Pucks, Pixels, & Memory Palaces: The Wild World of Learning from Ice Hockey to Fortnite
In the ever-evolving landscape of learning and skill acquisition, the convergence of video games like Fortnite, the lightning-fast reactions of table tennis champions, and the strategic wandering of soccer legends like Lionel Messi offers a fascinating glimpse into the future of learning. This exploration spans sports, gaming, and ancient memory techniques, shedding light on the universal principles underpinning skill mastery across diverse disciplines.
Over the past few weeks, we've delved into how we can harness our innate abilities to train like superheroes, mastering lightning-fast reactions akin to those of MCU characters, wielding extra limbs in the vein of Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus, tapping into enhanced sensory powers reminiscent of Professor X, or engaging in strategic foresight to navigate future scenarios.
This journey into the realm of superheroes and their extraordinary abilities sets the stage for exploring real-world legends who mirror these fantastical skills through their exceptional talents and intuitive strategies.
A Tale of Two GOATS: The Strategic Wanderer and The Hockey Legend
At the heart of this discussion lies the tale of two GOATs (Greatest Of All Time): Lionel Messi and Wayne Gretzky.
"On Sunday, a global audience of a billion plus will tune into the World Cup final to behold the most transfixing spectacle in sport: a small man walking back and forth. The Argentina-France match, at Lusail Stadium, in Lusail, Qatar, will be a showdown between two of the world's great footballing powers ...
Sunday's result might well turn, as so many games have before, on the meandering movements of Lionel Messi, who will spend much of the ninety minutes simply walking around—drifting here and there, wandering the field at the pace, and with the apparent dreamy purposelessness, of a flâneur on a psychogeographic dérive.
Messi is soccer's great ambler. To keep your eyes fixed on him throughout a match is both spellbinding and deadly dull. "
Simon, Joshua. "The Genius of Lionel Messi, Just Walking Around." The New Yorker, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/sports/world-cup-2022/the-genius-of-lionel-messi-just-walking-around.
Contrary to some pundits' assertions, Lionel Messi is far from a lazy player. His methodical pacing across the field is a testament to his strategic genius, highlighting the crucial skill of scanning. Messi excels in this technique, diverting his gaze from the ball to absorb additional data around him, enhancing his decision-making upon receiving the ball. The efficacy of scanning is quantified by the scan rate—the frequency at which a player surveys their surroundings within the 10 seconds before ball reception. Notably, higher scan rates are linked to an increased probability of executing successful forward passes.
Messi's scan rate far surpasses the norm, with an average of five scans in the 10 seconds leading up to receiving the ball—almost double the rate of the typical Premier League forward. During the World Cup final against France, he performed 676 scans, achieving a remarkable 90% success rate in forward passes. However, the true value of scanning extends beyond mere frequency to include the timing of scans, particularly the critical last glance before ball reception. Messi's proficiency in this aspect enables him to make well-informed decisions under immense pressure.
Video: How Messi Won The World Cup Final by Checking his Shoulder
In the video of the World Cup final against France, Lionel Messi's pivotal goal was set up by his seven scans of the field within the 10 seconds before scoring, demonstrating his exceptional situational awareness. This detailed scanning and his quicker reaction times compared to his opponents gave Messi the essential edge to propel Argentina to a 3-2 lead in extra time.
This ability to scan effectively is a skill that can be developed, as illustrated by the experience of another athlete.
Skating Towards the Future: The Genius of Wayne Gretzky
Wayne Gretzky, celebrated as "The Great One," is the most illustrious hockey player in history, setting the record for the highest points ever scored in the NHL. His extraordinary vision, strategic intelligence on the ice, and unmatched foresight in anticipating the game's flow have left an indelible mark on hockey.
Gretzky's celebrated mantra:
"Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been,"
This philosophy originates from a childhood practice encouraged by his father: drawing an ice rink on a large piece of paper and tracking the puck's movement while watching hockey games. This unique method cultivated Gretzky's profound understanding of the puck's dynamics, akin to developing a superpower for predicting its future position.
As we transition from the ice rinks to the fast-paced world of table tennis, the principle of anticipation remains a constant thread weaving through the fabric of sports mastery.
