FIFA world cup, but the exciting final match between Argentina and France is still fresh in our memories. It was a wonderful tussle of skill, endurance, determination and sheer luck between players of both nations. Towards the end, the unfortunate penalty misses by French players Kingsley Coman and Aurelien Tchouameni led to France losing the World Cup title to Argentina. However, what followed was a disgrace to the entire football community. The French players were racially abused and insulted for missing the penalty shots. This got me thinking. People really need to understand the complexities involved in a high pressure situation. This is not a trivial point and shoot practice session. This is a world cup final! The immense amount of mental pressure the human brain has to endure during this event is simply unfathomable. So what exactly went wrong in the minds of Coman and Tchouameni? As a medical educator, this is exactly what I set out to explain. So I decided to make an educational video out of it. We have a very active thread on discussing football and world cup, so hence thought of posting it here.

https://youtu.be/MasRCt6ofcI

Simply put, any voluntary motor activity that we perform, whether it is a penalty kick or driving a car or even sipping coffee requires the coordinated action of a group of muscles. However, these muscles cannot function on their own. They are under the direct control of our nervous system, with the brain acting as the command center. Every action by the muscles is preceded by a thought originating in the brain. Now, although the brain might look like an unorganized clump of jell-o, it is highly organized and various areas in the brain specialize to take up various functions. We have various areas that specialize in thought generation, motor activity, sensory perception (touch, vision, hearing etc) and much more. Even structures that are present deep inside the brain contribute to fine-tuning movements made by the muscles. As ours is a community comprising of members from all spheres of life, let me try to explain it without getting too medical about it.

The process of doing a motor activity involves various phases. This is true not just for taking a penalty kick, but any activity involving our muscles. For simplicity sake, we will try to base our understanding on the penalty taking process.

1. Thought & decision: Once we place the ball at the penalty mark, we think about our options. We are essentially analysing spatial and temporal information that is available to us. We are assessing how far away the goal post is, what the goal keeper would try to do, our training sessions, previous penalty kicks and their success/failure, which part of the net to attack and so on. All this is done in an area of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. You could say that this forms a major part of the construct that we know as the ‘human mind’. After analysing all this information, this area decides on a kick to employ.

2. Planning: Now that the decision has been made, an area of the brain known as pre-motor cortex starts working on the plan that can bring the prefrontal cortex’s plan into action. This plan encodes information such as which leg to use for the kick, which all muscles to be activated, the order and extent of their activation etc. This is the neurological equivalent of thinking ‘if I hit the ball at this part of the ball, with this spot on my foot, with this much force and in this direction, it will end up in this corner of the net’. The plan will be formulated based on this. Accompanying this, we also visualise the kick we are about to take. This is done by an area known as the supplementary motor cortex.

3. Fine-tuning of the plan: Now the premotor cortex has made what looks like a perfect plan, but it is far from perfect. The problem is there are a large number of permutations and combinations of movements that can be planned for the kick we are about to take. Filtering the essential movements from the non-essential ones is a task that the premotor cortex is simply not capable of doing alone. So this work is outsourced to a side-loop circuit comprising of an organ called the basal ganglia, which is situated deep inside the brain. It hand-picks the signals that are absolutely essential for the kick, amplifies them and dampens the undesired ones.

4. Execution: Now, that the plan has been thoroughly checked for error-codes, it is ready to be executed by the primary motor cortex. The nerve cells present here are the ones who click the proverbial ‘enter’ key which results in stimulating the groups of muscles involved in the kick that we have decided and planned.

5. Conduction of the signal: The signals produced in the cortex are communicated down into the muscles via neural tracts that make their way through the spinal cord.

6. Feed-back control: Because of the sheer number of structures involved in executing a penalty kick, there are various ways the kick can go wrong. Everything from the muscles in the kicking foot to those in the non-kicking foot, torso, shoulders and limbs which are necessary for maintaining the proper posture and balance while employing the kick needs to be activated based on a particular sequence. The signals for this sequence have already been encoded in the plan, but should things go awry during execution, somebody needs to step in. That ‘somebody’ is none other than the cerebellum, which compares the actual movement with the intended one, checks for any error, and relays the correction signals back into the muscles if needed.

