How We Decide (Sports Edition)
Posted: March 26th, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball, Other Sports, Pop Culture | 73 Comments »
You know what we have been missing lately: A long, rambling post about nothing at all. So here’s one, coming right at you, inspired by Jonah Lehrer’s book “How We Decide.”
Let me tell you first about this strange experience I had while, of all things, playing a meaningless volleyball match in high school. This was during gym class, of course — why else would I be playing volleyball? — and our team was getting absolutely destroyed. Not that we cared; nobody cared. Nobody even knew why we were playing volleyball in the first place.
We were losing 13-2 or something — I think we played to 15 — and everybody on both teams was joking around, playing half-heartedly, the whole high school bit. And then, suddenly, I had this weird sensation: I knew that we were going to win. It wasn’t like any feeling I ever had playing baseball or tennis or basketball or football or any of the other sports that I actually played with some seriousness. No. This was a feeling I never had before and never had since. I just KNEW we were going to win. It was something visceral, something intense, a higher sensitivity. I didn’t particularly CARE that we were going to win. But I knew it was going to happen.
And it happened precisely as I knew it would. We started to come back. I would like to tell you that I stepped up my game, but I don’t remember it that way and, anyway, I barely knew how to play volleyball. I just remember that we started coming back, and suddenly it was 13-6 or 13-7, and a certain seriousness came over the game. Then it was 13-9, 13-11, and the momentum of our comeback brought us together, and it frustrated the other team, and sure enough we came all the way back, won the match, kind of did a miniature version of the celebration at the end of “Victory” and then went on to our history class or English class or whatever was next. Nobody thought another thing about it. Except me.
I have never really talked about that day because, let’s face it, who cares? It was gym volleyball. But I’ve always been fascinated by that feeling. I knew what was going to happen before it happened. I was in the moment. I tried many times to get that feeling again, but I never did and I suspect I never will. I’m not into Zen or Tao, but I have come to believe that the reason it happened then is because I wasn’t trying, because I didn’t care, because I was playing a game that did not mean anything to me. I have also come to believe that the greatest athletes — your Larry Bird, your Albert Pujols, your Michael Jordan, your Tiger Woods, your Tom Brady — go into these sorts of mental states all the time. They may call it “The zone” or whatever, but from my one brief encounter with it, I recall the feeling being more like this rather peaceful certainty. I already knew the ending. It was up to everyone else to catch up.
I am thinking about this because I am reading Jonah Lehrer’s very interesting book How We Decide, which is about, you know, how we make decisions. More than that, it is about the brain and neuroscience. And it is often about sports. Lehrer writes about how Tom Brady makes decision in the pocket, how a hitter can so quickly recognize a pitch and hit it, how Jean Van de Velde blew the British Open* and so on.
*I was there at Carnoustie when Van de Velde blew the Open, and it remains one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen. You probably remember: Van de Velde had a three-shot lead going to the 18th hole (a hole he had birdied each of the two previous days) and he proceeded to lose his mind before our very eyes. What I remember most is not him bizarrely choosing to hit driver off the tee or hitting the worst second shot in the history of golf (the ball bounced off the grandstands and into rough that would have made Tom Cruise disappear) or him dropping into the water to to try and hit the ball out (“He has gone batty,” the BBC announcers supposedly said — anyway that was the sentiment), or him making the eight-foot putt that actually sent him into a playoff (which he promptly lost).
No, what I remember most is Van de Velde’s own description moments after his famous collapse. He was all class. “I talk about everything except 18, OK?” he said as he walked into the press conference. Everyone laughed. He talked about how it was no tragedy — golf is only a game. Everyone nodded in sympathy. Then someone asked him what he was thinking when he went into the water to hit the ball. He explained that, at first, he had seen the ball up on top of the mound, where he could reach it. But then, as he walked in, he saw the ball sink. And with that he gave voice to the ball, a high-pitched voice.
“I could see the ball sinking,” he said. “It was like (the ball) was telling me “Hi, you silly man. Not for you. Not today. ‘ ”
Some of my favorite stuff in the book, though, revolves around how the mind searches for patterns and rhythms, even when those patterns and rhythms do not actually exist. This involves dopamine neurons — these are the neurons in the brain that (and I’ll probably get this wrong) more or less help us predict future events. As I understand it, these neurons are hyper sensitive to any hint or clue or indicator about what’s coming next. In an elite athlete, these neurons can be preposterously sensitive — Lehrer points out that it takes roughly .3 seconds for a fastball to reach home plate, and it takes roughly .25 seconds for the muscles to initiate a swing, which would seem to make the task impossible. The reason it’s not impossible is because the brain is anticipating before the ball is released, the brain is picking up clues, looking at the pitcher’s windup, his facial expressions, how he grips the ball, the position of his elbow, the height of his front leg, connecting the moment to past at-bats, on and on and on and on. You will often hear baseball announcers say, ”Oh, he really fooled him with that pitch.“ But the truly extraordinary part, from a neurological perspective, is when the pitcher DOES NOT fool the hitter.
Anyway, these dopamine receptors are amazing, but they have their flaws too — they are constantly in search of a pattern, even in the most random of settings. This, Lehrer says, is why slot machines are so effective. You can tell yourself again and again that there is no way to beat a slot machine, no financial future in a game that — quite bluntly — promises to take away roughly 10 percent of the money put in. But slots are perfectly designed to fool those dopamine neurons. They pay off in the most random and surprising ways, and that surprise gets the dopamine neurons to fire away. Lehrer quotes Cambridge professor of neuroscience Wolfram Schultz in saying that for the dopamine neurons, unpredictable rewards are typically three to four times more exciting than expected rewards — or in the words of Paul Newman (from the Color of Money): ”You remind me that money won is twice as sweet as money earned.“ So, these dopamine neurons, desperate for that payoff again, search and search and search for the pattern that will get that unexpected money. And of course, there is no pattern. And by the time you figure that out, you have lost money.*
*And some people, of course, never figure it out.
