
Total Recall: LeBron's mighty mind (2014) - wallflower
http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/11067098/lebron-james-greatest-weapon-brain
======
socrates1998
Impressive, no doubt. This type of memory happens more often than people
realize to athletes and coaches.

Pattern recognition in competitive sports is extremely valuable.

Lebron is one of the all time greats because he combines such unique gifts,
his memory, his work ethic, his physicality, size and quickness.

He is just a freak all the way around.

His basketball IQ has some interesting affects on teams he plays though. He
has problems submitting and listening to his coaches. Often because he thinks
he is right, which he often is.

Still, there can be only one person making decisions and Lebron does not like
to give up his power.

This is ultimately what caused him to leave Miami. He was the 4th most
important person in the organization behind the owner, the GM Pat Riley, the
head coach and the homegrown star (Dwayne Wade).

When he went back to Cleveland, he went to an organization that he could
dominate from top to bottom.

I think his desire for influence and power has hurt his career to a certain
extent.

If he had gone to San Antonio, for example, he might have had several more
titles by now.

I don't see the Lakers winning one in the few years, so Lebron will probably
end his career with 3.

~~~
jimbokun
Winning a title _in Cleveland_ is one of the singular greatest achievements in
NBA history, and in American sports history.

In a lot of ways, it transcends the quantitative metrics we generally use to
measure athletes' success.

LeBron will not control the Lakers from top to bottom, especially with an even
more charismatic leader like Magic around. I think it's generally understood
he went to LA in part to kick start his post playing career.

Both of which are to say, LeBron has his own goals, desires, and motivations
for his decisions, which may sometimes go beyond just counting rings.

(Also, I'm still not ruling out Magic, LeBron, and the pull of LA leading to
another title before LeBron retires.)

~~~
cloudwalking

      I think it's generally understood he went to LA in part to kick start his post playing career.
    

I'm curious about this, do you know of any good reading?

~~~
jimbokun
Random example:

[https://247sports.com/nba/cleveland-
cavaliers/Article/David-...](https://247sports.com/nba/cleveland-
cavaliers/Article/David-Griffin-believes-LeBron-James-signed-with-Los-Angeles-
Lakers-to-set-up-post-NBA-career-121150229/)

------
William1000
His memory has always been laughably impressive:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVJFRl6f6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVJFRl6f6s)

~~~
maxxxxx
I have heard the same about the top Formula One Drivers. After the race they
can recall almost every turn of the race in detail with their engineers. It
takes hours to get all the information across. It makes sense that a good
memory is big asset for an athlete. It allows them to replay a situation and
learn from it. When I did martial arts my memory of a fight was pretty vague
so I couldn't analyze and learn much.

~~~
prmph
I've noticed this ability as well in other fields: it seems those at the very
top (chess grandmasters, piano virtuosos, etc) have an incredible ability to
remember the details of performances in their field. The question is: is it
their existing recall abilities that (in part) helps them to get to the top,
or is it the process of becoming that good that greatly enhances their memory?

~~~
pterhx
In Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Ericsson had chess
grandmasters look chess boards of real games, and they could recreate the
board in a pretty short fashion.

But when they took chess boards of randomly placed pieces, they could not
remember the placement of pieces any better than a random group of people.

The idea is that through practice, you develop the ability pattern match and
chunk together the data into more cohesive blocks, and memory fewer of these
blocks.

The rough analogy in software is to take a quick look at some code and
recognize the design patterns, and remember the design patterns used rather
each individual character.

In fact, words are a form of chunking -- we don't remember hundreds of
character sequences, but we remember the words instead.

~~~
maxxxxx
It's probably like boxing a beginner. They do all kinds of weird stuff you
never have seen and don't know how to categorize.

~~~
cepth
If you want to see what pterhx was referring to in action, National Geographic
did a documentary featuring Susan Polgar a few years back. The relevant clip
and timestamp are here:
[https://youtu.be/LdKHrxcpxrY?t=238](https://youtu.be/LdKHrxcpxrY?t=238).

The difficulty in recalling nonsensical positions is not that it's like
"boxing a beginner", it's that the pieces are literally placed in a way that
the positions could not have been reached with legal moves.

Analogously, remembering famous quotes or memorable phrases in a certain
language is quite easy. If instead, you had to memorize a string of randomly
placed words that did not follow established rules of grammar or sentence
structure, it'd be a much harder task.

Chunking is context and experience dependent.

