Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer,
You may be a lover
But you ain’t no dancer.
—John Lennon and Paul McCartney,
“Helter Skelter”
You talk the talk. Do you walk the walk?
—Animal Mother, in Stanley
Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket
When I taught at the University of Southern California, a school celebrated for the athletic achievements of its students, I was fortunate in having an office that looked out on the campus track, a sightly Persian-orange oval set in a field of thick green grass. I squandered hours watching the athletes stretch and preen and practice there. They were impressive in action—young sprinters bursting from the blocks in a blur of chest-high knees and flattened hands, javelin throwers drawing chalk-white Newtonian arcs across the blue sky, vaulters at weightless apex dismissing the pole and peering down over their shoulders at the ground nineteen feet below—but I also enjoyed watching them in repose. I liked to see the milers dangling their fingers like birds shuddering off rainwater, hurdlers bending at the waist and grasping their ankles to stretch their impossibly lanky and sinewed legs, exhausted discus throwers and shot putters reclining on the grass in gray sweat suits like prides of lions born to just that spot. Absent was the restless uprootedness of our times; I might have been looking out on the Serengeti Plain, ten thousand years ago.
I often thought that if visitors from another world were to land and ask to see something our species is proud of, I would first show them this—not a painting or a symphony orchestra, a poem or a differential equation or the Hong Kong skyline, but these runners and jumpers and hurlers, arrayed in labor and repose on the green. So much that is human was there, in their errors and accomplishments, their taut competitive striving and easy economy of action, their immersion in the moment and their daily sacrifices toward a future goal—and much, too, that goes beyond the human, and shares something of a wild animal’s wordless dignity. There is, after all, nothing quite like them anywhere else in the universe.
Athletes are seldom given much credit for intelligence—to praise a school for its triumphs on the playing field is not what most professors would call a compliment—but I wonder whether our traditional conceptions of intelligence have been too limited. We academics tend to stress the importance of abstract reasoning, and logic is certainly one of the glories of the human mind, but it’s hardly the whole story. If the brain is not a unified monolith but a constellation of programs, each with its own aptitudes and liabilities, it follows that there are many sorts of intelligence, each representing excellence in one or more of the programs. We are not apt to understand human (much less extraterrestrial) intelligence until we begin to appreciate that it comes in many forms, and that all are valuable.
I got to thinking anew about athleticism and the brain during the 1989 professional football season, when I was teaching at Berkeley and following the San Francisco 49ers. It was a happy time: Brilliantly coached and enviably balanced, the 49ers that year ranked among the most sophisticated—and insouciant—football teams ever to take the field. As the sportswriter Robert Oates, Jr., put it, they “seemed to mock the machismo of its sport. Nothing looked hard. Everything looked easy. The ‘Niners threw short, they threw long, they ran outside, they ran inside—and they did it all with a creative grace that spoke less of brute force than ballet.” Watching them play, I began to recognize how much we have to learn about intelligence right here on Earth.
Several of the players on that extraordinary club I would call geniuses, by which I mean that they played so creatively that they innovated the sport.
One was Ronnie Lott, the free safety and as such the 49ers’ last line of defense. Daunting as a Prankish axwielder in black gloves and a pair of black arm protectors that made him look as though he prepared for each game by dipping his forearms in boiling Butyl, Lott dominated the deep backfield like a creature imported from a slightly more massive planet. Physically gifted—he could run backward faster than most men can run forward, and cut sideways as abruptly as a light beam bounced off a mirror—Lott was equally impressive for the intellectual resourcefulness he brought to the game.
I remember one play in particular that exemplified Lott’s imaginative approach to football. Early in San Francisco’s pivotal 1989 playoff game against their old adversaries the Los Angeles Rams, Lott found himself on the far side of the field from Rams receiver Flipper Anderson, who had beaten his man and was loitering alone near the goal line, watching a pass from quarterback Jim Everett spiral toward him for what seemed a certain score. Moving with unmitigated confidence, Lott sped across the field, took to the air, and slapped the ball away perhaps a yard short of Anderson’s outstretched hands. For Lott to have gotten to the ball in time was memorable as a physical accomplishment, but astonishing, too, was the audacity of imagination that had enabled him to think that he could get there—the vision that inspired him to go for the ball rather than the receiver, knowing that if he arrived a split second late Anderson would score a touchdown. The point was lost neither on Anderson (who left the field shaking his head and muttering, “He came out of nowhere”) nor on the Rams, who were shut out for the rest of the afternoon and lost the game 30–3.
