Exhibiting supreme grace and power, soccer players display how marvelously plastic the human mind is every time they take the pitch.
Right on time, a piece from BBC Future describes in more detail how, through repetition and practice, footballers make the split second calculations needed to dribble through defenders or arrive on the end of a long ball to nod home a goal. It's the same skill, incidentally, that many of us use everyday while driving a car. Tom Stafford:
Intelligence involves using conscious deliberation at the right level to optimally control your actions. Driving a car is easier because you don't have to think about the physics of the combustion engine, and it's also easier because you no longer have to think about the movements required to change gear or turn on the indicators. But just because driving a car relies on automatic skills like these, doesn't mean that you're mindless when driving a car. The better drivers, just like the better footballers, are making more choices each time they show off their talents, not fewer.
Known as embedded cognition, the essential idea is that our intelligence is distributed, which means that Robin van Persie's feet have a mind of their own. And this rather simple shift in how we think about intelligence now informs roboticists, philosophers and the practice of medicine alike.
Check out the video highlight reel of van Persie. And have a closer look at this outrageous World Cup goal against Spain!
Wayne