Your Football Team

"A guy can change anything. His face, his home, his family, his girlfriend, his religion, his God. But there’s one thing he can’t change. He can’t change his passion."

 

~ Pablo Sandoval - El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret In Their Eyes).

 

Definitely one of the best crime films I've ever seen. A 2009 movie, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards.

The above quote tied in with the criminals love for his local football team, and the words ring so true. But football fans in general seem to have this idea that they couldn't have supported any other team. And I would include myself in that too. The thoughts of supporting anyone other than Manchester United just seems ridiculous. Frightening in fact.

Now unless you come from a household with a father, mother or older siblings who supported a certain team, yes you're probably going to be influenced by them and moulded by that environment. But it's a myth to think that you couldn't have supported any other team. It was just what you were exposed to in that time of your life. At that particular moment that set the tone for the future. The ups and downs. Downs mainly if you're currently supporting Louis Van Gaal and his "philosophy".

However once the choice is pinned down, especially at a young age, it's set for life. There is no going back. And the slagging of other fans and calling them fickle or 'typical', you could have been one of those fans yourself if the path was different. I mean if you supported that rival team, would you suddenly be ascribed with these features for choosing to support them?

 

No obviously. But we all assume so.
I do it regularly. And it's just a very strange thing.

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I'll see you when I get my new glasses...

Have a look.

 

The Explanation: 

 

Inattentional blindness, a phenomenon known as "the failure to notice an unexpected stimulus that is in one’s field of vision when other attention-demanding tasks are being performed." This phenomenon is classified as a psychological attentional error - and you'll be relieved to know -  not the result of visionary deficits. The main reason for this lack of attention is the overload of stimuli surrounding us; in order to be able to focus on the intended things, we learn to disregard many others and be unaware of the unattended stimuli. There have been a large number of experiments demonstrating that this phenomenon has a significant effect on people’s perception...and now this one with you.

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"What we see depends mainly on what we look for." ~ John Lubbock

The Mozart Effect

Named after the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791), this finding, first reported in the journal Nature in 1993 (pdf here) , said that listening to compositions by Mozart increases scores on tests of spatial ability for a short while.



In the original experiment, college students were given various tests after experiencing each of the following for ten minutes; listening to Mozart's sonata for two pianos in D major K488, listening to a relaxation tape, or silence. Performance on the paper-folding subtest of the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale was significantly better after listening to Mozart than after the other two treatments, but the effect dissipated after about 15 minutes, and other non-spatial tasks were unaffected.

 

The finding has been contested by other researchers and has been widely misinterpreted to imply that listening to Mozart, or just classical music in general, increases one's intelligence.

 

Several independent research studies have shown that children who receive extensive training in musical performance achieve significantly higher average scores on tests of spatial ability, but that long-term consequence is not the Mozart effect.

The Cracked Jar

An Indian legend tells of a man who carried water to his village every day, in two large jars tied to the ends of a wooden pole, which he balanced on his back. One of the jars was older than the other, and had some small cracks; every time the man covered the distance to his house, half of the water was lost.

For two years, the man made the same journey. The younger jar was always very proud of its performance, safe in the knowledge that it was up to the mission it had been made for, while the other jar was mortified with shame at only fulfilling half of its allotted task, even though it knew that those cracks were the result of many years hard work.

It was so ashamed that one day, while the man got ready to fetch water from the well, it decided to speak to him: ''I want to apologize, but because of the many years of service, you are only able to deliver half of my load, and quench half of the thirst which awaits you at your home''.

The man smiled, and said: ''When we return, observe carefully the path''. And so it did. And the jar noticed that, on its side, many flowers and plants grew. ''See how nature is more lovely on your side? commented the man, I always knew you were cracked, and decided to make use of this fact. I planted flowers and vegetables, and you have always watered them. I have picked many roses to decorate my house with, I have fed my children with lettuce, cabbage and onions. If you were not as you are, how could I have done that?''

''All of us, at some point, grow old and start to acquire other qualities. We can always make the most of each one of these new qualities and obtain a good result.''

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The Default Network Mode; The Brain's Screensaver

The default mode network (DMN) is a network of brain components active when during daydreaming, self-generated thought, and when not attending to outside stimuli. Marcus Raichle, the discoverer of the DMN, has referred to it as "the orchestrator of the self". It is most active when the brain is at rest or involved in social communication.

 

The concept of brain resting-state network arose from observations made when comparing cerebral perfusion during cognitive processing to that measured during passive baseline conditions such as at rest, that is, when subjects lie in the dark and are instructed to think about nothing in particular (Mevel, 2011).

Raichle first used the term in 2001 to describe the nature of brain activity when it is not engaged in any specific, externally focused task. It's been considered quite an elaborate system, and while there are no definitive functions of the DMN as of yet, some proposed have included internal processes such as self-reflection to diffused passive attention. The DMN is generally inhibited in most cognitive tasks, however, tasks that involve episodic memory does not deactivate the DMN - suggesting a link.

The main hypotheses associated with the DMN and cognitive functions are, the Internal Mentation Hypothesis, and the Sentinel Hypothesis. The Internal Mentation hypothesis holds that DMN is important in introspection and internal attention. The Sentinel Hypothesis argues that the DMN supports a low level ''exploratory'' attention that surveys for unexpected stimuli.

Although some variation occurs, the default network mostly includes medial brain structures, i.e., the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the inferior parietal lobe, the lateral temporal cortex, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampal formation. Probing the functional anatomy of the network in detail reveals that it is best understood as multiple interacting subsystems (Buckner, 2008).

The link between DMN and episodic memory is well established. It is now known that retrieval of episodic memories, whether internally or externally cued; relies on the DMN (Cabeza et al., 2011). Further, dysfunction of both grey matter of DMN nodes as well as white matter connections are implicated in Alzheimer's Disease, a disease with obvious prominent effects on episodic memory. People with early signs of Alzheimer's Disease have unusual resting state signatures, while in Autism; the resting-state networks can be 'hyperconnected'.

People who are depressed show an increase in DMN activity. This is likely to be precisely because what characterizes depression is a sense of constant rumination and negative self-referential mental activity – in neurological terms being stuck in the DMN. (Smith, 2015). Others researchers discovered findings that suggest increased default mode network activation during meditation (Xu et al., 2014), indicating that this activation is related to the relaxed focus of attention, which allows spontaneous thoughts, images, sensations, memories, and emotions to emerge and pass freely, accepting them as part of the meditation process (Xu et al., 2014). The DMN has also been linked with depression (Belleau et al., 2014), schizophrenia (Mingoia et al., 2012), and post traumatic stress disorder (Lanius et al., 2009).

While the functional significance of the DMN remains unknown, converging evidence suggests that the DMN might be critical for self-referential processing (e.g., introspection). Age differences in the ability to deactivate the DMN has been found between older and younger adults, which may reflect the cognitive change experienced in normal aging (Park et al, 2009). The mental activity of the DMN has still not been rigorously assessed to date. Despite the growing amount of knowledge regarding the DMN physiology and anatomy, the cognitive function of this network is still poorly understood (Mevel, 2011).

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''Whatever resting activity is doing, its existence proves one thing - the brain only rests when you're dead'' ~ Miall (2009)