This is interesting to me … but what’s really fascinating is how this plays out in sports. Lehrer uses a basketball example — he suggests that it is these dopamine neurons that help convince basketball players that they are ”hot.“ A couple of scientists studied years of basketball statistics and came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a hot shooter. They found that an NBA shooter who made three in a row, for instance, shot a lower percentage on the fourth shot than he did in total. They found the same pattern on free throws. ”Hot“ and ”cold“ streaks were simple quirks of chance. A good shooter who will make 50% of his shots will have stretches where he hits a few in a row, and stretches when he misses a few in a row, but all-in-all, like the flipping of a coin, the patterns are random. Making one shot does not in any way project that he will make the next.*
*I’ve often said I would take a few moments and flip a coin 100 times and record the results just to make point. Well, since I’m stuck in a hotel room in Phoenix waiting for late-night college basketball, I figured now was as good a time as ever. I flipped a quarter 100 times — no catch and flip — just to see the results.
They are as follows:
Tails: 60
Heads: 40
Longest streak of tails: 6 in a row.
Longest streak of heads: 4 in a row.
Hottest tails: 9 of 11.
Hottest heads: 7 of 8.
Now, here’s the point — and this is NOT the point that I expected when I started this posterisk: Even as I was doing this with an ordinary quarter that I had found in my backpack, I started to wonder if maybe my coin was badly weighted or if I was flipping the wrong or if maybe I was misreading the coin (the heads in the sunlight does look a bit like the New York State quarter tails). The reason? Tails was coming up too often. Tails came up 7 of the first 10 times, and then 8 of the next 10 times. Something had to be wrong. In other words, even in a silly little exercise when I was trying to prove a point about randomness, my mind was still insisting there HAD to be a pattern.
I think that this human search for pattern is especially prevalent in baseball. What is the whole concept of ”clutch hitting“ but our minds searching for a pattern and a reason? This mediocre hitter comes through in the clutch a few more times than his overall numbers would suggest and our brain cannot help but insist that he has some sort of superpower and keen focus that makes him better when it counts. This great hitter fails in the clutch situation a few times more than his overall numbers would suggest and our brain cannot help but feel that he is lacking some sort of internal fortitude. Our minds simply do not deal well with what author Paul Auster called the music of chance. We need to see patterns. It’s in our DNA.
*One more pull from the book: Lehrer tells about this incredible experiment. Scientists put rats in a T-shaped maze and put food at one of the top corners of the T. They put the food on the left side 60 percent of the time and food on the right side 40 percent of the time. What they found is that once the rats realized that the food was on the left more often, they ALWAYS went left, figuring in their own rat minds that more often than not, they would get food.
But when they did a similar experiment with Yale undergraduates — I’m not sure what they use as a reward for Yale undergraduates — barbecued Fritos? — they found something else. The students also came to realize that the reward was on the left most of the time, but they tried to figure out the pattern. There WAS no pattern, but their brains simply could accept that and so instead of going left and simply getting the reward 60 percent of the time, they tried to outsmart the system. And so they only ended up with the reward 52% of the time. As Lehrer says — outsmarted by rats.
The final verdict: My suspicion is that rats would be more likely than many baseball fans to accept that A-Rod’s a really good baseball player, even if he hits into a clutch double play now and again.
There are many other thought-provoking things in Lehrer’s book — it really has been fun reading. And though it doesn’t follow logically, the book does have me thinking again back to my volleyball experience. It’s obvious to me now that my dopamine receptors were tingling in high gear, and I picked up something in the air, something that told me that we were about to make the greatest volleyball comeback in East Mecklenburg High gym class history. I don’t know what I sensed. I don’t know.
But I think it’s might be a similar sensation to the one that Greg Maddux would have when he was unhittable, that Magic Johnson would have when he was about to take over a game, that Jack Nicklaus would have when he was taking hold of a golf tournament. And it might be a similar sensation to the one you had on a football field or softball field or whatever. It might be a similar sensation that you get to watching sports too — you just know what will happen. That’s one beautiful thing about the games we play. Sometimes, we are right.
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Strangely, I’ve also had some kind of premonition, and it only happened once. It wasn’t even for something I was involved in. For some reason, I KNEW the Patriots would be the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI. I don’t know how or why, I didn’t care about either team, but I just knew it was going to happen. I wish I was into gambling then.
I like what you wrote — heck, I like everything you write — but when you conclude with the great athletes and how they feel when they’re about to take over, I wonder where their self-confidence fits in the equation. If I played 1-on-1 with a friend and felt like I was about to go on a run, and then I did, it would feel kind of mystical and bigger than me, because I am not that good. The greats, knowing their skill plays such a big role in what’s about to happen, must feel a little differently.
Classic Poz. Great post Joe.
Okay, Joe…We love you but some of us are probably asking, “Has he lost his mind? He’s flipping a quarter 100 times while in his hotel in Phoenix and KEEPING TRACK OF THE HEADS & TAILS STREAK PATTERNS FOR GODSAKES!!”