A genius on the offense was Jerry Rice, a wiry, buoyant wide receiver never more at ease than when in motion. Most receivers going downfield will fake, throwing a foot or a hip one way and cutting another, but Rice generally just ran. At full speed he looked as relaxed as a man in an easy chair, and it was his habit when a pass came his way to look back unhurriedly, as if hearing someone whisper his name, then gather in the spinning football with as little fuss as if he were opening his mail. What ensued might be a sprint to the goal line or the horrifying crash into the small of his back of an angry and frustrated defensive back, but in either case Rice customarily reacted with imperturbable good cheer. So renowned was his equanimous demeanor on the field that once, when he politely disagreed with two officials who had declared him out of bounds when catching a sideline pass, the referees actually turned to each other and began discussing his testimony—behavior as astounding as if police detectives were to consider releasing a suspect simply because he told them he was innocent. (A videotape replay showed that Rice was right, and the pass was ruled complete.)
But the player who particularly intrigued me, from a neurological point of view, was Joe Montana. To play quarterback in the National Football League calls for speed (the quarterback has on average two and a half seconds in which to take the snap from center, drop back, set, spot a receiver, and throw a pass; a handoff play may take less than one second), deception (while doing all this he tries to appear to be doing something else, lest the defense read his intentions), precision (if you can consistently chuck a football into a trash can buckled in the passenger seat of a swerving jeep twenty yards away, you may have what it takes), initiative (if the play as called doesn’t work the quarterback tries to improvise), and poise (he must stay cool while a half dozen of the strongest and most violently aggressive men in the world pursue him with the cherished intention of slamming him to the ground so hard that he’ll walk off the field, hang up his shoulder pads, and restrict his future athletic endeavors to golf).
Born to this singular calling, Montana by 1989 was ranked by many, among them the legendary quarterbacks Joe Namath, Bart Starr, Roger Staubach, and Terry Bradshaw, as the greatest quarterback ever. They were impressed not only by his statistics but by his sheer nonchalance. Montana executed nearly every play, even a final-second heartstopper in a championship game, with the lighthearted composure of a kid in a sandlot game who doesn’t yet know what it is to lose. Physically lithe and fit but otherwise unexceptional-looking, Montana was bright, pleasant, and unprepossessing to the point of blandness: Asked at a postgame press conference following the 49ers’ 55-10 rout of the Denver Broncos in the 1990 Super Bowl what he planned to do next, he replied, “I’m going to take a nice nap.”
What was Montana’s secret? To be a genius is to have genius, somewhere among the centers of the brain. The genius of a great musician might reside in the right frontal lobe, a poet’s in the left lobe. I think the locus of Joe Montana’s genius was to be found in his premotor cortex.
The impulse to carry out actions is conveyed through the nervous system to the muscles from the brain’s motor cortex, a belt of gray tissue that arches across the forebrain and terminates just in front of each ear. When we walk or run—or hand off a football to a running back—it is the impulses conveyed by neurons in motor cortex that incite the striated muscles in our feet, legs, arms, and hands to act. The motor cortex, in turn, selects specific actions from what amounts to a dictionary stored in the supplementary motor area, located at the top of the brain. Together these two centers are capable of handling individual actions, but not complex sequences: Using motor cortex and supplementary motor area alone a quarterback might be able to take a snap from center or throw a pass, but he would be unable to do these things in rapid succession. To coordinate a sequence of actions he must call on the premotor cortex, a strip of brain tissue located immediately in front of the motor cortex.
