

How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains? - danso
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/how-damaged-are-nfl-players-brains.html

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sgpl
Somewhat unrelated but when I was in school and still naive (sophomore year -
US equivalent), at the insistance of my house boxing captain (went to a
boarding school that had 5 houses/residences), I took up boxing as a sport
because it looked fun, and I thought I could win my weight category. Long
story short, some senior went on a crazy diet, and entered my weight category,
and as luck would have it, I was the one drawn to fight him instead of the
other three that I could have drawn against.

On the day of, though we had protective head gear, mouth guards, and other
such stuff, this dude banged me up pretty bad for three one minute rounds that
was allotted for our bout. At the time I was happy that I wasn't knocked out
(we had technical knockouts if one dude was getting banged up pretty badly),
but in retrospect that would have been a better outcome.

For the next few days/weeks, though I looked normal, my head felt swollen, and
it would pulsate randomly when I put my head down on a pillow or try and take
notes (similar the the feeling when trying to find your pulse on your wrist
times.10). The school doc gave me some pain killers, but even when not on
them, my attention span was gone and I couldn't stay focused at all for the
next few days. Foolishly I boxed again next year, but was better at defending
my self, so wasn't hit much.

I recently graduated from 4 years of college, and looking back it had a
significant affect on my memory/retention my junior and senior years of
school, and my focus was never the same and god knows what else was damaged.
Perhaps I am attributing my decline in academic performance to that single
incident, when there could be a bunch of other reasons (correlation doesn't
imply causation), but if I could take those three minutes back at the cost of
a year of my life, I probably would.

I recently saw a TED talk[1] by Amy Cuddy, a professor @ HBS, on an unrelated
subject, where she talks about suffering head trauma in a car accident, that
resulted in her having to take significantly longer to graduate college,
because of the accident's affect on her mental cognition.

[1] <http://www.ted.com/speakers/amy_cuddy.html>

~~~
Iterated
Boxing is extremely damaging to the brain. The gloves make it even worse
because it allows a boxer to sustain more blows for a longer period of time.
If there were no gloves there would be quicker knockouts and less bouncing of
the brain around in a boxer's skull for extended periods of time. This is why
many posit that MMA is safer than boxing. Smaller gloves mean quicker
knockouts. There are also ways to win MMA fights that don't involve direct
punching.

~~~
brazzy
Actually, if there were no gloves, there would be very little punching to the
head, because that would often lead to broken fingers rather than knockouts.

Gloves were introduced because the few punches to the head nearly always
caused cuts, making bare-knuckle boxing a very bloody sport.

Gloves made boxing palatable to the glamour crowd, at the cost of the
fighters' health (and sometimes life).

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rdtsc
Start with high school. Go there and see how many kids go around the hallways
with dislocated shoulders, sprained ankles, fractures, neck braces, broken
fingers from playing contact sports. Of course concussions are cumulative so
those are not obvious at first.

Now look for burnt fingers from Bunsen burners or from building model rockets
you probably won't find many. Because as soon as that happens those real
chemistry sets get replaced with soda and vinegar and power point slides. But
having kids bump into each other head first running at full speed is
acceptable.

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stiff
Unfortunately so-called "common sense" lags a few hundred years behind
scientific understanding and most people for most of their lifes still think
of themselves as a Cartesian spirit "trapped" in a body, at least until
serious disease occurs for the first time.

The moment you really internalize that all your memories, dreams and
reflections are collected in a small region in the front part of your brain,
which basically is a ball of meat suspended in some fluid in your skull, is
the moment you might start to actually care for your brain not getting thrown
around too much. The same thing goes for car accidents and having a basic
intuitive feel of high-school level physics .

~~~
leoh
Interesting, but I don't see how common sense lags hundreds of years behind
scientific understanding. I think it would be obvious to many people that head
injuries are dangerous both today and hundreds of years ago.

~~~
stiff
I will give you an example: ask a religious person you know in a completely
neutral context where are memories stored and what would happen to a person
after suffering severe head trauma. He or she will I guess not have any
problems responding that memories are stored in the brain and that people with
severe head trauma die, because everyone "learns" it at school. Yet the same
person at a different time would fiercely convince you that there is an
afterlife where your soul goes after death and where you are more or less the
same person. It is not specific to religion, we seem to "know" a lot of
things, but choose to not think of them too much for example because they
evoke unpleasant emotions.

