Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Performance Cortex
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1987?
WEBSITE: http://www.zachschonbrun.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| HEADING: | Schonbrun, Zach |
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PERSONAL
Born c. 1987; married, wife’s name Missy.
EDUCATION:Syracuse University, B.A., 2009; Columbia University, M.S. 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. New York Times, New York, NY, sports and business contributing writer, 2011–.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and websites, including Bloomberg BusinessWeek, ESPN the Magazine, SB Nation Longform, VICE, Newsday, the Athletic, and Yahoo! Sport.
SIDELIGHTS
Journalist Zach Schonbrun writes about sports and business for a periodicals and websites. He has covered the Super Bowl, the Final Four in college basketball, and playoffs in tennis and basketball, as well as golf championships. He also writes about business topics such as advertising, travel, and the retail sector. Six of his articles have appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Schonbrun’s January 2015 ten-thousand-work Amazon Kindle Single titled “One Great Shoe,” was chosen as among the best Kindle Singles of that year. The article focuses on And1, an American shoe company started by three friends from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that ended up competing with Nike in the billion-dollar basketball sneaker market.
In his debut book, The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius, Schonbrun examines the latest advances neuroscientists have made in understanding motor skills. Focusing primarily on neuroscience and sports, the book examines how neuroscience explains the reasons why some people are master athletes, rising above their competitors in sports, both amateur and professional. Discussing the burgeoning field of neuroathletics, Schonbrun explains research discoveries connected with neurological markers for greatness in athletics. For example, using an electroencephalogram (or EEG), scientists are beginning to reveal the neural markers that can make a greater baseball batter. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a technology primarily used to study depression via noninvasive use of magnetic fields to stimulate brain nerve cells. However, neuroscientists are also using it to reveal markers associated with spatial recognition and athletic success, such as the qualities found in successful football quarterback’s brain.
Schonbrun takes readers through the history of neuroscience, beginning in ancient Egypt and the treatment of head injuries on to modern science and medicine. Overall, neuroscientists are learning more and more about what drives human movement in relation to the brain. Throughout the book Schonburn uses examples of talented performers, from Tom Brady in football to Serena William in Tennis to examine motor research and its explanations for athletic excellence. He also relates these studies to virtuosos in other fields, including music and dance.
According to Schonburn, neuroscientists are providing more an more details about how the brain may play the most important role in an athlete’s performance. For example, the brain often helps athletes become outstanding performers even when they appear to be behind others in terms of motor skills, such as speed. As one example, Schonburg points to professional basketball star Stephen Curry who, when scouted in college, was though to be slow and not gifted with enormous athletic skill. Nevertheless, Curry, who was not drafted highly out of college due to scouting reports, would go on to become one of the top players in the National Basketball Association (NBA).
“The stereotype of the dumb jock may not survive this explosive jolt,” wrote Bryce Christensen in Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “Readers interested in the applications of neuroscience to everyday life will find plenty of value here.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2018, Bryce Christensen, review of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius, p. 10.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of The Performance Cortex.
ONLINE
Hilsinger-Mendelson Inc. website, http://hilsingermendelson.com/ (July 14, 2018), brief author profile.
Sport Techie, https://www.sporttechie.com (April 18, 2018), Joe Lemire, “Q&A With The Performance Cortex Author on Neuroscience in Sports.”
Zach Schonbrun website, http://www.zachschonbrun.com (July 14, 2018).
Zach Schonbrun
Zach Schonbrun is a journalist who writes regularly for The New York Times, covering sports and business. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, ESPN the Magazine, SB Nation Longform, VICE, Newsday, The Athletic, and Yahoo! Sports, among other publications.
Zach is the author of The Performance Cortex, which explores the neuroscience of motor skills, and was published by Dutton/Penguin Books in April 2018.
Zach has covered five Final Fours, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA postseason, US Open tennis and championship golf -- among numerous other events -- for the Times, as well as regularly contributing coverage of New York's professional and college teams. He also writes occasionally for the Times' Business Day section on topics in advertising, retail and travel. Zach has authored six articles that have appeared on the front page of The New York Times.
Zach received a B.A. in Economics from Syracuse in 2009 and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia in 2011.
He lives in New York City with his wife, Missy and their dog, Luke.
Zach is represented by Carol Mann at the Carol Mann Agency.