Two things come to mind for me…Yes, I had the same feeling most nights in the locker room before our football games, except I always KNEW we were going to LOSE!
The other is, now all I can think of is this athletic little point guard “Mouse” and he always goes left and still scores 60% of the time! Thanks., Joe
I’ve only had feelings like that a few times. All of the sudden you are just above the game, knowing you can put the shot close (golf) from wherever it is or sink 20 footer after 20 footer. Some days you just have it.
Also, what you are talking about comes down to why we are humans and rats are rats. Searching for patterns in a seemingly random world has taught us pretty much everything we know. The rats were simply satisfied with going left every time to achieve the 60% success rate. Not content with that, the humans searched for 100% success, and got boned.
I’ve had that feeling exactly once as well, playing in a meaningless city league basketball game. I had made a couple of shots in the game, and I came across midcourt and knew — knew! — that I was about to make a 3-pointer. So I pulled up immediately and fired. Swish. The shot was long enough that there was a reaction on the court and among the dozen people there. My daughter was there. Unfortunately, she was 8 and too young to understand how impressed she should have been.
This is fascinating stuff — as is nearly all of what you write, Joe. Keep it coming!
I wonder if there isn’t some selection bias, though. Would you have even remembered your precognitive moment if you hadn’t won that volleyball game? I can recall a handful of “I KNEW he’d hit that homer!” moments, but only those times the homer was actually hit — I suspect I dismissed the others as “I was ALMOST sure he’d hit one out” events. The brain indeed works in mysterious ways, including our memories. Good stuff to keep in mind, about the mind!
My own experience suggests to me that there is a ‘zone’ that (that I no longer approach), but as Mike says above a lot of it has to do with confidence. When I was (much) younger and playing at a relatively high level (university) in the sport I was best at (hockey), my zone was accompanied by a song playing in my head – quite often that was the fairly new “Jungleland” – and I tried to influence the zone song by listening to it as I drove to the rink. Didn’t always work of course that it was that song. And it didn’t often work at all. What likely did happen in retrospect is that I may have scored a goal early or made a difficult play, either offensively or defensively, relaxed and felt that much more confident, and it was the confidence that inspired the zone, not the other way around. But on those occasions I did feel as though I could do just about anything on the ice. Something akin to what you felt that day Joe. I just wish the music would play more often nowadays. Sigh.
I get a feeling like that quite often. I would describe it as a “sickening” feeling, and it only happens during Detroit Lions games.
I read an article a few years back that said one of the reasons many athletes were terrible and obsessive gamblers, beside their competitive nature, is that they are so conditioned to think that they have the skills to change the outcome of the games they play, they come to actually believe their skill will help them change the outcome of random things like cards/dice/etc. That’s an interesting theory when coupled with this article.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” has some great information on the brain making accurate split decisions. He has a chapter about asking athletes how they do things like hit a baseball or return a tennis serve. And they either don’t know to explain it or say phrases like “I keep my left elbow in” because that’s what the coach has always told them. Then video replays show their bodies doing something totally different. Because while the player remembers what the coach said, the body remembers what it was doing when it had success and repeats it.
I think this post needs a high school yearbook pic of Joe.
Another thing…You could get the feeling that you’re going to “win the game” quite often, but you only remember it when you do actually win the game. Therefore, you think there is something to is.
My favorite description of the feeling of JUST KNOWING comes from the Hustler when Eddie says:
“When I’m goin’, I mean, when I’m REALLY goin’ I feel like a… like a jockey must feel. He’s sittin’ on his horse, he’s got all that speed and that power underneath him… he’s comin’ into the stretch, the pressure’s on ‘im, and he KNOWS… just feels… when to let it go and how much. Cause he’s got everything workin’ for ‘im, timing touch… it’s a great feeling, boy, it’s a real great feeling when you’re right and you KNOW you’re right. It’s like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue’s part of me. You know, it’s uh – pool cue, it’s got nerves in it. It’s a piece of wood, it’s got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don’t have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody’s ever made before. I can play that game the way… NOBODY’S ever played it before.â€
Of course Eddie starts that passage by saying he’s only felt that way twice which may explain why he’s still playing lousy pool rooms.
I’ve had that feeling three times in my life. Once was a softball game, where I (playing right field) deliberately jockeyed deep with a guy who’d poke a single to right. I knew he’d go for the single, raced in, dove, and gloved the ball just before landing on the infield dirt. Once was a bridge tournament where we were trying to help a sweet eighty year old lady become a Life Master and I became a total hand hog as well as playing insanely well. All I remember from that day was as it wore on was I got so much tunnel vision that I lost the ability to socialize, not even speaking when spoken to by a lovely opponent. Our friend got her gold card because of that day. And the third time was the critical match in winning a national title at bridge. I suddenly knew the opponents would have to do something stupid if I did something that wasn’t quite as stupid (but wasn’t smart), I made my bid, they responded as I knew they would, and we won the match because of that one board. So it can and does happen. Zia Mahmood, one of the world’s best bridge players, calls it heat one, and says the truly great players learn when they are playing great (and push a little more) or playing below average (and take fewer chances).
As for your coin flipping, did you notice that you had 20 flips (the first 20) which went 15-5, and then 80 flips that were right at 50% as a clump? In the long run, statistics do even out. The late great Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) said that the search for patterns is why people believe in God, despite no reproducible evidence in support of that faith. I also had one friend with a dull job who spent much of his days rolling 20 sided dice and recording results, 1,000 times each. It wasn’t really using loaded dice if you just chose dice likelier to give you the numbers you wanted, was it?