I am just sharing a few pics of the relevant areas of the brain mentioned above, so that you can orient yourselves around it.


Prefrontal, premotor and primary motor cortices


Basal ganglia & cerebellum

This motor loop is not a closed system, but an open one. Errors are monitored and corrected continuously so that the movement can be made impeccably good. This is what professional athletes train for. Remember the saying ‘for a fight of 45 minutes, you have to train for 45000 minutes’? This is true in any sport and almost all walks of life. Practice does make perfect. So why do they falter at times? It has something to do with the first step in this sequence…thinking!

Imagine yourself as Kingsley Coman or Aurelien Tchouameni walking out to the penalty mark to take the penalties. A flood of thoughts would have invaded your mind. What if I miss? Would I let my team down? Would my career suffer? Will I end up being a hero or a villain? Remember how stressful it was for us fans to watch that shoot out? Imagine the plight of the players involved. And what is the seat of all these thoughts? The prefrontal cortex! This flood of thoughts translates as a flurry of signals inside the prefrontal cortex. Larger the number of thoughts, more stress it puts on every other component downstream. Your prefrontal cortex cannot decide which kick to employ. Your premotor cortex cannot plan a proper motor sequence. Your basal ganglia cannot decide which ones to filter out. You finally decide to just get done with it and your primary motor cortex executes a half-cooked motor plan into action and the following ensues.

Your run up is inadequate, your foot placement is incorrect, your leg swing is insufficient, your contact with the ball is inaccurate and the result is inevitable – you miss!

This is probably what happened in the world cup final too. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s a link on a 2021 study conducted in the Netherlands where brain activity of penalty takers was mapped. The anxious penalty takers were found to have a hyperactive prefrontal cortex that led to them having a lower scoring rate compared to their peers.

A bit off topic, but if you are good at connecting dots, you can see that this is also what often happens in our life. Time and again, I have seen posts and threads in team bhp where members who seem to be suffering from their life’s troubles come looking for help. Remember guys, it's not in our nature, it IS nature. It is physiology. If elite athletes who have devoted their entire lives to overcome high pressure situations, while having access to industry best standards of doing it, and being paid in the millions doing so, are not immune to overthinking, it is quite natural for mortals like you and me to succumb to the pressures of everyday life, buckle in and miss our goals by a long shot!

What needs to be done is to roll it all back, dial down your thoughts, get a hold of them, prioritise them and put them into action. Bend those neurophysiological elements to your will!

Remember:- Change your mindset, Change the game!

[DogNDamsel12]

What an awesome writeup!

All of the process that you have accurately described takes place in a matter of under a minute.

This should also pique our interest and understanding then, how quickly biases too work in our brain and mind. Seeing something outside one's usual experiences, our brain quickly chooses the information available to it, practised for several years, may be over a lifetime when one judges and attacks anything that is unfamiliar - races, cultures, skin colour, genders, dogs for god's sake, religion, science, new way of doing things, kissing on the street. Sort of everything that is unusual and feels unfamiliar.

Hence organisations have full fledged training programs for removal of bias, desensitization practices.

What decisions we take are a matter of choice, how we react to our stimulus is how much we are in control of our reflexes versus allowing ourselves to fall prey to what we have been conditioned to believe through the social collective experience - a society and culture who signed us up to practise distrust and hatred without even us knowing it. There was a whole article on inefficiencies in Tata cars because of their plant being an all-women one - guess which parts of the brain were coordinating all that information!

Tying this back to driving, imagine the practice and right coaching one needs to learn, unlearn, relearn to be able to make the right decisions on the road in that one moment of glory. Cannot be lax, can we!

Just ruminating! Awesome article.

[GKR9900]

Originally Posted by DogNDamsel12

What an awesome writeup!

This should also pique our interest and understanding then, how quickly biases too work in our brain and mind. Seeing something outside one's usual experiences, our brain quickly chooses the information available to it, practised for several years, may be over a lifetime when one judges and attacks anything that is unfamiliar - races, cultures, skin colour, genders, dogs for god's sake, religion, science, new way of doing things, kissing on the street. Sort of everything that is unusual and feels unfamiliar.