Zach Schonbrun has been a contributing writer for The New York Times since 2011, covering primarily sports and business. Six of his articles have appeared on the newspaper’s front page. He graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in economics in 2009 and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2011. His work has also appeared in ESPN magazine, Newsday, The Washington Post, Yahoo! Sports, VICE, and SB Nation Longform. In January 2015, he published a ten-thousand-word Amazon Kindle Single, One Great Shoe, which was selected as one of the best Kindle Singles of the year. He currently lives in New York City with his newly wed wife.
The Performance Cortex: How
Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic
Genius
Bryce Christensen
Booklist.
114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p10. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius.
By Zach Schonbrun.
Apr. 2018. 352p. Dutton, $28 (97811019863321; e-book, $14.99 (97811019863491.612.
To understand why Jose Altuve performs so well on the diamond, or why Tom Brady excels on the gridiron, don't look at these sports superstars' arms, hands, legs, or eyes. Examine their brains. Poised to guide the sophisticated sports fan in such examination, Schonbrun lucidly explains the fascinating new world of neuroathletics. Under Schonbrun's tutelage, readers learn how an electroencephalogram (or EEG) exposes the neural markers of a great hitter, how transcranial magnetic stimulation illuminates the brain's process for updating the mental spatial map of a winning quarterback. Naturally, such neuroscience matters not only to intelligent fans but also to team managers, coaches, and athletes themselves. In the march of neuroscience--from ancient Egyptian medical treatments for head injuries to twenty-first-century techniques for transcranial direct-current stimulation--readers will recognize the emergence of stunning future possibilities for assessing and perfecting the performance of athletes (Schonbrun's prime concern) as well as musicians and dancers. The stereotype of the dumb jock may not survive this explosive jolt!-- Bryce Christensen
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic
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Genius." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 10. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A533094374/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=9a2e9d80. Accessed 21 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094374
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Schonbrun, Zach: THE PERFORMANCE CORTEX
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Schonbrun, Zach THE PERFORMANCE CORTEX Dutton (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 4, 17 ISBN: 978-1-101-98633-2
New York Times contributor Schonbrun takes readers on a sometimes-tangled but revealing tour of the minds of winning athletes.
A baseball player at bat has a few milliseconds to decide whether to swing at a pitch. Some of that decision will hinge on experience, on the neural pathways telling the batter that this is the sort of thing the eye has seen and the brain has processed before. But in the end, the heavy lifting is being done in the fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that "picks up baseballs like bird- watchers spot a warbler in the bush," or other parts of the brain that govern perceptions and especially the timing of our responses to them. Schonbrun's principals in his sometimes-science- thick, sometimes-jock-talky narrative are tasked with scouting and training promising athletes. This is no easy matter, especially given that neuro-training, so to speak, isn't something that coaches and managers have adapted themselves to--yet. But more, they and other sports-oriented neuroscientists are "tracing the essential correlates of a skill," using imaging and scientific method alike to chase down the ineffable--e.g., the workings of the mind of a star athlete like, say, Stephen Curry, who "was considered to be too slow-footed and unathletic by scouts that many teams passed on him in the NBA draft." In studying anticipation, decision, and response, some scientists fall back on the old notion that it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something, which occasions a problem. "No one has any idea why it takes so long," Schonbrun writes, "because no one knows what it actually means to be skilled." But even so, researchers are constantly gaining insight, and their findings are likely to figure prominently in how athletes are recruited and trained for optimal performance in the future.
It's not quite in the same league as Moneyball, but readers interested in the applications of neuroscience to everyday life will find plenty of value here.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Schonbrun, Zach: THE PERFORMANCE CORTEX." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959770/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=97575edb. Accessed 21 June 2018.
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Q&A With ‘The Performance Cortex’ Author On Neuroscience In Sports
Sports Science, Trending April 18, 2018April 19, 2018 Joe Lemire
The Performance Cortex by Zach Schonbrun examines how neuroscience is being applied to sports. (Dutton Books)
The new book from Zach Schonbrun, The Performance Cortex, examines the intersection of neuroscience and sports, focusing on the complex interplay between an athlete’s brain and motor system.