It is by virtue of instructions programmed into premotor cortex that an athlete can blend together a series of acts much more rapidly and smoothly than would be the case if the brain had to invent each motion in real time. We see the premotor cortex ablaze in all its glory when we listen to the seemingly effortless playing of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, or watch the dancing of the late Fred Astaire. Joe Montana, whom Joe Namath aptly described as “football’s Fred Astaire,” was smoothness incarnate. “With most guys, it’s, ‘I see. I step. I throw,’” said John Madden, the sports commentator and former coach of the Oakland Raiders. “With Montana, it’s, ‘I seestepthrow.’”
The programs in Montana’s premotor cortex were distinguished not only by their seamless weave but by their duration, by the length of the chain. Montana could check off two covered receivers and throw to a third man, sometimes even finding a way to get the ball to a covered receiver, in part because he didn’t have to reflect on the situation at the time. Most of what he had to do was already programmed into his premotor cortex; to introduce conscious decision-making into the process would usually wreck his timing. As Montana remarked, “If I ever stopped to think about what happens, what really makes things tick, after the ball hits my hands, it might screw up the whole process.”
The importance of premotor cortex to professional athletes helps us understand their penchant for practicing hard. Watching Montana and Rice work out one sunny afternoon at their training camp in Santa Clara, I was struck by the fact that they moved just as fast in practice as when playing a game. Dressed in sweat suits and deprived of their shoulder pads and jerseys, they looked like an ordinary bunch of guys playing touch ball at a Sunday picnic—until the ball was snapped, whereupon all was transformed into a blur of amazing grace. Obedient to a dictum introduced by Rice and running back Roger Craig, every ball carrier ran every play all the way to the end zone, the idea being to so condition their minds that scoring a touchdown would become, to borrow from computer lingo, their default position. The reason for practicing so assiduously was not physical; few top players nowadays rely on practice sessions for conditioning. Nor did it have much to do with acquiring new knowledge; Montana and Rice were not learning how to handle the ball. Rather, they were doing what violinists and pianists do when they practice—tuning up their premotor cortex—and this works best when done in earnest. To hold back in practice would be to load an inferior program, one that might later surface as poor play in a real game. Better always to do it right, in the spirit of the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who said, “I never practice; I always play.” To practice hard is to load the right program. “As the ball is snapped I picture the play,” Montana noted in his autobiography. “It’s like a movie running through my mind.”
This in turn sheds light on athletes’ emphasis on attitude. The importance of maintaining a winning attitude is sometimes put in mystical terms, as if it were a secret that only initiates could understand, but it becomes less mysterious if we view it as a way of keeping the conscious mind from interfering with the functioning of premotor programs geared to success. Ronnie Lott often counseled his teammates before a game to visualize how they wanted to play, then keep that vision firmly in mind until the game was over. Don’t watch the other team play, he would say; keep your mind on your performance. “You’ve got to mentally dominate the game,” said Harry Edwards, a sociology professor at Berkeley and a former athlete who served on the 49ers’ coaching staff. “I’ve never known a great athlete who did not have as his basic attitude, not if he was going to win, but how he was going to win.”
Which may explain why good teams so often play their worst games against bad teams. Competition (from the Latin con petire, “to seek together”) is a two-way street, and the best-laid plans of premotor cortex can go awry when executed against an opponent who errs. The great running back O. J. Simpson used to rehearse patterns constantly in his mind; when driving in traffic he would pretend that the other cars were defensive players, and think about how to run through them. So long as his opponents did what they were supposed to do, Simpson’s careful planning helped produce the kind of results that earned him a career total of 11,236 yards gained, one of the highest in football history; but Simpson was vulnerable to tackle by defensive backs who botched their assignments and found themselves in his path accidentally. The 49ers were like that. The only decisive loss they posted in the 1989 season was to the inconsequential Green Bay Packers, who played so inconsistently that they confused the ‘Niners, beating them 21-17.
As one might expect from a premotor cortex virtuoso, Montana relied especially heavily on attitude. “For a quarterback the game is at least seventy per cent mental,” he said. His performance could plummet alarmingly if a few plays went wrong and he began to lose confidence in the movie in his head, but he tended to recover quickly on the sidelines, seldom permitting a poor series of downs to interfere with his global vision of ultimate victory.* Outright defeats he regarded with Olympian indifference, as corruptions of the Platonic ideal; accosted by a fan after botching a last-minute drive in a playoff game the 49ers should have won, he replied breezily, “Haven’t you ever had a bad day at the office?”