Thank you for the kind words. It's just surreal how we tend to question almost everything that have been thrust upon us be it belief systems, habits, culture etc when we breakdown our entire mind into neurophysiological elements. An idea that gets repeated stimulating particular brain circuits over and over a period of time by internal and external forces become a belief. The action based on that belief when continues for a period of time becomes a habit. A habit practiced over time and reinforced by collective opinion becomes a culture. This stands true for religion, politics, business etc. Kinda emphasises the importance of unlearning in today's world.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by GKR9900

Every action by the muscles is preceded by a thought originating in the brain.

Amazing post and great explanation, thank you for another useful, scientific, and interesting contribution!

Can see the balance between thinking and just 'going with the flow' in complex physical activities that also involve some thought. Very often getting into the flow state where you just 'do' can produce a higher level of play/skill than thinking about each step. I guess it's a matter of countless hours of practice that allows one to enter that state when required. There is certainly something called muscle memory, I've seen that some physical movement while participating a sport just becomes easier the next time I try it, even if that's after a month and without any practice or training for that in between.

Originally Posted by GKR9900

However, what followed was a disgrace to the entire football community. The French players were racially abused and insulted for missing the penalty shots. This got me thinking. People really need to understand the complexities involved in a high pressure situation.

Oh people understand that quite well. It's just easier to blame the 'different' or the 'outsider'. Knee-jerk.

I suppose at one point in prehistory it made evolutionary sense to mistrust the outsider from a tribal protection aspect. Sad that in this day and age, that sentiment can still be so easily aroused, especially by all politicians and religions. And that agenda so often blindly propagated by most elders in any society, all in the name of 'tradition'. I guess a few hundred years more of civilization will be needed for the prefrontal to completely hold sway over the limbic.

Speaking of which, is it that straightforward? Is the limbic system really the prehistoric part of the brain and the prefrontal the 'higher' bit? I know that theory was fashionable earlier, but read that it's not that clear-cut anymore. Couldn't find a clear answer online, so thanks in advance for any information.

Originally Posted by GKR9900

Now, although the brain might look like an unorganized clump of jell-o, it is highly organized and various areas in the brain specialize to take up various functions.

Again, is the 'hand-off' that straightforward from one portion of the brain to the other? I was at a gym a few years ago where a member who was also a neuroscientist brought some basic portable brain-mapping equipment and had people wear it while performing different physical activities. It was interesting to see different areas of the brain map light up on the laptop while they were doing the activities.

[GKR9900]

Originally Posted by am1m

Amazing post and great explanation, thank you for another useful, scientific, and interesting contribution!

Can see the balance between thinking and just 'going with the flow' in complex physical activities that also involve some thought. Very often getting into the flow state where you just 'do' can produce a higher level of play/skill than thinking about each step.

Thank you for the encouraging words! This 'going with the flow' is exactly what is needed to perform such tasks. A few years back, I tried simulating something similar while driving. I consciously tried to keep track of all my actions during the driving process. Needless to say, everything became less cohesive when I did that. The reason can be attributed to the overt involvement of the prefrontal cortex.

Originally Posted by am1m

Speaking of which, is it that straightforward? Is the limbic system really the prehistoric part of the brain and the prefrontal the 'higher' bit?

Again, is the 'hand-off' that straightforward from one portion of the brain to the other?

Although I mentioned that certain areas of the brain take care of certain functions, it is not necessarily the only function that it performs. I try to see it from an evolutionary point of view. As organisms started evolving beyond the basic necessities of life, so did the neural circuitry, especially once cognition started taking shape. For example, when I feed fried fish to my cat, it merely stimulates the areas of the brain related to hunger, satiety, may be a bit of reward centres etc. But if I am the one eating the same fried fish, there would be other layers of details added on top of that, like the process of cooking involved, the sight and smell of the ingredients, past experiences of eating such a dish etc. All this pulls in information from various parts of the brain and integrates it to make me feel what I feel. It would be impossible to annotate feelings to such tasks without the involvement of the limbic system. So I guess all these areas are interwoven at various levels for seamless operating of our operating system, if we can call it so!