I'll chime in on how the brain recognizes patterns which is well explained for the layman (which I am) in the book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins.
I have to look at that... I was thinking brain structures, i.e., you know the amygdala has to be firing when a great QB senses pressure in the pocket, but at the same time that firing is suppressed or countered... another set of pathways forms for each "kind" of pressure you feel, as you convert awareness of/fear of pressure to useful information wired into counter-strategies... from "I can buy time by stepping right" (never spoken in the mind of course,) to
this pressure from
this player in
this defensive set-up is correlated with the Y receiver being open often, look for the Y but 5 yards right of the expected route... because that's what the Y does in the pattern that resulted in the specific form of pressure (strong form of the argument)... or just "Step to the right, no biggie" in the weak form.
You know structures involved in non-verbal pattern recognition (especially visual) have to be firing like crazy. I just wish I knew more about how these patterns are interacting.
One example of one structure that would have to be either going nuts or uninvolved (see rest of paragraph) would be Brodmann's area 25, apparently a little doohickey that's the gate for the memories you "need" and "don't need" at a given moment... depressives can be treated w/deep brain stimulation here, the idea being that they continually dwell on a memory or many memories that should be screened... what's his Brodmann's 25 doing during a given play? Or are episodic memories, those involving narrative, inimical to the in-the-moment task (as we so often hear...) Is Brodmann's 25 gating off episodic memory like crazy in a good athlete or are these memories simply atrophied while on-field? Does this habit of thought become generalized? I.e., would we find that episodic memory is weak in high-performing athletes? If so, is that a matter of the pathways that would not be reinforced, because of the need for good athletic performance... or would such a trait predict better performance to begin with? Strong episodic memory, I believe, is linked with learning for most people... that is, hippocampal conversion of short-term to long-term memory... so I
think (but don't have enough knowledge to assert) that it would be a byproduct of converting study of the playbook to the think-it-through stage of getting the new play down. Brady the grandmaster, of course, recognizes the new pattern quickly and easily - does this byproduct episodic memory not get stimulated, or is episodic memory being really efficiently filtered? (Just a f'rinstance). It's also interesting to me how, importantly, the Pats work to take ego out of the player, while other teams want to "play with emotion," which seems like it would be correlated with episodic memory.
There's a little chunk of the thalamus that seems to be responsible specifically for recall of declarative memory - e.g., memorizing and reciting the list of the 50 states... if you damage it, declarative memory goes to hell, but other forms of memory are more or less undamaged... how important is/is not this area?
There are six levels in the brain which deal with increasing layers of recognition complexity. The simplest level may recognize lines. The next may put those lines together to recognize a shape. The third level may do some simple interpretation of that shape e.g. seeing it as a letter. The next level would recognize a whole word; the next a sentence and so on.
When something is not recognized at a high level, the brain pushes it back down to a simpler level. Naturally, this takes time and the brain is not very fast at all especially when compared with computers nowadays (figure one to two tenths of a second at a minimum).
I have to look this up. I am wondering whether he is describing "layers" of thought or of literal brain function... e.g., the occipital lobe receives the info from the retinas, but it also processes information - so line-to-letterform might happen there (like I said, I'm really dumb about most of this stuff.) But then you'd go somewhere else for what letter the letterform is (I think,) possibly over to the Wernicke's area for speech recognition (think about reading out loud as a child, or moving your lips while reading, as an adult Jets fan). Speed reading is in large part the process of getting Wernicke's area out of the way, I think; you don't subvocalize, you scan for patterns, and you let the pattern-recognition bits of your brain deal with content. Your memory of visual/auditory patterns is over in the temporal lobe, but back in the posterior parietal cortex you have a chunk responsible for synthesizing somatosensory and visual input... It would seem that if we are looking for a "place" for pattern recognition it's going to be a network of the whole shootin' match... I did find this, however... and am diving in...
Superior pattern processing is the essence of the evolved human brain
And p.s., here's something a little less boring than above, confirming the earlier analogy of the chess grandmaster to the athlete (i.e., elimination of "bad moves." I think it misdiagnoses the chess achievements of computers, or we simply expect them to win the way humans do... it says that once the computer could consider more combinations than grandmasters, the computers were winning... Well that makes sense when you specify that Deep Blue used full frontal assaults on all combinations, but the first article on human grandmasters emphasized pruning the tree or
this author might be using shorthand. Anyhow, it spends a paragraph on what a QB has to read...
Humans Are the World's Best Pattern-Recognition Machines, But for How Long?
What Tom Brady is saying from a brain perspective is that his brain is recognizing the patterns he is seeing on the football field without having to push it back to a simpler level. This type of recognition takes a lot of training and practice. That's why it takes a very long time to master most skills e.g. playing an instrument professionally requires many thousands of hours of practice.
Famously approximated at 10,000 hours by Gladwell, although I'm sure that doesn't carry weight once you compare skills to be mastered... and sadly, you have to use it or lose it, at the high levels. You don't forget how to ride a bike, but you forget how to play an instrument (well) when you first come back to playing. (Pablo Casals and all that.)
In summary, Tom Brady has put in the practice and his brain's recognition skills are at an extremely high level for the defenses he typically plays against.
Yep. I think using the reading analogy above, you could say that nothing's going over to Wernicke's area; you're just reading, speech doesn't come into it. "Read and react" as it were. But in reading, you're also moving what you see into long-term memory schemas so that each page isn't some novel concept. Similarly Brady's building schemas throughout the game while all the "one play at a time" processing is going on (more like "one step per player at a time")
I studied the interception he threw in the Super Bowl. The defense was very complex with the robber in the middle of the field switching robber responsibilities with an outside defender who made the interception when the man he was covering cut into the middle of the field towards the original robber.
This was a very sophisticated defense and hard for any quarterback to read, particularly if he did not play against it very often. Given the defense, I wasn't surprised that Brady threw an interception there; most any quarterback might have mis-diagnosed the defense. Just a very good - and unusual- defense by Atlanta.
That's interesting - the analog is false pattern recognition, like seeing a face on the moon or animals in cloud shapes. In fact, it's that much more complex, because a DC spent time
making you falsely recognize a pattern.
I think Brady's gotten to where, as you say, he's reading everything at a very high level... I just want to see what's lighting up during the game LOL... PET scans and fMRIs for every play d%#*!@t!
But there would also be available cues from the second-order study of individual expression, body language, and/or tone of voice, as encountered with multiple individuals present. Just wool-gathering. These are all "automatic" functions for a human, and some do it better than others.