I wonder if Jonah Lehrer is related to or possibly the son of Jim Lehrer of PBS fame and author of many books?
I’ve always wondered about the difference between ‘confidence’ = self fullfilling prophecy (a greater chance that something may go in your favor) vs precognition (knowing any result, such as this will or will not happen). Brain froze. End post.
Only been in the “zone” once. Played some good tennis matches and golf shots where I felt really dialed in, but I still felt “normal”. However, once when I was playing baseball in high school, I had a singularly unique experience. It was a key at bat in extra innings that ended up being a walk-off game winner and the entire pitch and hit was in super slow-mo. Never experienced anything like it before or since, but the pitch looked like it was going about 5 miles per hour and was as big as a soccer ball. It was almost like an out-of-body experience. I’m sure elite athletes get this often – they talk about the game slowing down and seeing the field/court/etc. It was pretty awesome when it happened – be nice to experience that again.
Joe, if you enjoyed How We Decide, you would love A Drunkard’s Walk. By a renowned physicist who co-wrote A Brief History of Time with Stephen Hawking. About randomness and human beings’ inability to distinguish such, fantastic read.
A great line: When Apple first rolled out the Ipod, the random play feature was truly random. Due to such, Apple received many complaints when the same song would play 2 or (gasp) even 3 times in a row. So, Apple de-randomed the random play…Steve Jobs said “In order to make the feature seem more random, we had to make it less random.”
There are several great books about evolutionary psychology, arguing that our brains are evolved to conditions about 10,000 years ago. Makes it tough to function in a world of large numbers when your brain evolved to small family groups and the power of the anecdote.
I have twice predicted home runs right before they happened. Once at a Iowa Cubs-Denver Zephyrs, the Cubs brought in a left-handed reliever late in the game with the bases loaded. As he was warming up, I was looking around in a non-focused kind of way, and it all suddenly came together. The hitter’s stats on the scoreboard showed that he had some power, the pitcher’s stats on the scoreboard showed he didn’t have a lot of strikeouts, the hitter was in the on-deck circle taking right-handed swings, and in an instant before I had even taken notice of these facts I knew he was going to homer. The pitcher threw two balls and I told my now-wife, “Watch this. It’s going out.” Sure enough, it did. The only other thing I rememeber about the game is that Jamie Moyer started for the Cubs.
The other was a Cubs-Cards game when I owned Jody Davis and Lee Smith in my fantasy league. The Cubs were down by one in the top of the ninth and with a guy or two on base and I told my wife that Davis was going to homer and then Smith would stand up and start warming up for the save. I was feeling pretty cocky after that one happened.
I also had a premonition that Darryl Motley was going to have a big game when they were announcing the lineups at Game 7 in the ‘85 WS. But I was too nervous to say anything to anyone for fear I’d jinx it. Of course, I know I’ve had premonitions that were just as strong that didn’t happen–which explains why I still have to work for a living.
Also, Joe, this blog entry is interesting. You start by falling into the old “premonition” fallacy, and end up debunking some of the “pattern seeing” fallacies.
I would venture the reason you remember your premonition about the volleyball game is because your team won. If your team went to lose 15 – 3, you would have thought “ah, that was a stupid premonition.” The reason people remember these things is that they get immediate positive feedback, and therefore remember the premonition. None of us remember the ones that were stone cold wrong.
We all have storis like this. It’s one of the fun things about being human. In college I was playing 2 on 2 basketball with a friend and two strangers. I’m 6′4″, so I’m usually the tallest person on a court. So when I play, I’ll typically post up. I always post up. During this game, my buddy passed me the ball when I was on the three point line on the left. It was for the winning point in a close game. I never take that shot. I always wait for my buddy’s screen, roll right, pass to him when the defender’s switch and go to the net for the pass or rebound opportunity. For some reason, I knew I’d hit the shot and hoisted it up. I don’t know if I’d ever taken that shot before in a game, but I did and knew it would go in. It was a cool feeling.
One time when I was in middle school, time slowed down for me. It wasn’t for anything cool like hitting a baseball or anything, but we were playing basketball and I was running down the court, I tripped near a wall and to this day remember falling face-first towards the wall and everything going really slow as I fell face-first into the wall. I know it happened because my brain went hyper-aware due to the impending pain. But after experiencing it, after seeing what your brain is capable of in an intense situation, I’ve always wanted to train myself to do that whenever it would have been helpful. It probably would have extended my baseball career another year or so…at least until I graduated High School.
Happened one time for me. I was assistant coaching a baseball team with a buddy. A few things had happened in the inning, pitcher gave up a walk, then a fielder made an error on a double play ball. I just had this feeling so I said to my buddy, the coach, “he is going to hit this next batter.” First pitch, right into the kid’s ribs. My buddy just looked at me like I was insane or a genuis or an insane genius. It was just odd and it has only happened that one time.
I wanted to second the notion of the first commenter. It was my freshman year of college and I woke up the morning of Super Bowl 36 (Pats-Rams) and literally said out loud “the Patriots are going to win.” I consider myself a very rational fan that looks for unbiased opinions on my own favorite teams, but for some reason, it was just stuck in my mind that the Pats were winning that game. I had never had that feeling before, and haven’t had it since, despite many lopsided victories for my home town favorites.
Great post, fun stuff to think about. Re: the heads/tails experiment…actually, a “tails” bias should be expected, because if you sliced a coin in half (separating the heads and tails side of the coin), the “heads” side should weigh more than the “tails”. So when you flip it, it stands to reason gravity will pull the heads side of the coin down, meaning (slightly) more tails should show up.