Individuals begin to look a bit different once one starts thinking of each as a galaxy of intelligences, and I would go so far as to conjecture that you could read signs of Montana’s physical excellence in his relatively expressionless face. Joe smiled a lot, on the field and off, but his was a static smile of repose, rather like a dolphin’s. This inexpressive countenance strikes a familiar chord: It is the embodiment of “cool”—the mask worn by Buster Keaton, the most accomplished athlete among the silent screen stars, and by Steve McQueen, who in the film Bullitt permits himself only the slightest knit of the brow when a gangster he is pursuing at the climax of a high-speed car chase blows out the windshield of his Mustang with a shotgun.
I suspect that the genesis of this mask can be traced to developments in cortical tissue produced by sustained athletic training. Control over the various parts of the body is localized in specific cortical regions, and these regions can be mapped. (It is from such studies that researchers derived the homunculus diagrams that one sees in textbooks, where arraigned along the cortical strip are large areas for controlling the hands and face, and smaller ones for the knees, trunk, and shoulders.) For years it was assumed that the relative sizes of each cortical zone were more or less fixed throughout an adult’s life, but in the 1980s researchers learned that in sensory cortex, at least, the size of a given region increases when the part of the body to which it corresponds is used more often. When, for instance, a monkey whose cortical map was being monitored was trained to hold a finger against a vibrating surface, the number of cortical cells devoted to processing sensations coming from that fingertip increased on a daily basis. Presumably the same is true of humans, so that when a child learns to play the piano or an adult practices card tricks, the area of somatosensory cortex devoted to the fingers grows in size. It seems reasonable to propose that this phenomenon occurs in motor cortex as well, so that a map of a belly dancer’s motor cortex would show proportionately more cells devoted to controlling the abdominal muscles, and a hurdler’s more cells devoted to the legs and feet.
Growth in one region of cortex comes at the expense of adjacent regions. And what lies next, on the cortex, to the hand? The face. Assign more cortex to control of the hands, and you are borrowing from brain tissue that otherwise would be devoted to the face. We would expect, say, that an actor who constantly practiced facial expressions would enlarge the cortical area that operates her face—and that, conversely, a quarterback’s cortical map would prove to have relatively more area devoted to his hands and wrists. Motor cortex is bifurcated, with facial and related muscles assigned to half of a normal individual’s cortical tissue while the other half handles hands, arms, trunk, legs, and so forth; possibly the frontier between the two realms migrates in response to disproportionate demands for control of a given realm.
So it just may be that the cool, almost expressionless face of an athlete like Joe Montana is the outward badge of a motor cortex so skilled at managing the hands and feet that it has depleted the cortical territory normally employed to control facial muscles. We respond to the mask precisely because we have learned to associate it with competence in action. That’s why macho movie stars like Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger underact like crazy. The critics may complain that their unvarying facial expressions get tiresome after a while, but Eastwood and Schwarzenegger know what they are doing: They are playing men whose intelligence lies in deeds, not talk, and whose motor cortex, consequently, has borrowed tissue from mere expression in order to devote it to large-muscle functions like running, jumping, and firing endless clips of ammunition from automatic weapons.
But isn’t all this merely a roundabout way of saying that athletes are just dumb jocks after all—that they have sacrificed their “higher” brains on the altar of athletic excellence?
