So I occasionally post pieces regarding how top sportsmen train or have certain philosophies that are applicable to the marital arts or just life in general. Here in Hong Kong we have not been immune to the "Linsanity" that has been sweeping the US and there was even a big fold-out poster of Jeremy Lin in the South China Morning Post last week (which my colleagues promptly photo-shopped and replaced the head with his number one-fan in the office and pasted it in his cubicle). Trawling though numerous pieces on the internet most of the analysis was pretty banal, concerning stereotyping and not giving up on your dreams. However there was one piece in the Atlantic that was a little more thoughtful than the rest. Here is the meat of the analysis with some commentary of my own. Lin is known not just for scoring but for "assists"--that is, he's good at passing the ball to teammates who are in a position to score. Being a good passer in basketball isn't the same as being a good passer in football. Quarterbacks tend to go sequentially through their targets--they look at the primary receiver, and if he's not open they look at the next prospect, and so on. In basketball, the great passers are simultaneously aware of several targets at once; their focus expands toward the edge of their peripheral vision. Indeed, sometimes the success of the pass depends on never looking directly at the person you're passing to, as that would tip off your opponents.
One of the most intriguing cultural contrasts between eastern and western ways of viewing the world was documented in experiments by the psychologist Richard Nisbett, some of them in collaboration with Takahiko Masuda. The upshot was that East Asians tend to view scenes more holistically than westerners. For further reading you can refer to their book The Geography of Thought
for more information.
for more information. In one experiment, East Asians and Westerners were shown pictures and then asked to remember what they'd seen. Westerners tended to recall the dominant foreground image. If the picture was of a beaming tourist with a mountain stream in the background, they'd remember the tourist clearly. The stream? Not so much. East Asians were on balance better than westerners at remembering the background.
Related tendencies showed up when people were asked to take pictures of other people. East Asians, compared to westerners, framed the pictures so that the individual was smaller relative to the entire scene.
An assessment of eastern and western art found something similar. East Asian landscape paintings, wrote Nisbett and Masuda, "tend to put the horizon high as it would be seen by a bird flying over the landscape or an artist perched on a high outcropping. Western landscapes put the horizon low, as it would be seen from the ground. Consequently, less of the landscape is seen."
[the author] played basketball in high school. Anyway, [he] remembered a kind of perceptual "frame shift" you needed to undergo when, on a fast break, or while driving the lane, you had targets to your left and right and needed to be aware of them simultaneously. It was a kind of broadening of your focus, toward a more wide angle view. You stared straight ahead but your focus wasn't straight ahead; in a sense, there was no focus.
Is it crazy to think that the perceptual tendencies that Nisbett and Masuda documented in East Asians could equip them for this sort of thing?
Actually Takuan Soho in his book - the Unfettered Mind talks a lot about this kind of thing when applied in the art of Kenjitsu. If you focus one one given thing to the exclusion of the gestalt then your mind "stops" and you cannot act in a fluid and free manner. The metaphor of sports and war is sometimes overdone, but the mad scramble on the court and the effect on your brain is probably the same, and there appropriate lessons and training might be applicable to both cases.
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