Saturday, February 1, 2014

Freestyles of Our Forgotten Ancestors

When rappers freestyle, they use a unique neural network that allows them to improvise verbally in real time. It is unlike other states in that it increases activity in the parts in charge of motivation and action of thought, but decreases the regions in charge of filtering and supervising, so what is left is a person literally flowing thought from their heads.

When reading this, I immediately connected it to football. Perhaps some individuals are more naturally predisposed to facilitate improvised actions than others. Maybe when Ben Roethlisberger makes broken plays look golden it's because his brain is hardwired to perform those moments better than say, Andy Dalton's brain. What if the ability to improvise is genetic and cannot truly be taught?

This also makes me wonder if Big Ben can rap.



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