Originally published in the SUMMER 2004 issue of Seed. Updated for 2006:
Credit: Maxim Petrichuk
At about the same time that Homer invented the epic hero, the Greeks started a religious festival dedicated to Zeus. The Gods, they decided, might like to see the human form in motion. Naked men competed in a single race, 200 yards long. The winner received a branch of wild olives. The Greeks called this celebration the Olympics.
Though the ancient sprint remains, today the Olympics are a sporting bacchanalia. The Gods are gone, but the thrill of seeing the body rage against its limits endures. Ski jumpers, plummeting towards snowy earth, find time to elegantly carve air. Figure skaters, with their flesh like a rubber band of muscle, suggest that gravity is optional. Faster, higher, farther: The Olympics celebrate the dream of progress as embodied in human form.
That the games are intoxicating to watch seems beyond question. After all, over one million people will flock to Torino this winter; 3.2 billion people will watch the games on television. That’s half the world. We will all hold our breath when the bobsledders make hairpin turns on the icy track. We will rise from our seats when skating begins. Certainly, being a spectator is an enthralling experience, but why?
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In 1996, three Italian neuroscientists, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese put an electric probe into the premotor cortex of monkeys. They discovered that inside these primate brains there were networks of cells that “store vocabularies of motor actions.” Just as there are grammars of language, rules for forming a sentence, there are grammars of movement. These populations of cells are the bodily “sentences” we use every day, the ones our brain has chosen to retain and refine.
Think, for example, about a golf swing. To those who have only watched the Masters on TV, golfing seems easy. It’s like T-ball played on a vast lawn. To the novice, however, casting a smooth arc with a lopsided metal stick is virtually impossible. This is because most novices swing with their consciousness, using an area of brain right next to the premotor cortex. To Tiger Woods, on the other hand, the mellifluous whoosh-ping sound of a perfectly balanced stroke is second nature. For him, the motor action has become memorized and the movements embedded in the neurons of his premotor cortex. He swats the dimpled ball with the tranquility of his unconscious, his neurons on a perfected autopilot.
John Updike, in his novel Rabbit, Run, has his character Rabbit struggle while on the golf course to explain to his Episcopalian minister what he’s chasing in life, what he wants “from it all.” Lacking the eloquence to tell him, Rabbit takes a swing. To his surprise, he hits a booming drive that flies down the fairway, a divine straight line diverted only by gravity. He turns to the minister and says, “That’s it.” What Rabbit really wants is to live like Tiger Woods swings, with the greased ease of the unconscious.
Woods, after all, has been blessed with a particularly eloquent set of neurons in the premotor cortex. His nerves, hard-wired by a lifetime of driving ranges and practice puts, have learned to activate just the right subset of muscles at exactly the right time. For Woods, driving the white ball 300 yards to the green is as much an act of brain as brawn. It is a feat of invisible, electrical choreography.