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siruncledrew
It's cool to watch alongside the game action he's describing:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/8jajbd/lebrons_photogr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/8jajbd/lebrons_photographic_memory_overlayed_over_video/)

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atmosx
As others suggested, this is common in sports. I believe the reason is
epinephrine release. Epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) greatly improves
attention to details and vivid memories by enhancing the brain, facilitating
long-term memory recording.

From wikipedia:

\---

Epinephrine acts by binding to a variety of adrenergic receptors [...]. Its
actions are to increase peripheral resistance via α1 receptor-dependent
vasoconstriction and to increase cardiac output via its binding to β1
receptors. The goal of reducing peripheral circulation is to increase coronary
and cerebral perfusion pressures and therefore increase oxygen exchange at the
cellular level.[64] While epinephrine does increase aortic, cerebral, and
carotid circulation pressure, it lowers carotid blood flow and end-tidal CO2
or ETCO2 levels. It appears that epinephrine may be improving macrocirculation
at the expense of the capillary beds where actual perfusion is taking place.

\---

I would argue that adrenaline can turn seconds in to years, the world suddenly
starts going in slow motion, especially when your body is trained by having
adrenaline rushes frequently.

One of the reasons many newly hired SREs learn many things about their stack
quickly over incidents is adrenaline rushes... Of course, in the case of
incident response, it might have negative connotations as a recent talk at
SRECon by a DO employee showed: nearly 70% of SREs had trouble sleeping
because of anxiety after am incident.

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gargarplex
The better you are at something, the more efficient your mind is at encoding
the memory. It's like the brain has a Huffman codes table for all the various
abstract ideas, so one may encode information efficiently and therefore have
more elaborate recall

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jl2718
First-off, I think this is interesting because athletes have hit the point of
diminishing returns on physical abilities, and now the games are turning
mental in every sport. The NBA has done a great job at turning strategy into a
spectator sport. In the NFL, the possibly single worst athlete in the
quarterback position is the best ever. They are changing too. I’m not sure MLB
can adapt. I wonder whether this doesn’t just pave the way for eSports to take
over.

~~~
_raoulcousins
I don't follow football but I'm curious. Who is the bad athlete/best player
you're referring to?

~~~
sp3000
Tom Brady is notorious for how unathletic he was during the NFL combine before
the draft (in which he was picked in the 6th round, #199). Here is a picture
just to give you an idea: [https://sports.cbsimg.net/images/blogs/Tom-Brady-
shirtless-0...](https://sports.cbsimg.net/images/blogs/Tom-Brady-
shirtless-02-15-15.jpg)

Now I don't think there is much argument that he is the greatest player to
ever play the game.

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wallflower
LeBron James is arguably the greatest player of his modern era (Wilt
Chamberlain did not have as much competition), if not all time.

Yes, he has tremendous physical gifts and dexterity.

What most people don't know is he has an almost uncanny eidetic memory that
allows him to truly know how the other players on a team have played against
him or his team in the past _without_ studying game video ipso facto... and
also whup them at Madden.

> "When I was a kid my coaches started to say to me that I remembered things
> that happened in games from a few tournaments back -- and that surprised
> them," James says. "I started to realize how important that could be years
> later, probably when I was in high school. And then, eventually, I realized
> that it can get me into trouble."

~~~
ssharp
Besides his physical and mental talents, he's also an incredibly dedicated
worker and has also embraced a lot of innovative playing, training and
recovery ideas that has helped him extend his peak physical years beyond where
they normally are.

One of the surprising things I heard about last year was that the newer
basketball cameras that record all aspects of play rated him as one of (maybe
even the) slowest players in the game. Of course, if you've ever watched him
run, especially on a chase-down block (such as the one he did in the 2016 NBA
Finals game 7), you'd know he's one of the fastest players in the league.
However, he's figured out ways to be effective without moving that much so he
preserves energy.

At age 33 last season, he played every single game of the regular season, plus
22 playoff games. He's made the NBA finals eight years in a row, which would
be roughly the equivalent of 2 additional regular seasons, though playoff
basketball is substantially more physically demanding, so the physical strain
would be more than just 2 additional seasons.

I think ultimately, the longevity of his dominance, coupled with how talented
the rest of the league has been during his tenure, will be the factor that
makes him the best player of all time.

