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How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

newyorker.com

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Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#21

Post by nwh »

anigbrowl wrote: post #20
johnvschmitt wrote: post #5

This is another example of how you should handle fear-based news. This coming from a guy who played H.S. Football in Texas, & is still good at math: Look at your odds: 1) You are VERY unlikely to ever play in the NFL. 7B people, ~10k people in NFL. 2) If you play team sports as a youth, you will learn how to: A) deal with adversity, & perserve. Even if you don't win, you learn that you can survive, learn, & live. It…

Baseball is a team sport, and your odds of getting a blow to the head are a lot lower. They also seem to take such contact a lot more seriously.

Incidentally, that was the only sport at school that I ever took any serious damage from; a baseball to the forehead.

I was never interested in any sport though. I was standing at the back waiting for lunch.

Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#22

Post by coryl »

Iterated wrote: post #11
sgpl wrote: post #2

Somewhat unrelated but when I was in school and still naive (sophomore year - US equivalent), at the insistance of my house boxing captain (went to a boarding school that had 5 houses/residences), I took up boxing as a sport because it looked fun, and I thought I could win my weight category. Long story short, some senior went on a crazy diet, and entered my weight category, and as luck would have it, I was the one d…

Boxing is extremely damaging to the brain. The gloves make it even worse because it allows a boxer to sustain more blows for a longer period of time. If there were no gloves there would be quicker knockouts and less bouncing of the brain around in a boxer's skull for extended periods of time. This is why many posit that MMA is safer than boxing. Smaller gloves mean quicker knockouts. There are also ways to win MMA fi…

- We don't know if a quick KO is "better" than a sustained beating. I'm not sure if any scientific evidence helps show this, so that hypothesis is just theory at the moment. (I haven't research this at all though, so if you have articles please do share.)

Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#23

Post by leoh »

stiff wrote: post #18

Unfortunately so-called "common sense" lags a few hundred years behind scientific understanding and most people for most of their lifes still think of themselves as a Cartesian spirit "trapped" in a body, at least until serious disease occurs for the first time. The moment you really internalize that all your memories, dreams and reflections are collected in a small region in the front part of your brain, which basic…

Interesting, but I don't see how common sense lags hundreds of years behind scientific understanding. I think it would be obvious to many people that head injuries are dangerous both today and hundreds of years ago.

Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#24

Post by BSousa »

sgpl wrote: post #2

Somewhat unrelated but when I was in school and still naive (sophomore year - US equivalent), at the insistance of my house boxing captain (went to a boarding school that had 5 houses/residences), I took up boxing as a sport because it looked fun, and I thought I could win my weight category. Long story short, some senior went on a crazy diet, and entered my weight category, and as luck would have it, I was the one d…

I had the opposite experience. My attention and productivity during my boxing years was way greater than now. Could have been the discipline I got from training leaking to other parts of my life. Who knows, but I know I did way better with most aspects of my life when training than not training.

But related to your story, your coach was an asshole. He should have refused to let you fight. There is a reason at the lower rankings (pro and amateur) people are matched by similar number of fights.

Here in Portugal, you even have 2 leagues. Rookie and Veterans, where your first fights are in the rookie league with people with less than 3-4 fights. Usually coaches try to have only 1-2 fight difference. When you have a certain number of fights (I think 5 but not sure as it was a long ago) you graduate, but even then, you don't really seem more than 3-4 fights difference.

Sure, you may have someone that has been training for 6 years and only then taking it's first fight, but that is rare and usually, the idea is to rank similar fighters to avoid having a bloodbath as it happened to you.

Again, and specially because this was a school environment, the coach should be fired and prevented from coaching ever again.

Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#25

Post by stiff »

leoh wrote: post #23
stiff wrote: post #18

Unfortunately so-called "common sense" lags a few hundred years behind scientific understanding and most people for most of their lifes still think of themselves as a Cartesian spirit "trapped" in a body, at least until serious disease occurs for the first time. The moment you really internalize that all your memories, dreams and reflections are collected in a small region in the front part of your brain, which basic…

Interesting, but I don't see how common sense lags hundreds of years behind scientific understanding. I think it would be obvious to many people that head injuries are dangerous both today and hundreds of years ago.