I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why. Motor and premotor cortex are part of the higher brain, and can claim credit for some of our loftiest achievements. Anatomically, both are closely related to the brain centers responsible for language: Broca’s area, the section of the brain that processes speech, belongs to the premotor cortex. This association between talking and acting leads some brain researchers to hypothesize that our ability to speak and write—one of the hallmarks of intellectuality—evolved as a byproduct of selection for advanced athletic skills, in particular the ability to bring down wild animals by throwing stones and spears. The American neurobiologist William H. Calvin suggests that “the supposed specialization of the left brain for language is probably just a secondary effect of a more primitive specialization of the left hemisphere for handling sequences.” If Calvin is correct, the cortical development that graces our species with its unique ability to speak and to write was driven less by intellectual challenges than by advances in human athletic competence.* This is not surprising, if you consider that speaking is itself an intricate physical feat: From the point of view of the premotor cortex, articulating long strings of syllables is a lot like climbing a rock face or pitching a baseball game. In performance, Kenneth Branagh the Shakespearean actor and Joe Montana the quarterback are exercising many of the same areas of their brains.
Very well, one might argue, perhaps language was made possible by physical prowess, and if so we are no more justified in deriding an inarticulate athlete than in making fun of an orator who can’t play tennis. But what of logic? Surely here, in the realm of abstract thought, the higher brain soars far above its sweaty origins in ball-playing and spear-throwing. Are not intellectuals justified in regarding the pure thinking of Einstein and Euler as superior to the merely physical feats of Michael Jordan or Martina Navratilova?
Not really, for the abstract thinking of scientists is a great deal more physical than is usually assumed. The great theoretical physicists, however much their completed theories may be couched in the ethereality of mathematical equations, usually think in terms of mental models, which are but substitutes for physical constructions built of balsa wood, sealing wax, and string. “I never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing,” said Lord Kelvin, the giant of classical thermodynamics. “If I can make a mechanical model I can understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way through I cannot understand.” Einstein’s “thought experiments,” though they led him to counterintuitive conceptions like particulate light and plastic time, were based on information garnered from real experiments. Much the same was true of Archimedes and Galileo, whose investigations of physics owed a lot to their scrutiny of ropes and levers at work in boatyards and docks, and of Newton, who said that “the proper method of inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.” The grand abstractions of science work not because they are abstract, but because they are firmly anchored in the gritty reality of the physical world. And while it is true that pure mathematics can get pretty abstruse, it too sprang from the interrogation of the tangible: Number theory began with counting, and geometry, for Plato the very emblem of pure thought, originated with the efforts of Egyptian “rope stretchers” to survey property lines in oft-flooded farmlands adjoining the Nile.
My point, in any case, is not that quantum mechanics or the mathematics of Cantor sets are less miraculous than the spectacle of Ronnie Lott knocking away that pass in the ‘Niners-Rams game—not, to put it another way, that a great scientist is less to be esteemed than a great athlete—but that they are equally to be esteemed. The higher brain centers that create poems and symphonies and theories of chemical bonding are not “better” than the centers responsible for mere running and jumping and play; as the American physicist Richard Feynman liked to say, “Nothing is ‘mere.’” If those of us who contemplate the prospect of extraterrestrial life were to spend more time trying to grasp the diversity of intelligence here on Earth, we might be less quick to fix on one-dimensional paradigms that rank pan-stellar brainpower in terms of smart and dumb, and in doing so become a little less dumb ourselves.
If you’re still unconvinced that it takes just as much brainpower (albeit of a somewhat different kind) to play center field for the Red Sox as to teach anthropology at Harvard, consider what has been going on in the “artificial intelligence” field. There scientists are finding, to their surprise, that it is harder for a computer to coordinate sequences of physical actions than to solve abstract problems.
Modern computers are pretty good at carrying out logical tasks of the sort that their programmers tend to value as intelligent. They can solve in seconds equations in higher mathematics that would consume a human’s efforts for years. (Indeed, we are beginning to see mathematical proofs that only a computer can solve; they make mathematicians uneasy, but nobody except another computer has the time and the dogged devotion to check up on whether the computer was right.) They can also play a wicked game of chess; by the early 1990s only the world chess champion and a few of his peers could beat top computer programs like Deep Thought, which while pondering its next move examines up to 450,000 positions a second.