In general I think we do not as a rule change our deeply rooted beliefs or
behaviours simply when new facts appear. It takes changes in social policies,
education and to some extent also for new generations of people to replace old
ones to have those new facts affect our way of living. That's what I meant by
a lag between common sense and science.

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ritchiea
Absolutely shocking that Malcolm Gladwell's initial declaration that football
is unequivocal brutality does not play out as clearly in actual data.

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johnvschmitt
This is another example of how you should handle fear-based news.

This coming from a guy who played H.S. Football in Texas, & is still good at
math:

Look at your odds:

1) You are VERY unlikely to ever play in the NFL. 7B people, ~10k people in
NFL.

2) If you play team sports as a youth, you will learn how to: A) deal with
adversity, & perserve. Even if you don't win, you learn that you can survive,
learn, & live. It makes you resilient. Resiliency is better than raw strength.
B) deal with team dynamics. If you can't fire the member, you quickly realize
that you must improve the weakness of your teammates, & welcome similar offers
from them on your own weaknesses. C) Learn that exercise is fun, is living, &
is something you embrace.

Or, you can simply live in fear, & increase your odds tremendously to die by
diabetes, & idleness. "Sitting is the new Smoking Cigarettes.."

~~~
scoofy
This kind of bs talk radio approach is exactly the thing scientists are trying
to cut through. If the data says football is damaging most kids lives, we
should go with the data. It's just a game and there are plenty of other games
we can play. It has nothing to do with "fear-based news".

~~~
johnvschmitt
Go with the data, right. The data shows that NFL players have damage, not the
average high school player.

That's like saying, "Studies show that the top 0.01% of hackers are suicidal,
so don't do computer programming!"

I've played other team contact sports (Basketball & soccer), but really
football was the best at making me resilient. There's no comparison. The
benefits outweigh the risk for 99.9% of players, & for the elite who go on to
the NFL (0.1%), then the risks may outweigh the benefits.

~~~
p9idf
"The benefits outweigh the risk for 99.9% of players"

Does the data support that or did you make that up? This would be a more
interesting discussion if it has some scientific substance.

~~~
eric-hu
It sounds like the data is unknown for the remaining 99.9%. In that case, no
scientific conclusion should be drawn at all.

I still appreciate his johnvschmitt's initial comment because it's an anecdote
about how football has benefited him.

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cpursley
The real question is, 'How damaged are NFL fan's brains?'

~~~
colemorrison
yes, yes, yes!

How odd that such a huge portion of the US worships a ton of bulked up dudes
tossing a brown ball back and forth. My favorite oddities:

1\. One that smacked me in the face from Paul Graham's essay was that when a
CEO makes 100x the normal pay...it is an outrage. But those same people
complaining are okay with all of these athletes making 128x pay.

2\. They're just throwing a ball back and forth. "Oh but they're generating
economic surplus!" Napoleon Bonaparte once thought that by having people dig
holes in the ground he was doing the same. . . think about how better the
world would be if the people in the NFL industry (athletes + overhead) spent
their talents in another field??

Bastiat's "What is Not Seen" beckons this:
<http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html>

3\. All of the fans say 'We won!' No asshole, "They won." Good for them, they
worked hard (at game..) and did well. You, on the other hand, sat on your ass
and drank a lot of beer.

4\. Some cities base the majority of their culture around these ridiculous
customs. Take Louisville Kentucky (and Lexington Kentucky) for example........
IT is a RELIGION here. Speaking out against these teams is borderline heresy.

5\. Die hard fans quote game/player stats like their number-crunching
statisticians. Amongst the groups where sports is religion, these
"statisticians" are revered.

~~~
tomflack
We get it, you don't like sports. As a geek who grew up playing the occasional
sport but not really enjoying it, finding a sport I truly enjoy at the age of
26 (baseball, not so popular in my country) and following a team has been eye-
opening.

Sports fans have welcomed me, and been very accommodating explaining parts of
the game I don't understand.

And then there are other geeks like you - that have an almost visceral
reaction to the idea that people would enjoy something like that. I don't
understand people who have such a negative view of others' happiness.

Oh I'm sure you have some kind of horror locker-room story where the football
team did something disgusting to you, but sports wasn't what did it. Those
alpha males would have some something similar even without the context of
sports.

~~~
cpursley
There's a HUGE difference in enjoying/playing sports compared to vicariously
living through professional athletes.

Getting together with friends for a pick-up game is not difficult and much
more gratifying and you can still drink beer afterwords.

~~~
tomflack
Why not do both! Your original comment "How damaged are NFL fans brains?" was
glib bullshit and you know it.