Thought provoking and of high quality. Kudos.
Undoubtedly, both chance and performance have got to come into play. Imagine a batter locks in and “knows” he will hit a home run. His counterpart, the pitcher, will also be going through a similar process (although perhaps he doesn’t “know” the outcome). With regard to chance, the pitcher may be locked in or zoned out. For example, the pitcher’s focus is variable (and unaffected by the hitter) resulting in the variable quality of the pitch (example: maintaining good arm speed on a change up). All of this is uncontrolled by the batter and, hence, random. In contrast, one must consider that dopaminergic activity does not affect a solitary thought process. Namely, As Joe said, dopaminergic activity is involved in pattern recognition. This may come in handy when, say, trying to pick up the spin on the ball as it approaches the plate. From all this, one can imagine that a hitter may “know” they will hit a home run and, consequentially, such extra dopaminergic activity may provide better recognition of the pitcher’s pitch selection.
“I’m not sure what they use as a reward for Yale undergraduates”
Entry level jobs at Goldman Sachs or the chance to have sex with someone who has an entry level job at Goldman Sachs. Student’s choice.
I understand the Yale motto has been updated from Lux Et Veritas to Slightly Dumber Than Lab Rats
I have this book too but I haven’t finished it, although now I feel like I should.
I suspect that everyone here has had that feeling of “just knowing” more often than you realize. Have you ever met somebody and just knew at once that you would go on to be good friends? Or seen a girl and knew without even speaking to her that there was some chemistry there? I think the brain is making these predictions for you based on cues it picks up on and relates to past experience that we’re not even aware of.
One thing about just knowing – and Nick Kristof’s column today sort of touches on this – is that when we “just know” something and we’re right it’s a memorable experience, but when we’re wrong we forget about it right away. Anybody who woke up and just knew that the Rams would beat the Pats in XXXVI has probably forgotten that they ever had the thought.
Have fun watching Mizzou tonight, Joe. Get us a W.
I’m a couple of years into the adulthood world of a career and all that. I pay bills. i rent a house. i get my tires rotated. i lead a mature enough life. yet i know i will never be as successful in anything in life as i am while playing beer pong (or beirut for missouri folks) when somebody else is talking trash to me. my dopamine receptors are utterly useless.
haven’t i read this exact story in a klosterman book before?
My premonition happened this year. I was playing pool with some friends in Haifa and we were having a good time, laughing, complaining the whole thing. Then suddenly I realized I was going to win, I don’t why and I don’t know how but I knew I was. Next thing you know, I won (I was helped by a third party eliminating a few balls from play but I was still right). It was among the most incredible feelings I have experienced, absolute complete confidence that no matter what happened the outcome was predetermined. If I could get that feeling when I was hitting then maybe I could actually start it would make life a lot better.
I’ve had it twice — once playing pinball (it was a baseball table, ages ago, and if you hit a home run with the star lit, one out got removed; I ended up playing a five-out inning, just smashing everything, and scored 169 runs), and once playing stickball with a friend with the closing instrumental to “Freebird” hammering through my head. I smacked six, seven homers in a row, just deadly.
I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now.
Thanks, Joe.
My girlfriend studied under the “hot hand” guy (Tom Gilovich) and has tried for years to explain it to me. I’ve always resisted, saying something like, “You just don’t get how sports work.”
Now I get it.
The key was being told I was looking for a pattern. That, and the fact that the guy who wrote the book I gave to three relatives last Christmas said it.
#11 hits the Irony nail on the Irony head. You’ve gotten this feeling many other times (I sure do too), but you only remember the ones where it happened. And you only REALLY remember the big, super, huge times it happened.
Which is of course ironic because a whole subsection of the post is talking about how humans look for patterns that aren’t actually there… like, for example, how-every-time-I-KNOW-I’m-going-to-win-I-end-up-winning.
Hindsight bias. It’s all just hindsight bias.
Very enjoyable post.
Skinner made a study in which he found that pigeons getting food rewards on a regular basis stopped looking for the food shortly after it was stopped. Birds rewarded on a random basis kept looking for the food for much longer periods after it was stopped. Some birds kept checking until the experiment was over.
like slot machine players.
bird brains.
chirp.
After Don Denkinger screwed the Cardinals out of a World Series title in game 6 in 1985, I KNEW they would lose the next night. And so did Whitey. The winning run scored w/one out, Clark dropped a pop up, Porter’s passed ball, yeah, yeah, yeah. If Denkinger hadn’t blown it none of that would have happened. Heck, if Coleman would’ve stayed away from the tarp it would have been Cards in five. C’est la vie.
I’ve had the premonition experience three times, although none of them since 1991, and — here’s what makes them even weirder than yours — none of them had anything to do with me or with patterns I should have been able to sense. The first two involved the board game Pursue the Pennant, of all things. Having been through hundreds of games in which a few innings of no-hit ball by a pitcher would reliably make me tense, curious, and wondering, I got three innings into a Jay Tibbs pitching performance, relaxed, and realized “This will be the first no-hitter I’ve played through”. Which it was. The second, a hundred or so board games later, was similar and involved Jay Cowley: I knew after two innings that it would be a no-hitter, and relaxed, and was right. How?
