Total Recall: LeBron's mighty mind (2014)
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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.
I was blown away how much Mike Tyson knows about boxing history. Great athletes are skilled but they are also students of the game [1][2][3].
You can't get video anymore unless you look since Norm MacDonald Live episodes are off Youtube while he gets his new show on Netflix, but Mike Tyson | Norm Macdonald Live episode had so much boxing history sprinkled in it was amazing [4].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtRfwTLtiM8 [2] https://youtu.be/rhThso-PE_o?t=47m15s [3] https://www.boxinginsider.com/columns/mike-tyson-boxing-hist... [4] https://player.fm/series/norm-macdonald-live-1705948/ep-26-m...
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.)
I think it's generally understood he went to LA in part to kick start his post playing career.
I think it's more legacy definition, he's been talking 'Chasing a Ghost' for a years now and rebuilding LA (after 8 consecutive finals decimating the East, a Ring to Cle) would do that.
Leaving Mia for Cle was due to (Kyrie + 2*(#1 overall)) > (Bosh+(Wade - 1.2 knees)), and the Coming Home narrative.
Eh, he's barely a top 3 Laker, if only because Jerry West always lost to the Celtics, Wilt wasn't there for very long and still lost to the Celtics, and Shaq came and went. I put him third all time after Kareem and Magic.
But that really says a lot about the Lakers--you have to stop and think for awhile before naming the best NBA player who never played for the Lakers, Celtics, or Bulls at this point.
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.
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.
I have 20 years experience as a glassblower, and the apparent duration of the most intense parts has mentally expanded for me over time. Guitar playing is similar - my awareness while under pressure for improvisation or a slick solo has slowly changed over the years. The intensity of opening a wine glass foot is about the same as playing a quick improvised jazz solo. If you asked a musician how a performance went, they could probably tell you how it fell playing each line. Same with a glass collaboration – I can usually recall how making a piece went, but in a setting like a collaboration or competition, I would remember every part of making a 2 1/2 minute piece as if it was a 15 minute story.
When you start out making cups, the process can quickly go wrong in a jumble when it is time to open the rim. The next time, you remember to avoid that mistake… but might make a different one. Or maybe make the same one again. Each time it’s 10 or 20 minutes until you can be at that point again... it reminds me of 8 bit games where you have to go through a level repeatedly to get to a difficult jump, and keep trying til you make it. Eventually, you start finishing the process, and after many repetitions can do it without thinking. After even longer you learn every microsecond of the process - with glass, the feel of the hot bubble folding over and turning from a sphere to a flat disc in about 800 milliseconds, as you spin it in the flame. That’s the part that expands mentally for me - the control during that time. One learns to not fail to pay close attention at that time.
While these moments still feel like they are over in an instant, over time, my ability to make good decisions repeatedly while taking it in stride has increased. I’d sum it up as my level of overwhelmedness has gone down.
It’s as if time is expanded, though it all still happens very quickly. Due to all the practice, my awareness stays active instead of being overwhelmed. This phenomenon could also show up in other activities like sports.
Your question comes down to basically nature versus nurture, though. Do some people have innate talent, or does it come from training? It seems like the answer is both, of course. My analysis is that some people are better at releasing their minds to accept learning things. Then, it’s a matter of practice and experience. Anything eventually becomes commonplace.
For example, if you start off learning a language, there are all kinds of tiny details to pronunciation that you don't even recognize and could never recall afterwards. If you try to repeat what someone's said, you might miss a lot of those details.
But if you've become fluent at a native (or near-native) level, you've trained your brain to subconsciously recognize and focus on all of those details and can recite something that someone's said perfectly.
Similarly with basketball or any other highly curated group of individuals performing a skill.
The current drivers are really impressive too, they have the track layout, the braking points, the turning points of every track they race in their head to the point they can drive it by memory[1][2]. I think this also contributes to the memorisation of the race detail as the track contours and details are in their 'cache' or background memory so they can spend more cognitive capacity in feeling out the changes instead of trying to absorb the whole 'event' or race.
[0]: http://atlasf1.autosport.com/98/bel/schumacher.html
I'm guessing it's because of the adrenaline. I don't remember anything from my first Formula Ford race (and I had years and years of street racing experience at that time and vast databases of memories from those street races), but after a while that level of "combat" actually becomes cherished, you relish the "fight". Then you are in the position to make use of your memory to aid yourself in becoming better when you are not even participating.
I'd say this is probably more true for racers where seat time is very expensive so you must develop the ability to bench race (visualize yourself actually driving, shifting gears, looking into the corner, and so on, and so on) to become competitive.
FWIW, and in my personal experience; when you get to the point where you remember what you were actually thinking right before you made an input, then you are truly in a position to really improve when you are not even actually participating.
This reminds me of how many chess grandmasters can easily recall and recite and visualize every move in a game from years past. I think James deserves a little more credit than just being on par with chess GMs: to memorize something so complex as a basketball game without even attempting to commit it to memory speaks to his extraordinary intelligence.