The Reflexes of a Table Tennis Champion
Matthew Syed, a journalist and former Olympic table tennis champion, recounts his astonishment when his lightning-fast reaction times unexpectedly left him flat-footed:
"In December 2004 I played a game of tennis with Michael Stich, the former Wimbledon tennis champion from Germany...The match was part of a promotional day pitting journalists against top tennis players ...
I asked Stich to serve at maximum pace. He has one of the fastest serves in the history of the sport—his personal best is 134 mph ...
I crouched down and focused hard, coiled like a spring. I was confident I would return the serve, ... Stich tossed the ball high into the air, arched his back, and then, in what seemed like a whirl of hyperactivity, launched into his service action. Even as I witnessed the ball connecting with his racquet, it whirred past my right ear with a speed that produced what seemed like a clap of wind. ... I stood up straight, bemused ...
When I stand behind a table tennis table, I am able to react to, and return, smash-kills in the blink of an eye. The time available to return a serve in tennis is approximately 450 milliseconds; but there are fewer than 250 milliseconds in which to return a smash-kill in table tennis. So, why could I return the latter and not the former?"
Syed, Matthew. Bounce (pp. 34-37). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Despite his ability to return smash-kills in table tennis within 250 milliseconds, Syed could not react to a tennis serve at a relatively leisurely 450 milliseconds. It's puzzling how he failed to even make contact with the ball.
Video: BOUNCE - How Champions are Made, Matt Syed
As we delve into the development of these extraordinary abilities, let's shift our focus to a realm of even greater speed: the world of eSports.
Fortnite: A Digital Playground for Skill Development
Fortnite heralded as one of the most significant video games in recent memory, transitioned from a simple survival game to a sophisticated battle royale where constructing structures is as vital as combat. This evolution reshaped player strategies and highlighted the skill disparity between casual and competitive gameplay. Initially absent from the game's launch, building soon became indispensable for Fortnite's continued success. What began as a mechanism to defend against zombies emerged as a cornerstone in the competitive landscape of the Battle Royale mode, offering a unique twist to the game's dynamics.
A Brief History of Fortnite
Video: The ENTIRE History of Building (Fortnite)
Initial Concept (2011-2014): Fortnite was introduced without building; early versions featured basic structures and explosive gameplay elements.
Building Debut (2014): Building showcased as a defense against zombies, with simple structures like walls, floors, stairs, and cones.
Launch and Growth (2017): Building complexity evolved post-launch, transforming from basic defenses to intricate strategies for advantage.
Skill Evolution (2017-2018): Techniques like ramp rushes, and defensive building emerged, revolutionized by Builder Pro and Turbo Build.
Practice Modes (2018): Playground and Creative Modes enabled focused skill development, leading to advanced tactics like coneing and box fighting.
Skill Gap (2019): The widening skill gap between casual and competitive players is highlighted by advanced building techniques and piece control.
This concise overview traces the evolution of Fortnite's building mechanic from a basic concept to its status as a game-defining feature, influencing both competitive and casual play. Initially, erecting structures mid-battle seemed absurd—pausing to construct a wall amidst chaos appeared highly unrealistic. Yet, the strategic deployment of walls for ramp rushes to higher ground, and the addition of floors and walls to protect ramps, revolutionized gameplay. This rapid innovation in tactics led to a significant skill gap among players. Developing training arenas in Creative Mode and simulators for various skills, from ramping to weapon handling and box fighting, allowed players to refine the competencies necessary for competition. The swift evolution of these strategies online offers a glimpse into the future, demonstrating how real-time gaming can facilitate accelerated learning curves.
Transitioning from the high-speed reactions required in ice hockey, table tennis, and Fortnite, we now explore a more pedestrian practice.
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Memory Palace
In "Moon Walking with Einstein," Joshua Foer recounts his journey from having a weak memory to competing in memory championships. He highlights an ancient method known as the memory palace, essentially a mental blueprint of a familiar place, complete with rooms, doors, and stairways. The key is to navigate this mental space effortlessly. Typically, one might start with a well-known structure, like one's home. The method involves assigning vivid, memorable "objects" to represent items to remember, placing them throughout the rooms of this mental structure. To recall a list, one mentally visits each room, observing these unique objects—a giant tomato in the living room, for example—to jog memory.
