Looking Into Space Is Looking Back in Time
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 963 Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2021
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn why soccer players miss penalty kicks; how we estimate population sizes; and how space helps us look back in time.
Pro soccer players miss penalty kicks because pressure makes them overthink by Kelsey Donk
- Johnson, S. (2021, May 12). Why professional soccer players choke during penalty kicks. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/choking-under-pressure
- Slutter, M. W. J., Thammasan, N., & Poel, M. (2021). Exploring the Brain Activity Related to Missing Penalty Kicks: An fNIRS Study. Frontiers in Computer Science, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2021.661466
- Guo, Z., Li, A., & Yu, L. (2017). “Neural Efficiency” of Athletes’ Brain during Visuo-Spatial Task: An fMRI Study on Table Tennis Players. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00072
How do we know the population sizes of species when there are too many to count? by Cameron Duke
- Allen, S. T., O’Rourke, A., White, R. H., Schneider, K. E., Kilkenny, M., & Sherman, S. G. (2019). Estimating the Number of People Who Inject Drugs in A Rural County in Appalachia. American Journal of Public Health, 109(3), 445–450. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2018.304873
- Hammond, P. S. (2009). Mark–Recapture. Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, 705–709. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-373553-9.00163-2
- Krebs, C. J. (1999). Ecological methodology. Benjamin/Cummings.
- Mark-Recapture. (2021). Nau.edu. https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/mark_recapture/mark_recapture.html
Looking Into Space Is Looking Back In Time by Reuben Westmaas
- Most distant object in the universe spotted by Hubble Space Telescope, shattering record for the farthest known galaxy. (2016, March 4). The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/most-distant-object-in-the-universe-spotted-by-hubble-space-telescope-shattering-record-for-the-farthest-known-galaxy-a6911096.html
- Cain, F. (2014, August 7). Are All the Stars Really Dead? - Universe Today. https://www.universetoday.com/113709/are-all-the-stars-really-dead/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from |
| 0:05.1 | Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Goff. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about |
| 0:09.5 | why pro soccer players miss penalty kicks, how we know the population sizes of species |
| 0:14.3 | when there are too many to count, and while looking into space is looking back in time. |
| 0:19.4 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:21.4 | Imagine you're a professional athlete. |
| 0:25.0 | It's crunch time, and it's up to you to make the final game-winning point for your team. |
| 0:31.0 | The lights are on. Everyone is watching. You line yourself up, you take a deep breath, you focus your mind, and you miss. This is not unusual. In soccer shootouts,outs when missing a penalty kick means elimination |
| 0:45.6 | players miss somewhere around 40% of the shots they take |
| 0:50.8 | So what's the deal? Why do athletes who spend their whole lives training for moments like this? Blow it! |
| 0:57.0 | Well a new first of its kind study aimed to find out. |
| 1:02.0 | Scientists were able to scan soccer players' brains in real time as they took |
| 1:06.8 | penalty kicks. That brain measurement came via a headset that the players wore and it used something called functional near infrared spectroscopy. |
| 1:16.8 | That's a technology that uses light to measure brain activity. In the study the players |
| 1:21.7 | faced three different penalty kick scenarios each one more stressful than the last |
| 1:27.5 | And as you would expect the players did worse in the second and third rounds as the pressure intensified. |
| 1:34.3 | And the inexperienced soccer players did worse than the pros. |
| 1:38.3 | But what was going on in their brains? |
| 1:41.6 | Well, the data showed that when kickers missed their shots they had higher |
| 1:45.9 | activity in parts of the brain that were not related to kicking a ball at all. They had a lot of |
| 1:51.4 | activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region associated with long-term planning. |
| 1:57.0 | Basically, they were overthinking things, thinking too far into the future, or about the long-term implications of their actions. |
... |
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