What computers can’t do very well is to act. The simplest physical tasks are hard for them. At the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s leading center for robotics, a robot arm programmed to open a door in a laboratory demonstration instead ripped the door off its hinges. (The computer needed a better feedback loop, like the one that communicates between Joe Montana’s motor cortex and his right arm.) Another robot, programmed to lock down a mock space station component, reached tentatively toward the part and then froze; somebody had turned on an overhead light, and the robot’s sensors could not adjust to the difference in lighting. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tried for years to build a computer-controlled “rover,” the prototype for an automated vehicle that would roam the surface of Mars; though equipped with video cameras, a laser rangefinder, and a state-of-the-art high-speed computer, the rover never did manage to find its way around the lab parking lot.
The problem, in the view of Hans Moravec, director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, is that robotics researchers “set their sights directly on the intellectual acme of human thought, in experiments running on large, stationary mainframe computers dedicated to mechanizing pure reasoning.” But physical acuity is not an inferior version of logical thought; it is a separate and equal realm of intelligence that must be mastered on its own terms.
Those terms are largely unconscious and ineffable, which is why we usually do better at carrying out a sequence of actions—parallel parking a car, say, or throwing a baseball—if we don’t think overmuch about what we are doing. A student quoted in Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery asks the master,
“How can the shot be loosed if ‘I’ do not do it?”
“‘It’ shoots,” he replied.
… “And who or what is this ‘It’?”
“Once you have understood that,” the master replied, “you will have no further need of me.”
Mastery of that ineffable “it” is what athletes demonstrate every day, and what computers are nowhere near accomplishing.
Historically, the physical was the inventor of the intellectual—we spent millions of years evolving the wisdom of the body, as against perhaps one hundred thousand years for rational thought—and children are forever reenacting this old drama. The learning child acts; he reaches for blocks, experiments with stacking them (there is no “wrong” way to do this), then transforms the stack, through the magic of the imagination, into a castle or a fort. The child who simply stares into space is probably not thinking abstract thoughts; he is probably not doing very well at all.
The profundity of the body’s wisdom is highlighted in the talents of the abnormal—among great athletes, at one extreme, and, at another, among the brain-damaged inmates of mental wards. One of the great tragedies in the recent history of mental health institutions, much remarked upon by researchers, has been our blindness to the extraordinary abilities of autistic children and idiot savants. These are people whose speech centers have been damaged, leaving them cut off from their companions, but whose physical intelligence is often highly developed. Because they cannot talk normally, they have too often been classified as morons. Typically, they display a great interest in machinery. The psychologist Bernard Rimland describes one of his patients, an autistic youth named Joe:
He recently put together a tape recorder, fluorescent light and a small transistor radio with some other components so that music from the tape was changed to light energy in the light and then back to music in the radio. By passing his hand between the recorder and the light, he could stop the music. He understands the concepts of electronics, astronomy, music, navigation, and mechanics. He knows how things work and is familiar with technical terms. By the age of 12 he could find his way all over the city on his bike with a map and compass. He reads Bowditch on navigation. He is supposed to have an IQ of 80. He does assembly work in a Goodwill store.
This Joe, I suspect, is fascinated by machinery because the most highly developed part of his brain is the part concerned with the mechanical manipulation of objects. In this he shows signs of genius, as Joe Montana is a genius at throwing a football. Viewed with the eye of our understanding, both Joes remind us that we need not look solely to the stars in order to behold a wealth of wildly differing varieties of intelligence. Each human mind is a galaxy of intelligences, wherein shines the light of a billion stars.
*When things went well, Montana kept his edge by setting himself new challenges. Early in the fourth quarter of San Francisco’s 1990 Super Bowl win, Montana, rather than basking in the glory, sidled up to head coach George Seifert on the sidelines and suggested that the team should start thinking about winning a third straight Super Bowl the following season. (The ‘Niners came within one game of that goal, but were beaten by the New York Giants in the National Conference championship game after Montana was sidelined with a broken finger.)
*We see this evolutionary sequence recapitulated in the development of children, who ordinarily cannot begin talking until they learn to walk. Walking like talking is a complex task, and the left-hemisphere motor cortex normally responsible for coordinating both functions must reach a certain stage of development before the child can manage either. “Talk before you go / Your tongue will be your overthrow,” says a Victorian bromide.