Video: This Guy Can Teach You How to Memorize Anything - Wired
How do these diverse examples intersect? What commonality binds the building strategies in Fortnite, Messi's scanning technique, Gretzky's anticipatory skills, and Foer's memory palace? At the core, each scenario demonstrates our brains' ability to construct memory maps, enabling us to segment and organize critical behaviors, skills, and even navigate the tangible world and the realm of ideas. Essentially, it all boils down to map-making.
The Unifying Principle: Map Making
"In the 1930s, the psychologist Edward Tolman, working at UC Berkeley, was putting rats in mazes to see how they learned. Normal psychology-type work at the time—this was the generation that followed Thorndike. The research paradigm of Thorndike's law of effect, in which animals repeated behavior that had pleasant consequences, was in full force. Tolman noticed something odd. When rats reached forks in his mazes where the choice was not obvious—where it wasn't clear whether they should go left or right—rats would pause and look back and forth for a few seconds before choosing a direction. This made no sense in the standard Thorndikian view that all learning occurred through trial and error—why would the behavior of pausing and toggling one's head back and forth have been reinforced? Tolman made a speculation: The rat was "playing out" each option before taking it. Tolman called this "vicarious trial and error." Rats expressed this head toggling behavior only when decisions were hard."
Bennett, Max. A Brief History of Intelligence (p. 189). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
In "A Brief History of Intelligence," Max Bennett highlights this behavior to illustrate the brain's capacity for simulating future scenarios. The book further explains how this cognitive mapping is physically realized within the neocortex, offering a glimpse into the brain's intricate mechanisms for navigating and understanding the world around us.
"... a region of the entorhinal cortex, which acts as the GPS of the brain, neurons self-organize into "grid cells" that tile the physical space with a lattice of triangles and hexagons. When a rat explores a large room, each neuron fires only when the animal lies at the vertex of one of those triangles. Such grid cells appear a single day after the mouse begins to move around: the sense of space is based on an almost innate GPS circuit.
Dehaene, Stanislas. How We Learn (p. 246). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Video: Do Lab Rats Dream of Running Mazes?
Our map-making ability extends beyond merely charting the physical world, like mazes; it's integral to almost every learning aspect. This capability to create maps underpins our learning of mental and physical skills, knowledge, and geography, among others. The brain's knack for transforming any piece of information into a "map" or sequence enables us to memorize a wide array of data, from the digits of Pi to Wayne Gretzky's skill in anticipating the puck's trajectory. These maps deconstruct learning tasks into step-by-step instructions within our cognitive GPS. From the precise clicks and movements required to excel in Fortnite to understanding the dynamic plays of ice hockey and football, these mental maps and sequences empower us to simulate and predict future events.
Conclusion: The Future of Learning
This discussion leads us back to the workings of our motivational GPS within the brain and the process of learning sequences of steps, behaviors, and knowledge structures. The cycle of cue, action, and eventual reward, powered by dopamine in the basal ganglia, forecasts our optimal future actions and navigates us through the intricate steps necessary to master both our mental and physical realms.
Over time, advancements in sports psychology have heralded numerous breakthroughs in training methods. However, the emergence of spatial computing opens new horizons, enabling us to teach nuanced and complex skills, such as Messi's scanning technique. This technological evolution promises to enhance and expand our capacity for skill development across various domains.
We stand on the brink of a transformative era, where insights from sports psychology and game design converge to forge digital overlays and feedback systems that drastically enhance our skill acquisition. Currently, we are just beginning to explore beyond merely learning to play ice hockey like Gretzky—anticipating and scanning for the puck. We're venturing into the realm of providing digitally augmented feedback through real-time memory palaces superimposed upon our environment.
Video: How Messi Won The World Cup Final by Checking his Shoulder
For those eager to delve deeper into the development of a motivational GPS for learning anything—not just acquiring superpowers but mastering the ultimate meta-superpower of mental map-making—an Exclusive Deep Dive will be available for paid subscribers later this week.
Next Week: 🌊🐙 Squid Pro Quo: Unveiling the Ocean's Genius to Decode AI's Tomorrow 🚀
Next week, we'll continue to expand on these insights as we explore how an octopus, with its unique neural architecture, learns and what this can reveal about augmented intelligence and the future of AI. Stay tuned to uncover the secrets of the sea and how they illuminate the path forward in artificial intelligence.