How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains? | Hacker News Reader

How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

newyorker.com

42 pointsdanso30 comments

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

Correlation does not prove causation. It most certainly can imply it. I think it absolutely does imply it here. It is not like head injuries are not known for impacting memory, etc.

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.

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).

- We don't know if a quick KO is "better" than a sustained beating. I'm not sure if any scientific evidence helps show this, so that hypothesis is just theory at the moment. (I haven't research this at all though, so if you have articles please do share.)

I had the opposite experience. My attention and productivity during my boxing years was way greater than now. Could have been the discipline I got from training leaking to other parts of my life. Who knows, but I know I did way better with most aspects of my life when training than not training.

But related to your story, your coach was an asshole. He should have refused to let you fight. There is a reason at the lower rankings (pro and amateur) people are matched by similar number of fights.

Here in Portugal, you even have 2 leagues. Rookie and Veterans, where your first fights are in the rookie league with people with less than 3-4 fights. Usually coaches try to have only 1-2 fight difference. When you have a certain number of fights (I think 5 but not sure as it was a long ago) you graduate, but even then, you don't really seem more than 3-4 fights difference.

Sure, you may have someone that has been training for 6 years and only then taking it's first fight, but that is rare and usually, the idea is to rank similar fighters to avoid having a bloodbath as it happened to you.

Again, and specially because this was a school environment, the coach should be fired and prevented from coaching ever again.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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

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.."

There exist team sports that are not contact sports, though.

Technically, they're not sports

Technically (and subjectively for most people) they are. Golf, tennis, athletics, etc... plus the many limited-contact sports such as soccer, baseball, etc. etc.

soccer

There have been some studies investigating the effects of heading the ball on the brain[0].

[0] For example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11347686

Last I checked volleyball and tennis are sports... And there's several very popular limited contact sports like baseball and basketball.

And that's sticking to the technical definition of contact sports, when I think we're really talking about collision sports, which is what NFL is classified in...

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".

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.

"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.

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.

1) But if you run full speed into other players and hit them head on doesn't matter the level or professionalism or type of sport, your brain is probably not going to fair well. This isn't about the NFL in a large picture, but about tolerance as a society of a brutal sport that induces cumulative damage of the brain.

2) I can see an even better alternative -- programming, being part of an open source project (hey I didn't have to think hard here I am a programmer so that came first to me) and well pretty much any physical activity that doesn't result hitting your head against things, gardening or even walking is probably good enough to escape the sedentarism effects.

Baseball is a team sport, and your odds of getting a blow to the head are a lot lower. They also seem to take such contact a lot more seriously.

Incidentally, that was the only sport at school that I ever took any serious damage from; a baseball to the forehead.

I was never interested in any sport though. I was standing at the back waiting for lunch.

My co-workers daughter plays volleyball and was out of school for 3 weeks due to a ball being hit into her head.

I played multiple contact sports in Texas schools, decades ago and with research coming out, wonder if my mental potential or others was damaged by the some of the hits I took or delivered. The MMA training I did as an adult was much safer injury-wise.

You can be part of a team without being in a contact support. You can also workout with out increasing the chances of getting shredded by an outsider linebacker or a cut block or 90 mph fastball.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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