The innovative work from deCervo, a baseball-centric startup launched by two Columbia University neuroscientists, and its efforts to gain traction in sports occupy a central storyline in the book. Players wear an EEG (electroencephalography) headset that identifies the moment they made the decision to swing or not swing at a pitch.
Zach Schonbrun (Curtis & Cort Photography)
The Performance Cortex was released on Tuesday, and Schonbrun — a contributing writer for the New York Times — spoke with SportTechie about how developments in neuroscience are and will be applied in the athletic realm.
What is the most advanced neuroscience technology currently in use?
‘Advanced’ is kind of a tricky word. The reason I focused on deCervo is because I thought what they were doing was the most unique and probably the most ultimately beneficial neuroscience technology that teams are using right now.
At the time that I found them, they weren’t offering any performance benefits to the teams. They were saying that they were a data company, and they could use neuroscience to basically peel back the helmet, so to speak, and see what’s going on inside the brain at the time of a pitch and how a hitter decides to swing or not swing.
That’s kind of all they were offering, and they were allowing the teams to make the decision, ‘Can we use this information for scouting or assessment? Can we use it for training and maybe improving our players? Or both?’
To my understanding, deCervo is the only one that is still actively using EEG, so their approach with that alone probably makes them, in my mind, the most advanced.
How receptive have the professional sports teams been to applying neuroscience?
With deCervo, I would characterize it as very interested in learning about it, having conversations with the company and yet very hesitant and timid to actually get into bed with them and work with them in a manner that could actually help either side.
What deCervo was confronting was a lot of teams would hear ‘neural’ and they would hear ‘EEG’ and they would be immediately interested by what the prospects are. But, then, what it actually comes down to is, what deCervo is offering is this great information, but it comes at a cost. And this cost is time, basically — the players’ time. It’s not an invasive procedure, and you can do it pretty much anywhere. You can do it at the ballpark. All you need is an EEG, which the company provides, and the simulation on a laptop.
But the problem — and this is what the teams were kind of stuck on — is that it takes 40 minutes or so. That’s a barrier that, at this point, you can’t really get around. If you’re going to actually get anything out of the technology and get any usable information, you need to have this rigorous approach. You can’t just stick a guy in an EEG, have him in front of a laptop and see 10 pitches. You’re not going to get anything out of that. So it takes time.
Teams at this point are so afraid of burdening the players with any extracurricular activities. That was an issue. Until the point where the neuroscience technology gets to be so easy to use and relatively [burden]-free where you can wear it while walking around, I think that’s going to be a hard barrier for entry. Or it’s just going to take a team to say we’re willing to have our players sacrifice some time for what we might be able to get out of it.
Frankly, the teams are not doing that much with EEG anymore, but deCervo has had to pivot and move away from the neuroscience and move away from the EEG and move more towards this cognitive gaming side of things, which I do write about, but, to me, it’s kind of a shame.
When could this technology become more commonplace?
What needs to happen is that this technology needs to improve to the point where you can effectively wear neuro-imaging equipment like an EEG and be able to move around in it. Once that is created, then I think it’s really going to take off.
The problem, just more generally with motor research, is that the neuro-imaging techniques that are available now are not conducive to movement. With EEG, yes, you can wear it on your head and be in a room somewhere, but you can’t move around too much or else it’ll corrupt the signal, and you’ll get faulty data.
And an EEG isn’t even the best technique that’s available. The best technique that’s available for scanning the brain is a functional MRI, in which you can actually see the brain regions and see how neurons are activating in certain regions — it’s a brain scanner, essentially. That’s a fantastic technology for brain research. If you can get a Bryce Harper in there, you can potentially see which regions of his brain are responding to pitches and so on. The problem is that, in order to do that, Bryce Harper has to be in an MRI for half an hour and he can’t move.
So movement is a deterrent for motor research, which makes it tough to conduct research. The good news is that there’s a major effort to improve this. One of the technologies that I became familiar with — I didn’t write about it in the book but I visited a lab at Yale —where they’re using this technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). It’s basically a combination between an MRI and EEG. It’s like a head cap that you can wear that’s actually able to show the brain regions are they activate. It uses the same sort of technology as your Apple Watch uses to measure your heartbeat, so it’s completely benign and noninvasive.