If basketball is analogous, one could suppose that (A) there may not be anything special about LeBron's memory per se - e.g. he might remember the plays in a cricket match as poorly as anyone else - and (B) it argues that on the court LeBron is thinking out the game, and the implications of each exchange, in a way comparable to how chess masters think out moves (and he probably puts similar mental effort into the other pursuits the article describes).
If one accepts that hypothesis then it would make sense that you can reconstruct more accurately things that behave according to a fixed and small set of rules that you understand thoroughly and intuitively.
*small relative to the universe of rules outside of things like chess and basketball.
Did LeBron’s memory of the fourth quarter surprise you?
Kerr: “Not for a great player. I think great players remember everything. It’s like a quarterback.”
Your guys do?
Kerr: “Yeah. Not all of them [laughs]. Draymond would be the same way.
“We’ll be watching tape of a game from, we played Houston in December or something, and guys will be like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that. This is what happened next.’
“So I don’t think it’s that rare. But the best players generally remember the most and have the sharpest memories.
Um, 7? 6? 14?
I think coaches and athletes don't necessarily get upset about having to answer questions per se. I think a lot of times they are upset that the people writing about their sport have so little knowledge or curiosity about it.
Zach Lowe, as a counterexample, seems to get a lot of interesting answers out of players and coaches because he makes good observations and thus can actually ask interesting questions.
So trading one set of anecdotes for another: I don't see support for your hypothesis. I think it's plausible that professionally successful people without college education tend to have a better memory, perhaps because they need to in order to compensate for lack of formal education. But even that is unsubstantiated. We probably can't draw any meaningful inferences from the n = 1 example of one of the most successful basketball players of all time. Many of Lebron James' qualities - both mental and physical - are likely several sigma from the mean.
"Eidetic memory is typically found only in young children, as it is virtually nonexistent in adults.[5][6] Hudmon stated, "Children possess far more capacity for eidetic imagery than adults, suggesting that a developmental change (such as acquiring language skills) may disrupt the potential for eidetic imagery."[6] Eidetic memory has been found in 2 to 10 percent of children aged 6 to 12. It has been hypothesized that language acquisition and verbal skills allow older children to think more abstractly and thus rely less on visual memory systems."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
one way to think about what education is, is that its a process for taking your perceptual inputs, and putting them on an abstract lattices
this is an obviously useful process in all sorts of ways
but it probably does change the way you both notice things, and remember things
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(there a sort of similar thing going on when you're looking at something to draw it, you have to sort of un-abstract it, instead of putting the lightwaves hitting your eye onto the lattice 'apple', you have to get it back to lightwaves in certain pattern)
this is an obviously useful process in all sorts of ways but it probably does change the way you both notice things, and remember things
The problem with this is you're inducing a hypothesis via intuition and analogy. I don't see any reason to think education has the deleterious effect you're proposing. I guess it could, but I don't think there's any compelling evidence for it. It doesn't strike me as the simplest explanation.
From my perspective, I don't think there is any inverse correlation between memory capability and educational achievement. I could just as reasonably say eidetic memory decreases as language skills develop because we no longer have as much need for episodic recollection versus semantic recollection.
But neither of these proposals is grounded in anything empirical, it's intuitive speculation based on limited anecdata. The simpler explanation, by Occam's Razor, is that educational achievement trains memory faculties.
how else do you create a hypothesis?
You're correct that I haven't done a peer reviewed study on the question.
(fwiw, I suspect we're talking around each other, I'm not sure I disagree that educational achievement trains memory that fits on an abstract lattice, what I question, is memory that doesn't fit on a lattice, either way, yes, its all mere speculation on my part, imo that's the sort of thing internet message boards are good for)
the idea that what we're trained to notice changes what we perceive, doesn't strike me as strange thesis at all
I'm reminded of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
From wikipedia:
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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.
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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.
On the converse, esports also has fundamental physical characteristics: reaction time and ability to put out apm, for examples.
As for athleticism, I really, really, really dont understand where you are coming from with Ben Simmons lacking in that area. The only thing the guy doesn't have is a mid-range jumper. As for the rest he is a 6'10" point guard, so basically Magic Johnson with maybe a tad more athleticism.
Now I don't think there is much argument that he is the greatest player to ever play the game.
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."
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.
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.
While we're on the topic, I wonder if anyone has started using computer vision to inform players of their movements and avoid injuries.
I think it would be common across all sports to find the true elite players do something fundamentally different from everyone else. I would also place a large bet the thing they do that makes them elite would be something coaches at lower levels (or even the elite level) would be trying to train out of them trying to extract even more performance.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
Lebron is smart.
Like the last second one that won them a playoff game last year?
> a low post game
Have you watched him play? He dominates the post, but is smart about it. If you put a small on him, he goes post. You put a big and he blows by for the dunk. Why take other players on at their strength?
LeBron's versatility is amazing. Whenever someone criticizes him for relying on his driving ability too much, I'm reminded of a famous interview that Michael Jordan had, when the reporter asked him about the comparison with Clyde Drexler, who was a better three-point shooter. Jordan coldly replied, "Clyde Drexler is a better three-point shooter than I choose to be". And then he hit six threes in the first half of a Finals game against the Blazers in Drexler's face.
After he couldn't post up 97 year old Shawn Marion, and 146 year old Jason Kidd.