Working in Movement

One of the thing about athletics is the desire to improve; get faster, stronger, more coordinated or whatever it takes to get better. One way is to train harder, but that can have its limits. One way some athletes have busted through that limit is chemical. Look at the steroid controversy in major league baseball right now. There's lots of agreement that steroid use gives unfair advantages to those using them, even if there are serious side effects. Organizations governing sports have caught on and are seriously clamping down users -- leveling the playing field, if you will.

But there are other ways to athletic advantage. Steven Johnson points to one, surgery to alter structure, in A Cut Above. Here's an excerpt Johnson posted on his website:

In fact, there's a chance you've had one of these next-generation procedures: laser eye surgery. Great [baseball] hitters anticipate the type of pitch being thrown - fastball or curveball? - by detecting the rotation of the seams of the baseball, which means that good eyesight is as valuable to them as strength or agility. One study of more than a dozen players who had opted for laser surgery found that "players coming off eye surgery are likely to see substantial improvements in batting average and power."

But poor vision can hardly be considered an injury. At least a pitcher with a torn ligament can say that he required surgery to repair an injury to his arm. Some batters naturally possess more muscle tissue than others; artificially manipulating that endowment with steroids violates the ethics of the sport. Other batters naturally possess better vision than others, but for some reason artificially augmenting that endowment is perfectly acceptable. If the sport objects to taking a pill or applying a cream that temporarily changes your body's chemistry, surely it should be an even graver offense to reshape your cornea or reengineer tendon and bone structure.

As I read this, I began wondering about other "overlooked" ways of enhancing athletic performance. The first thing I thought about was my experience using imagined movement in my Feldenkrais practice. Most people who practice find the effects of accurately imagined movements to be as "real" as those of the actual movement. Could this be enhanced in some way?

Later, I ran across Touching Your Own Future: Haptic Tools, an article about simulated touch in virtual environments on an IT magazine site. Now granted, I don't usually think of information Technology and athletic performance as anything similar.

But it got me thinking about using virtual environments in sports training, especially if the proprioceptive sense can be reliability programmed into such environments. Lots of implications for rehab, too.

There's a term for this simulated proprioception. Haptics.

That's how I learned that in ecological psychology, "haptic touch" is the name of the system that lets us feel stuff through objects we hold, to "feel the road through the stick or cane, or even through the wheels of a car we are driving." He explained that, in this instance, "force and torque sensors buried in the arm" and other muscles are "activated the same way when we use a stick as when we touch with our hand." This is what allows humans (and a goodly number of our primate cousins—not to mention possibly raccoons and otters) to treat tools as if they were extensions of our bodies, extending our sense of touch through them.

But the most dramatic idea from that article came from Andy Clark, riffing on the fiction of Rudy Rucker:

He agreed it was possible, following up with this faintly unnerving summary that uses Rudy Rucker's term for the human nervous system part of a cyborg. "Any technology that operates robustly and continuously," he said, "can be factored in by the rest of the mind so as to become as much a part of us as non-consciously operating wetware."

Lots of stuff in Feldenkrais focuses on sense of self in the environment. Now I'm beginning to wonder about sense of self in virtual environments --and what effect that can have on athletic performance. Haptics might be one way to think about it, but I bet there's a pretty rich vein of wonder around this subject. It makes you think.