Tennis as a Venue for Neurological and Neurobiological Research

Why Does Neurobiology Need a New Source of Data?

Most of what is known about the human brain has come from brain trauma. It is the result of discovering what has gone wrong due to a trauma such as a disease rather than discovering what goes right when a normal human subject carries out a plan of action. This is because the normal healthy brain is inaccessible to experimentation through invasive means. In contrast to brain trauma patients, the range of neurodynamics available to the normal human brain is enormous. The fact that we cannot carry out a full range of experiments on normal human subjects presents a significant barrier to research that we must find a way around.

Where Should We Look for a Source of Normal Data?

The human brain evolved under physical duress. All intellectual and physical skills evolved from the need to carry out physical actions such as survival and reproduction. there were no schools to guide human evolution. Everything evolved from physical forces that the human needed to cope with. Hence, complex physical action is fundamental to learning and to neurodynamics generally, including our intellectual faculties. The facts of evolution suggest that we look to the activities of sports as a venue where normal subjects freely engage in complex activities.

How Do We Obtain Valid Data?

However, in order to obtain legitimate data, we must find an experimental approach that does not interrupt the flow of data from the subjects. This is our challenge: to obtain objective, accurate, and uncorrupted data from a sport through observation, knowledge of the sport, interviews, and direct participation. In choosing a starting point for collecting accurate data, it is desirable to have the sport take place in a confined area where complete and accurate observations can be made. The sport must be complex and exercise a full range of actions, thought, and emotions. Of particular importance for dynamical complexity is eye-to-eye combat that does not involve the complication of physical contact. Also, the sport should not exclude either sex. And last, the sport should involve the minimum number of subjects to be played. Among all sports, the venue of tennis best satisfies these requirements.

Some Examples from the Venue of Tennis

The concept of choking. Choking is the most notorious word in tennis. It is usually given a psychological explanation that is synonymous with being a toad. However, advances in neuroscience in the past five years suggests that, in many cases, choking is not a psychological phenomena, but rather a neurobiological phenomena. In other words it is not a result of how often your mother picked you up as a kid, it is a result of the interaction of complex dynamical processes within the brain that, if understood, would lead to the elimination of choking in sports as well as other activities. In the language of neurobiology, choking might be described as a conflict between preafference and reafference. Understanding the mechanical rather than the psychological basis of choking is only one of the many ways in which the venue of tennis will advance medical research.

The Multitude of Racquets. We can prove through physics that the most powerful racquet is the stiffest racquet. In spite of this, there continues to be a diverse array of racquets on the market. How is it that reasonable people cannot be persuaded to discard their flexible racquets which reduce the potential ball speed they can produce and embrace these stiff racquets in mass? The answer likely lies in how the brain works.

From neurobiology we know that the racquet is an extension of the motor and sensory systems of the brain. As such, to learn at your fastest pace, you must have a suitable feed-back loop from the racquet to the brain. This loop must provide you with sensory information about the success of each hit. The sensory information needed varies with each brain, and is just as individualistic as a finger print. Also, the physical sensory information varies with racquet construction. The diversity of available racquets is experimental evidence of the neural diversity of the motor control and learning functions of the brain and suggest a further line of scientific inquiry. This line of inquiry might go as follows:

Obtain an example of every racquet used by the top 50 men and women singles and doubles players on the circuit. Submit each racquet to a sensitive vibration test to obtain the racquets auditory and physical vibration characteristics over a wide class of ball impacts. From this data, construct a frequency signature for each racquet. Simultaneously, obtain EEG recordings for each player corresponding to each racquet. Using the combined racquet and EEG data, search for correlating signals between player and racquet. Now formulate a player-racquet correlation hypothesis which will be used to demonstrate that the speed of learning a stroke is correlated to the racquet type. Using these results, formulate a rehabilitation technique based on EEG analysis for selected brain trauma's affecting hand and arm movement.

The Diversity of Stokes. The ball striking techniques of professional players is as diverse as are their racquets. We have documented 12 forehands and six movements that contribute to ball speed. Does this fact contain important information about the diversity of the structure of the motor control and learning systems of the brain? If so, could this lead to a classification of control system types that could be used to improve learning in the general population. Could these types be correlated to EEG's or other forms of testing? The answer to this question could lead to significant refinements in brain trauma rehabilitation. For example, if, in fact, rehabilitation programs should be personalized according to motor learning types, then using a single program for the general population will be highly inefficient. In some cases it might be detrimental.

What Have We Done So Far?

Over the past nine years, our first corporate sponsor (ACT) has been engaged in the study of learning based on the study of the development of tennis skills. This study has garnered ACT a reputation as a leader in applying learning theory to the problems of the Department of Defense. This commercial success is informal confirmation that this research approach is valid and will lead to new theories of brain trauma rehabilitation. Of particular significance is the theory that neural assemblies in the brain, once formed, can compete for the use of individual neurons and that neural assemblies have a dynamic that is the opposite of the Hebbean dynamic: Whereas the Hebbean theory suggests that stimulation will lead to reinforces structures, the destabilization theory suggests that stimulation can also lead to the destabilization of neural assemblies who's individual neurons then become available to be used in other assemblies. Additional questions are posed by the study of tennis. Some are described in an Issues Paper on this site.

Summary

In summary, Neuroscience needs a valid source of data about normal human brains in order to accelerate its progress. The most natural source of data arises from engaging in complex, organized, physical activity outside of a laboratory. This leads to sports. Among all sports, tennis provides the richest venue from which to derive valid data about normal male and female human subjects engaging in complex physical actions which include a significant intellectual component. Much progress has already been made in using tennis as a research venue as evidenced by the commercial success of our corporate sponsor in applying the results of that research to important practical problems.