Neuroscientistes measure how the fan's brain reacts to the game

like everything else in 2020, this year's Thanksgiving is different. But football games are still played on TV, and if you watch any game, the brain will deal with them in a way that you might not realize. In a study published November 25 in neuroon, a journal of Cell Press Cell Press, researchers showed how surprise when watching sports games changes brain patterns. It is important for neuroscientistes to understand these changes because they help to form particularly strong memories.
around the world, we tend to divide events into different 'blocks,'" he says. James Antony, lead author of the study and a researcher at Princeton University's Institute of Neuroscience, said, "We later called these 'blocks' discrete events. So the question arises, 'How does our brain decide when one fragment ends and the other begins?' It turns out that when an accident happens, it happens. In
to study surprise in the natural environment, the researchers looked at how people watched sports games. They chose basketball because frequent scoring in such games provides more opportunities to see how the brain reacts to change. Twenty self-considered basketball fans watched the final five minutes of Game 9 of the 2012 NCAA men's "March Madness" tournament. The older games were chosen because the participants were mostly college students at the time and were less likely to have seen or remembered them before.
to measure surprise, the researchers first calculated the probability of each team winning each game, and then calculated the surprise as a change in the probability of each ball. As a result, the match in which the score bites and scores alternately leads is more exciting than the one-side game.
when the participants watched the game, the researchers performed eye tracking and functional MRI scans to measure nerve activity. The researchers found that, at a more surprising moment, there was a greater change in pre-cortical activity and pupil expansion. Interestingly, surprise affects these patterns of activity differently, depending on whether these moments contradict or agree with current beliefs about which team is more likely to win.
" neuroimaging is usually done in a highly controlled environment, but we want to do something more natural. "At the same time, there is a trend to take advantage of big data through a lot of accurate measurements. That's what our probability of winning measure can do. The
also tracked activity in dopamine-rich regions, which carry information about rewards. Consistent with these reward effects, they found that these areas were more active when the teams supported by the subjects scored.
, the researchers are reanalysing the collected data to see if they can combine the probability of winning measure with the participants' neurode measures. They also plan to investigate sports fans' best and worst stadium memories in real life to see if they can link them to their own level of surprise.
" is a good example of perception and prediction of events, as these predictions are quantifiable. "Furthermore, although sport has nothing to do with survival, it taps into the deep human nature of excitement and social connection. (Source: Science.com Tang One Dust)
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