I will give you an example: ask a religious person you know in a completely neutral context where are memories stored and what would happen to a person after suffering severe head trauma. He or she will I guess not have any problems responding that memories are stored in the brain and that people with severe head trauma die, because everyone "learns" it at school. Yet the same person at a different time would fiercely convince you that there is an afterlife where your soul goes after death and where you are more or less the same person. It is not specific to religion, we seem to "know" a lot of things, but choose to not think of them too much for example because they evoke unpleasant emotions.

In general I think we do not as a rule change our deeply rooted beliefs or behaviours simply when new facts appear. It takes changes in social policies, education and to some extent also for new generations of people to replace old ones to have those new facts affect our way of living. That's what I meant by a lag between common sense and science.

Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#26

Post by xradionut »

johnvschmitt wrote: post #5

This is another example of how you should handle fear-based news. This coming from a guy who played H.S. Football in Texas, & is still good at math: Look at your odds: 1) You are VERY unlikely to ever play in the NFL. 7B people, ~10k people in NFL. 2) If you play team sports as a youth, you will learn how to: A) deal with adversity, & perserve. Even if you don't win, you learn that you can survive, learn, & live. It…

My co-workers daughter plays volleyball and was out of school for 3 weeks due to a ball being hit into her head.

I played multiple contact sports in Texas schools, decades ago and with research coming out, wonder if my mental potential or others was damaged by the some of the hits I took or delivered. The MMA training I did as an adult was much safer injury-wise.

You can be part of a team without being in a contact support. You can also workout with out increasing the chances of getting shredded by an outsider linebacker or a cut block or 90 mph fastball.

Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#28

Post by bmj »

corin_ wrote: post #13
grogenaut wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, they're not sports

Technically (and subjectively for most people) they are. Golf, tennis, athletics, etc... plus the many limited-contact sports such as soccer, baseball, etc. etc.

soccer

There have been some studies investigating the effects of heading the ball on the brain[0].

[0] For example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11347686

Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#29

Post by colemorrison »

cpursley wrote: post #27

The real question is, 'How damaged are NFL fan's brains?'

yes, yes, yes!

How odd that such a huge portion of the US worships a ton of bulked up dudes tossing a brown ball back and forth. My favorite oddities:

1. One that smacked me in the face from Paul Graham's essay was that when a CEO makes 100x the normal pay...it is an outrage. But those same people complaining are okay with all of these athletes making 128x pay.

2. They're just throwing a ball back and forth. "Oh but they're generating economic surplus!" Napoleon Bonaparte once thought that by having people dig holes in the ground he was doing the same. . . think about how better the world would be if the people in the NFL industry (athletes + overhead) spent their talents in another field??

Bastiat's "What is Not Seen" beckons this: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

3. All of the fans say 'We won!' No asshole, "They won." Good for them, they worked hard (at game..) and did well. You, on the other hand, sat on your ass and drank a lot of beer.

4. Some cities base the majority of their culture around these ridiculous customs. Take Louisville Kentucky (and Lexington Kentucky) for example........ IT is a RELIGION here. Speaking out against these teams is borderline heresy.

5. Die hard fans quote game/player stats like their number-crunching statisticians. Amongst the groups where sports is religion, these "statisticians" are revered.

Re: How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

#30

Post by tomflack »

colemorrison wrote: post #29
cpursley wrote: post #27

The real question is, 'How damaged are NFL fan's brains?'

yes, yes, yes! How odd that such a huge portion of the US worships a ton of bulked up dudes tossing a brown ball back and forth. My favorite oddities: 1. One that smacked me in the face from Paul Graham's essay was that when a CEO makes 100x the normal pay...it is an outrage. But those same people complaining are okay with all of these athletes making 128x pay. 2. They're just throwing a ball back and forth. "Oh but…

We get it, you don't like sports. As a geek who grew up playing the occasional sport but not really enjoying it, finding a sport I truly enjoy at the age of 26 (baseball, not so popular in my country) and following a team has been eye-opening.

Sports fans have welcomed me, and been very accommodating explaining parts of the game I don't understand.

And then there are other geeks like you - that have an almost visceral reaction to the idea that people would enjoy something like that. I don't understand people who have such a negative view of others' happiness.

Oh I'm sure you have some kind of horror locker-room story where the football team did something disgusting to you, but sports wasn't what did it. Those alpha males would have some something similar even without the context of sports.

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