The third premonition, if it could have held off until 1992 and made me old enough to gamble, could have made me tens of thousands of dollars: I KNEW, before the World Series even started, that all seven games would be won by the home team. Not an illogical guess — I was predicting a repeat of the Twins’ obnoxious 1987, when they’d beaten my two favorite teams in the playoffs, including a World Series of seven straight home-team wins — but it didn’t feel like a guess, it felt like revealed truth. Six of the seven games were incredibly close, but I just wandered in, glanced at the TV, and wandered out, because I knew how they’d come out. And I was right.
I’ve been waiting 17+ years to run a controlled experiment on the next time I get a feeling like that. It hasn’t happened.
I’m assuming Poz didn’t “take over” the game like a Jordan could if he felt the same way or a great athlete in an individual sport, like Tiger, could do. If so this feeling was completely dependent on the actions of high school kids playing a friendly game. Pure luck. You only remember it and consider special because it was cool that it worked out. We tend to forget the times we’re sure about something only to discover, eh, maybe it isn’t going to work out.
You ever have those weird little moments where you haven’t thought of something or someone in years and then – boom! you hear about it two different places maybe 15 minutes apart. And you think to yourself “Geez, that’s amazing. What are the odds?” It would actually be more remarkable if those moments NEVER happened. That they occasionally do is just proof that random chance is going to include these odd moments.
Two observations:
While playing keep-away with our dog, Coltrane, I once gave him a little misdirection and slipped the toy behind my head (I was sitting on the couch). Eventually he found it, and six years later, he still goes looking behind my neck whenever he can’t find the toy we’re playing with. Just like the rats …
I had the same premonition, but in a tennis game I was highly engaged in. A USTA League match, I was paired up with a partner I hadn’t played with before, at a “ranking” (#1 Doubles) I hadn’t played at either. Our opponents were solid players and we were out of sorts at the start of the match, and we quickly dropped the set 0-6 and I found myself serving 0-2 in the second set, 15-40 down. The receiver hit a lob over my partner’s head while I had played serve and volley, so I was out of position to try and cover it. I watched it for a second and then said “WTF” and raced back, flipping a weak lob barely over the net, and they hit the overhead straight down into the bottom of the net. 30-40, and I thought to myself, this is the opening. This is the chance. Ace. Service winner. Ace. We were on the board, and I had the same feeling as Joe – this match is in the bag. On the changeover my partner suggested that we receive serve a little further back, and it made all the difference in the world. We broke serve and now we were on a roll, and it seemed like in about ten minutes time, we had won the set 6-2 and were up 4-0 in the third. We didn’t close them out at love, but 0-6, 6-2, 6-1 was one of the most satisfying wins I ever had on a tennis court, especially at that level of competition. And I knew it was going to happen when we were down 0-6, 1-2.
To #19, that’s not necessarily true. I remember when my “premonition” went wrong. Junior year playing soccer we were down 2-0 at halftime, but I got this feeling that we were going to win. We scored two goals in the first ten minutes, and I felt like one of those precogs from Minority Report. In the last two minutes I fouled one of their players in the box and he scored on the PK. That really sucked.
Did anyone in the entire world think the Cards would beat Boston in the 2004 WS? After you come back from ridiculous odds to beat your arch rival, you get some kind of inevitable momentum. I definitely believe in the inevitable. Sometimes you just know, and the 04 world series is an example of a time when everyone knew. And I’m not talking about baseball analysis comparing starting pitchers, lefty/righty matchups, etc… I’m talking about inevitability. Everyone knew, and I think the Cardinals knew it too. Once the “curse” was broken (by beating NY in dramatic fashion) there was no doubt left. I’m not a boston fan at all, and in fact I’m something of a Cards fan (as long as they keep Pujols). but that WS was inevitable, regardless of who you wanted to win. I didn’t know anywone, not a sportswriter, not a friend, not an acquaintance, not a guy who knows a guy, etc., who thought the cards would win a single game. they had no chance. Shilling and Ortiz have both frequently commented on how they *knew* they would come through. I didn’t believe in the “curse” before 2004, but after they beat the yankees that way i did beleive that they had broken it. In any case, their victory was sealed before the first pitch of the WS was thrown.
“I wonder if Jonah Lehrer is related to or possibly the son of Jim Lehrer of PBS fame and author of many books?”
Or maybe Tom Lehrer, composer of such masterpieces as “The Vatican Rag,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” and other masterpieces.
“A great line: When Apple first rolled out the Ipod, the random play feature was truly random. Due to such, Apple received many complaints when the same song would play 2 or (gasp) even 3 times in a row. So, Apple de-randomed the random play…Steve Jobs said “In order to make the feature seem more random, we had to make it less random.†”
Actually, Jobs gave a good line, but a bad explanation. They went from “sampling with replacement” (every song went back into the pool for possible selection) to mostly “sampling without replacement.”
I thought the Cards were slight favorites to beat Boston in 2004.
I agree with the commenters who attribute most of these episodes to selection bias. Having said that, I find the phenomenology of this sort of thing both fascinating and somewhat bizarre. I have never felt subjectively sure of anything for which I did not feel I had some evidence, and have trouble imagining being completely sure of anything without any reason to be so.
[...] Random Feed wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptYou know what we have been missing lately: A long, rambling post about nothing at all. So here’s one, coming right at you, inspired by Jonah Lehrer’s book “How We Decide.†Let me tell you first about this strange experience I had while, of all things, playing a meaningless volleyball match in high school. This was during gym class, of course — why else would I be playing volleyball? — and our team was getting absolutely destroyed. Not that we cared; nobody cared. Nobody even knew why we we [...]