~~~
philwelch
LeBron also has very healthy body mechanics, which is an underrated part of
durability. The difference between more durable and less durable players isn’t
only down to conditioning and training and genetics; an NBA player jumps and
lands, cuts and stops, and generally subjects his body to the limits of what
it can withstand. Constantly and repeatedly doing that in biomechanically
vulnerable ways (bracing the knees inward, trying to stick one-footed
landings, landing on the heels, letting the knees translate in front of the
toes) will absolutely wear down and break any player.

~~~
toasterlovin
I wouldn't discount him just being more durable as a result of his build. He's
6'8" and 250lbs, which is on the more muscular side for the NBA.

I'm 6'6" and have been anywhere from 180-320lbs as an adult (currently about
290lbs), with the range being due to adding significant muscle mass as a
result of weight lifting. I can tell you that I am much more durable at my
current weight than I was at 180lbs. Bumps and falls that woulda hurt a lot in
past just aren't a big deal any more.

~~~
philwelch
LeBron’s size and body composition helps a hell of a lot, but good body
mechanics—especially landing mechanics—get more important, not less, as a
player gets bigger and stronger, because the amount of landing energy he has
to dissipate grows in proportion to those factors.

~~~
toasterlovin
Agree 100% that mechanics are important for things like landing jumps. Body
composition is probably more important for most other sources of injury,
though. After all, it's hard to have proper mechanics when you collide with
somebody unexpectedly, or when you land on your side because somebody knocked
your legs out from under you.

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mattdeboard
I've been thinking a lot lately about how intertwined memory and the brain's
capacity for pattern matching are. I'm really curious how they interplay,
neurologically/chemically

------
raihansaputra
I'm really curious on those who do have these kind of usable high memory
capacity. I seem to be able to remember random facts in my head but for other,
more important subjects (such as basic numbers about the company I'm working
for, my emotions and feelings on a certain point in life, lessons and
experiences that I've gone through in life) seem to pass me by and I feel like
I just have these holes in my memory that I can't patch. I remember my friends
sometimes ask me why I date my Instax pictures and I just realised that I
cannot recall my memories easily without aids and/or concrete data (one of the
reasons why it's hard for me to turn off my location history on Google). This
is especially a hindrance in my personal/social life as I often forget
significant life events for myself or others and come across as uncaring to
others.

How to improve my memory in general, basically, is my question. I've read
'Moonwalking with Einstein' that describes techniques used in memory
competitions (such as recalling thousands of digits of pi) but I don't feel
that is applicable in real life. Maybe someone here could chime in on that.

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bsparker
Lebron is also a genuinely good human being and as a Clevelander, I wish him
the best of luck in LA.

------
jaggederest
I have a similar sort of eidetic memory and I do find it often more hassle
than help.

Most people seem to remember about as much as they need to remember, so
remembering more is often not about having extra access to information you
need, but rather remembering minutiae that are discarded as irrelevant by
others.

~~~
glass_of_water
Could you elaborate on how you find it to be a hassle? I find it interesting
that the imperfection of most people's memory could be a feature.

~~~
jaggederest
Suddenly being highly distracted by relevant, compelling, irresistible memory
cascades at inopportune moments. Remembering every mistake and embarrassement
from your entire life, age 4 to 35. There's some evidence that eidetic memory
is tied to anxiety disorders and anecdotally I can believe it.

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dmoy
Wow I would want to clone his brain to help me maintain legacy code systems.

~~~
yosito
Seriously, I can't even remember the code I wrote last week.

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rajacombinator
This isn’t really surprising at all for anyone that competes at a high
strategic level. However it is interesting how vivid and persistent these
memories are compared to many other things.

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coleca
60 Minutes did a story on this condition four years ago or so. They called it
"Super Memory". Actress Marilu Henner was one of the people that possess this
super recall ability.

Part 1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeEQ85m79I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeEQ85m79I)

Part 2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en23bCvp-
Fw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en23bCvp-Fw)

~~~
beautifulfreak
They called it superior autobiographical memory.

------
DisruptiveDave
Sean McVay (NFL's LA Rams coach) has something similar going on:
[https://www.businessinsider.com/sean-mcvay-memory-hbo-
real-s...](https://www.businessinsider.com/sean-mcvay-memory-hbo-real-sports-
lebron-james-2018-7)

~~~
pitt1980
When Lane Kiffin was the offensive coordinator at Alabama in 2015, he
interviewed a recent college grad who had done his undergraduate work at
Florida and Kansas. Charlie Weis Jr., the son of the former Notre Dame and
Kansas coach, sought an analyst job with the Crimson Tide, and Kiffin had been
told the kid had a photographic memory.

So during the interview, Kiffin handed Weis his driver’s license and his
credit card. You can have these for three minutes, Kiffin recalled telling
Weis. Then I’ll take them back and start asking questions. After the allotted
time ended, Kiffin took back the cards and started the test.

