Parisian Basketball: Where’s the ball?

I love basketball. Beyond the flashy dunks and glitzy ego-driven trash talk lies sophistication and balance. The harmonious and smooth movement of the ball around the player and around the court can be mesmerizing. However, while fancy dribbling and acrobatic athleticism may inundate the highlight reels, the true beauty of the game lies in the simple versatility of ball movement, or in other words, how you handle the basketball while on the court. How can we move the ball without making a mistake and giving the other team a chance to take it back? This question came to mind when I stepped on the court a few days ago. Since being in Paris, I knew I would miss the game too much to stop myself from playing: I had to play, even if I couldn’t speak the language. Lucky for me, I found a small park across the street from the Cite U. with a basketball court. Without saying a word, I pointed to the ball and then pointed to myself. The guys on the court nodded their heads in approval as I stepped up and played in a game.

Parisian Basketball Court

While I was a bit anxious to be playing in another country in a game that requires teamwork and communication, all the stress faded away as I caught a pass and put up an easy open shot close to the rim. While my teammates and I couldn’t really say much of anything to each other, we were in perfect unison. We knew what we were all doing as we were scrambling around the court, trying to deceive our opponents with subtle movements and sharp explosions for open positioning.

Good basketball isn’t precedent on what’s shown on the big screen. It’s about teamwork, and teamwork is manifested through good passing. Together as a team, we work as a cohesive unit to pass the ball before eventually shoot a high-percentage shot. What’s easier, an open shot 2 feet from the rim, or a behind the back, 360 spin shot 20 feet away? Passing is what is essential for success and playing with these guys, where grounded fundamentals overtake acrobatic athleticism, makes the game so much fun as an outsider.

So what do you need to do to make a good pass? In a game that has so many variables, it’s easy to get distracted. You have to consider so many things and not only understand the movement of your own players, but also the actions of your opponents to be able to synthesize that information and make an affirmative decision. This consideration and process is an example of working memory, or the ability to hold multiple pieces of information (i.e. position and movement of players) and then manipulate that information for further comprehension (i.e. the guy on my left will be open for a pass soon) (Furley, 2013). As much as want to retain the relevant information to make a good decision, we conversely want to exclude the unnecessary information. When playing basketball or any other goal-driven task, who cares what color someone’s eyes are or what that green stuff stuck in their teeth is. If our brains readily accepted every detail, our minds would be too overwhelmed with all that information. Therefore, we filter out what’s needed and what’s not. This process of focusing on the important stuff while paying little attention to the unimportant details that come from our senses is known as top-down modulation (Zanto, 2009). Furthermore, this modulation is greatly tied to attention and focus. Through brain scans and other neural imaging, the evidence shows that there is an overlap in activity in the brain between what we place our attention on and our working memory (Zanto, 2009). Essentially, what we choose to emphasize as important (perhaps unknowingly) in a task will be more readily recalled and available as known information.

He has him beat

What I’ve just said should make sense– if we focus on something, we are better able to hold that information and use it. So what about distractions? Do they affect our performance somehow? One study tested the effect of ignoring irrelevant information in working memory performance. In the study, subjects were shown multiple videos of moving colored dots and then tested their working memory by asking them if a sample video matched what they stored in their memory. The subjects were broken up into 3 groups: some were told to remember color (but ignore motion), others were told to remember motion (but ignore color), and some were told to remember both. By measuring the brain activity while performing these tasks, the researchers found that those that performed poorly (based on a score that factored accuracy and time to recall) showed more brain activity in areas that correlated with the characteristic they were supposed to ignore, while those that performed well showed less activity in regions of the brain they were told to ignore (Zanto, 2009). By showing more activity in regions of the brain that should not be lit up (because they are not pertinent to the task), people that performed poorly did not show significant top-down modulation (the ability to focus, but ignore extraneous information), and the researchers concluded that neural suppression (low activity) of irrelevant information correlated with greater working memory performance.

To tie this back to basketball, making a good pass takes a lot of concentration, but it also requires factoring out what doesn’t matter. I would say this ability to discern what does and does not matter comes from experience and practice. By knowing what cues indicate an opening and what works and does not, basketball players are able to discern what information is necessary and what isn’t to make the right pass. Playing with the Parisians in a universal game was so much fun because they knew what passes to make and how to run around the court so that the ball could seamlessly move around the court and into the hoop. By ignoring the irrelevant information, which becomes more obvious through experience, they were perhaps able to optimize their working memory by effectively processing the important information to make the right pass and get the easy basket. As someone that can’t speak a lick of French, it’s weird how my team understood exactly what I was doing when I would be running on the court, looking for a pass. It seems like my body language was saying all it needed to say to play the game. How cool is that?

~Sam Yang

References:

Furley P, Memmert D (2013). “Whom should I pass to?” the more options the more attentional guidance from working memory. PLoS ONE 8 (5):e62278.

Zanto TP, Gazzaley A (2009). Neural suppresion of irrelevant information underlies optimal working memory performance. The Journal of neuroscience: the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 29 (10): 3059-3066.