I have a similar premonition before every NFL Season when I just know that my Raiders are going to lose at least 11 games.
i’ve lived in phoenix most of the past 20 years. it’s boring. counting heads and tails just might be the thing i’ve been looking for. thanks joe.
I’ve had that same feeling three or four times about guys about to hit home runs in TV ball games (never a wrong one), and once about a fire in the Minardi pit lane (F1). Weird stuff.
Saratoga racetrack. 1987, I think. My sister and her husband had a box in the grandstand each season. I’m no gambler, nor was my girlfriend at the time. Wouldn’t know a Racing Form from an Excel spreadsheet.
We were just casually picking horses, starting with races 1 through 4. They all come in first.
I get an idea. “OK, let’s do a Quinella (two horses finish 1st and 2nd, in any order). We both stare at the program. Our eyes come to rest on the same horse. Be both say its name, at virtually the same moment: The Time Is Now.
OK. First horse chosen. then, another spontaneous inspiration. I say: “Close your eyes. I’m gonna send you a number telepathically. Nod once when you see it in your mind.” I close my eyes, and visualize the number 4. I open my eyes. She looks at me and says: “4″.
I grin, and rush to the window to place a $2 bet. (Like I said, I’m no gambler).
‘The Time Is Now’ wins by a length. There’s a photo finish for Place. We wait. And wait. Finally, the results light up the scoreboard. The #4 horse Placed. The payout was something like $26 bucks. We’re delighted.
And then, of course, in subsequent races the Magic is replaced by the Ego: ‘Say, we might be onto something big here!”
Needless to say, we couldn’t pick a winner the rest of the day.
[...] [...]
This has actually happened to me twice in my life and it has fascinated me ever sense. The first was in 1994 in a bar in Dallas, TX. Me and my friends were playing pool and for whatever reason, I started making every shot. I could just see the angle of the balls and where to hit them to make them go in the pockets. And then I had the dexterity to make it happen. I was unstoppable. I was making bank shots, combinations, everything. People from the bar kept coming over and putting their quarters on the table to play me. People who said they were good pool players and wanted to beat me. But they couldn’t. It was the single strangest 2 hours of my life. I did not lose at pool that night. Never even came close to losing and by the end, people were gathered around the table watching.
The other time was playing golf. I was playing in a corporate event at Doral with rented clubs. I am an average golfer, a 16 handicap. I shot a 46 on the front, which is about right. But on 10 I hit my drive right down the middle of the fairway, hit a 7 iron within 8 feet and made the putt for a birdie. It went on from there and I shot a 34 on the back nine, 2 under. But again, it wasn’t that I was doing it that was the most amazing, it was that I knew it was going to happen. I could see each shot before hand. I was looking at the fairways and saying to myself, the best spot to approach the green is the right half of the fairway just past that bunker, and then I would hit it right to that spot. I even remember at the time thinking, this is just like that time in Dallas playing pool.
I talk about those two moments in my life a lot with my friends. They all just kind of pass them off as glory stories. But I knew something strange was happening during both events. I’m not sure what it is. A sixth sense or something. I try to tap into it every now and then, mostly when playing golf and sometimes will think I have but it leaves instantly. I’m always waiting for the next time.
I can only clearly remember that feeling once. It was unfortunately, a sad event for me as a Yankee fan. The Yankees were up 3-0 in their 2004 series with the Red Sox. They are winning Game 4 and the great Mariano Rivera comes in. As soon as he walked Dave Roberts, an overpowering feeling came over me and said: “The Yankees are going to lose this series.”
Now all the odds in the world were against that “feeling.” But I just knew it and all I could do was watch it all play out in sickening fashion.
Fascinating.
what year did Steve Bartman rob Alou of that foul ball? 2002? Everybody on the PLANET knew the Cubs would lose the game (and series) after that play.
I have always been amazed by Pat Tabler and his terrific ability to hit with the bases loaded, versus his very average hitting when the bases weren’t loaded. Apparently bases loaded for him was his zone. As a good high school and college tennis player, I have been in the zone quite a lot, where I could do no wrong, and I think that being in the zone has to do with a confluence of events but it is mostly related to confidence.
Getting in that “zone” is something that I think I witnessed on a golf course almost 3 decades ago. An odd sort of fellow I was caddying for playing 18 holes solo found the zone that you speak of….He couldn’t miss a putt for the longest time while putting the ball in all sorts of different ways. It was weird. Wish I had had a video camera at the time to preserve the memory.
Danny Noonan
It was a meaningless Cards/Cubs game and the Cubs had a lead but the bases were loaded because our reliever had just geniusly walked someone to get to Pujols, which is exactly what you should do in that situation.
And my dad called, distraught as you can be in July or whatever, and I said, “No worries. Pujols is about to hit into a 6-4-3.” We hung up.
On a 1-1 pitch, it was though I had designed it.
Thanks, Dopamine Neurons!
Agree with #7. I’ve had a few “I knew we were going to win/do something improbable” moments that came true, but I probably don’t remember all the moments where I had the same sentiment but we didn’t end up winning.
Anyway, your story seems to contradict the ideas of the book that you talk about, i.e. people assign patterns to things even when they don’t exist. I thought that’s where you were gonna go with it until I read the end…
“roughly .3 seconds for a fastball to reach home plate ”
=
~136mph fastball
Sid Finch?
George Brett WAS clutch, especially in Game 3 of the 1985 playoffs. I don’t care what anyone says.
I got into a zone once while bass fishing, believe it or not. Nobody else was catching anything; it was almost embarrassing. On some casts I knew I was going to catch a fish before I caught it.