Getting from the fMRI to the EEG was a big step. Now we’ve just got to get from the EEG to being able to walk around and move with it. I can’t say for sure how many years away that is, but I do know that it’s a priority for motor research in general. Then, eventually, it’ll get out to sports for sure, and I think once that happens, there’s no question in my mind that this neuroscience technology will be used in sports.
Is the current application of neuroscience better for assessment or training?
It depends on the team. A few of the teams that I spoke with, they think it’s better for training. You can reverse-engineer how the brain is responding in one guy to a different pitch. You can use that information to train and improve his technique in that certain pitch.
But I think more teams are seeing it as a scouting and assessment tool. If you’re able to get a certain baseline of decision-making in your best hitters — or at least in what it takes to be in your hitters at that level — then you can use that baseline to screen future players.
There’s a very small window in milliseconds for hitting a pitch. A 95-mile-an-hour fastball comes to home plate in 400 milliseconds, and that doesn’t even take into account that some pitchers are using deception or have longer strides and some just throw harder than 95 mph. The physical limitations on our ability to perceive and react immediately cuts that time in half. It takes about 200 milliseconds for you to perceive that pitch and send that signal to your motor system to produce a swing. It’s a very short window, it’s half an eyeblink, yet what deCervo was able to find is that players, even within their own lineup, were able to make these decisions at different times.
If you can use that as a baseline and say, ‘The guys who are going to hit .300 are all responding within 313 milliseconds to 336, maybe I should only look at prospects in the draft who are able to make those same decisions.’ It’s kind of a harsh reality that could be coming. I know teams are generally hesitant to throw out a prospect just based on one or two metrics, so I don’t know that will be the only factor in their decisions to draft players. But I think the more this becomes prevalent, it could definitely factor into their decision-making.
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What surprised you the most during your research for this book?
I just learned so much that it’s hard to pick, but I think the larger takeaway for me was this new realization of how much the brain is involved in movement. I guess it sounds obvious, but it never really occurred to me. As a sports fan and as a sports writer, I’ve been, like many people, very focused on the physical. You watch the NBA draft and the NFL draft, and they talk about speed, hand size, wing span and you think that must be all that goes into their abilities. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.’
I think neuroscience and understanding the brain will give teams that information that’s been missing. For me, it really was an eye-opening experience talking to these motor researchers about all the ways that the brain is involved on our movement. Just on a day-to-day basis, reaching out for a cup of coffee or walking down the street and avoiding obstacles along the sidewalk — that is a challenge for our brains to handle, and we take it for granted because it comes so easily to us. Then, if you consider what an NBA player is doing on a nightly basis or what a hitter is able to do in that short time frame of a pitch, it really is extraordinary. I won’t watch a sporting event the same way again. I can’t help myself now from thinking, ‘Man, in how many milliseconds is Bryce Harper responding to these pitches?’
What else should our SportTechie readers take away from The Performance Cortex?
What I heard a lot from actual sport scientists who are employed by the teams — because I spoke to a good amount of them in various sports — and they would tell me that they’re inundated with companies and emails from companies trying to pitch them on what they can offer. They were like, ‘We don’t know where to begin with this stuff. We’re having a hard time keeping up.’
What happens is that they try some things out, and they end up going with whatever is most squeakily marketed and whatever the players might feel most comfortable with. And then they might not work. It’s unfortunately caused a bit of a chilling effect on sports science. The teams have to do a better job — there’s a big gap between what’s happening in laboratories and the rigorous types of testing that has been happening with science there and what’s happening on the field. There shouldn’t be that big of a gap. It doesn’t have to be that way.
The teams are having a hard time figuring out what’s real and what’s not. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that’s happening in sports science today — which is really great, particularly for something like neuroscience which could be an incredible breakthrough for sports — but it’s probably further away than it needs to be just because some of these teams don’t know what to make of it yet and they’re hesitant to jump fully into it because they’ve been burned before.
Tags
neuroscience, The Performance Cortex, Zach Schonbrun
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About Joe Lemire
Joe is a SportTechie senior writer chronicling how the primary driver of sports innovation is shifting from X’s and O’s to 1’s and 0’s as data points and technology are overtaking tactics and tradition in shaping the preparation, participation, and consumption of modern sports. He is a former Sports Illustrated staff writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Grantland and Vocativ. A Virginia native raised in Massachusetts, Joe now lives in New York City with his wife and son. View all posts by Joe Lemire →
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