What street do I live on?

Weis answered correctly. He correctly recited various facts gleaned from the
two cards. The next day, Kiffin decided to test the job candidate’s retention.

What’s the expiration date on my credit card?

Weis answered correctly. If he didn’t already have the job, that cinched it.

Weis and Kiffin spent two seasons together in Tuscaloosa. Well, most of two
seasons. Kiffin jokes that they were 28–1 together and 0–1 apart. This year,
they’re back together with different job titles. Kiffin is the second-year
head coach at Florida Atlantic, leading a team that went 11–3 and won
Conference USA last season. Weis, who turned 25 in April, is the offensive
coordinator. “Sometimes it’s crazy to think about,” Weis said Sunday.

Weis doesn’t think about it too often, though. He’s too busy for
introspection. A night earlier, Kiffin and Weis had led the FAU offense
through its most important scrimmage of the preseason. They’re trying to
winnow down a quarterback race that features three transfer quarterbacks
competing to take the job abdicated by 2017 starter Jason Driskel, who opted
to retire from football in January and who obtained a civil engineering degree
in May. In less than two weeks, the Owls will open the season at Oklahoma.
They haven’t trailed in a game since October, but they haven’t been challenged
the way they will by the three-time defending Big 12 champ.

Whether former Sooner Chris Robison, former Florida State Seminole DeAndre
Johnson or former Arkansas Razorback/SMU Mustang Rafe Peavey will win the job
is a hot topic on campus, but an even more intriguing question is this: Which
son of a famous football coach will call the plays? Will it be Kiffin—the son
of legendary NFL defensive coordinator Monte—or Weis? Weis, asked what
percentage of plays he called in Saturday’s scrimmage, deferred. “That’s up to
coach Kiffin to talk about,” he said. “It’s not my place.” Kiffin didn’t give
a direct answer either, and both men discussed a collaborative effort.

Their collaboration at Alabama worked beautifully for the Crimson Tide. Kiffin
designed the game plans with help from Weis, whose memory and attention to
detail allowed him to find vulnerabilities in defenses that Kiffin could
exploit on gameday. If the Owls can now combine Kiffin’s ability to spot
potential huge plays in-game with Weis’s thorough prep and instant recall, the
offense should be as good or better than the one that put up 6.8 yards a play
and 40.6 points a game last season. That recall, Kiffin believes, will give
FAU the equivalent of the photos that we see NFL quarterbacks thumbing through
on the sidelines during games. Such photos aren’t allowed in college football,
but there is no rule against a coach taking one in his head. Kiffin had an
idea Weis could do that when, during his Alabama interview, Weis rattled off
all 11 jersey numbers for the starting defense of a team he’d scouted earlier.
After working so closely with Weis in ’15 and ’16, Kiffin is sure of it.

[https://www.si.com/college-football/2018/08/20/charlie-
weis-...](https://www.si.com/college-football/2018/08/20/charlie-weis-jr-age-
florida-atlantic-lane-kiffin)

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mandeepj
I think you must be a good listener, have sharp focus and dedication to be
able to remember\store things for long term

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babesh
He isn't smart enough to adjust his offensive game.

His go to move is to lower his shoulder. The best defensive players and teams
give way and then he is off balance and he tends to miss the shot. He has done
that his entire career. See Durant and Iguodala's defense.

Also his straight line drives are completely negated by a good shot
blocker(s). See Tyson Chandler and the Mavericks.

A more adaptable player would have developed a runner, a low post game, and a
stop and pop. He consistently hasn't shown the adaptability or foresight to do
that... other than to form new super teams.

~~~
kmkemp
What's interesting about this form of criticism is that his ability to do any
basketball task is judged not by the ability that the median NBA player has at
that task but against the bar he's set in other areas. His jumpshot isn't as
great as his rebounding, playmaking, dribbling, or defense, so he's lazy or
lacks foresight? No matter how good you become, you will always have a
"weakest" area to your craft. He clearly has made tremendous strides in
shooting (did you see him play in high school?), and in fact, he is well above
average when judged against a median NBA player, which is itself remarkable
since he possesses the ability to score an efficient 25+ ppg without taking
any jumpshots at all.

~~~
kmkemp
In fact, 55% of his shots last season were jumpshots, which he converted with
a 47.2 eFG%.

[http://www.82games.com/1718/17CLE15.HTM](http://www.82games.com/1718/17CLE15.HTM)