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Harry #57: I believe the 136 mph pitch was Sidd Finch’s changeup.
Talk about guys who could get “zoned in”. Finch and Mark Fidrych were two of the best ever in that regard. (However, I never ever had the opportunity to see Finch pitch – He must have been remrkable tho’, I mean, when the late George Plimpton writes about you, you’ve got to have some unbelievable talent!)
Interesting too, both of the above hurlers had very short careers. I wonder if getting in the “zone” on a regular basis burns out an athlete at a more rapid pace, especially pitchers?
I just knew Villanova was going to beat the crap out of Duke last night.
I visited this website this moment by chance, but I KNEW I would read the post.
#51 – Not to pick nits, or rub it in, but Mariano walked Kevin Millar. Roberts came in to run for him.
And while I have a couple of examples of “zone”-type experiences that might be selection bias at work, there was one thing similar that I had on a semi-regular basis.
I was never good enough at any sport to get in the zone in anything athletic, but I’ve played drums in a couple of bands, and there were times when even before we started the show, I’d just know that we were just going to kill that night, and then we did. And I recall being right about it often enough that I would remember if I’d been wrong, as it would’ve stood out.
I think this happens a lot with people. Somebody does a great college basketball bracket or upset and they “just knew”.
My favorites, though, are the ones I have convinced myself of that end up going the other way. Two examples I have are The D-Backs beating the Yankees in the 2001 World Series (game 7). Another is Texas beating USC in the BCS title game a few years ago. I knew these things weren’t going to happen to the point that I casually watched a few minutes of the games said screw it and went to bed. both times, my wife woke me up and said “Uh, you might want to come in and watch this”. The feeling was as amazing as any I have ever gotten from being on a hot streak or being right about something.
I’m betting this happened to a lot of folks with the Giants-Pats game last year.
I think there’s a difference between people using the language of “I just knew” and really having the same feeling that Joe and others are decribing. I use that language all the time to refer to correct upset predictions in sports, but I never mean that I actually “knew.” I just mean that I felt very confident about it for whatever reason.
People filling out their brackets for March Madness say they “just knew” all the time, but they virtually never really mean it in the sense Joe is talking about.
The point being that when we’re wondering whether it’s selection bias, you have to distinguish all those times people say they “just knew” when really they did not have the feeling that Joe is describing, it’s just the language they use.
I’ve filled out an NCAA bracket every since 1991, except for 1995 when I was in Ireland. So that’s 18 years, and 72 1 vs. 16 matchups that I have predicted. 71 times I have predicted the 1 seed to beat the 16. 1 time I picked the 16 seed to win. In 1996 I picked Western Carolina to beat Purdue. The final score was Purdue 73, WC 71. By score not the closest 1/16 ever…two games in 1989 were decided by 1 point, and one game in 1990 went to OT, I think. But in many ways it was the closest because Western Carolina controlled the play for much of the game. I’m pretty sure they had the lead with 3 minutes to go, and they may have had a 7 or 8 point lead at some point. I do know they had a 3 in the air for the win in the final seconds that hit the back rim, and then got the rebound and had a tying shot in the air at the buzzer.
And I said I just knew Western Carolina would win. But I didn’t. Because I have had that “just knew” feeling and I know the difference. What I “just knew” was that Purdue was a crappy one seed (and I was right…they barely beat the 16 and then got smoked by #8 Georgia) but I did not really feel that I knew WC would win the game, though I’m sure I used that language.
i have had this before. it was that cardinals vs. bears monday night game a few years ago. i was working at the arizona republic and knew all about the cardinals choking. at half time i absolutely knew they would lose the game. i was seriously not even surprised by anything that happened in that 2nd half.
Living in NYC at the time, I was in a cab on my way to a Knicks-Baltimore (Bullets?) playoff game in 1970, and the cabbie said “Baltimore will win tonight.” I disagreed loudly and declaimed, “The Knicks will win in double overtime.” And they did. Why did I say this? Why didn’t I just say “overtime?” Why “double overtime?” I had no premonition — it’s just what came out of my mouth. I wonder what that cabbie thought a few hours later….
I must concur that “A Drunkard’s Walk” would be a great follow up to the Lehrer book. It can be a bit exhaustive in the math of randomness, but it really brings forth some fascinating elements that we as society assume as skill but are rather quite random in reality.
Thanks for all the free material! I look forward to purchasing the upcoming book.
cheers
DF
Concerning the zone: In my experience, it doesn’t always mean you’ll win. Let me explain. Once upon a time in a former life, I was pretty darn good at Tae Kwon Do. I won some very large tournaments and such (I’m not trying to brag just establishing that I knew what I was doing). Early on, I would get into the zone quite a bit against top competition. These were the times I won.
However, at one point, relatively late in my career, I had some pretty serious shoulder issues (which I still have) that partially immobilized my right shoulder. Now, Tae Kwon Do is mostly about your legs, so I figured I could carry on competing, and I did pretty well. I could still beat most everyone, but there were one or two guys that I just could not beat. I remember one time specifically, I was fighting in the finals of a tournament and I was in the zone, but I still KNEW I was going to lose. I knew everything he was doing and I knew when it was coming, but my shoulder was messed up, and I also knew I couldn’t stop it. So, I got whipped.
I think the zone is really about understanding. You know what’s going to happen because you can see which way the variables are breaking this time. Most often, you can turn this into a win, but sometimes it just lets you know to cover you behind so you don’t get it kicked too badly.
I was in marching band in High School, and every summer, we met every day for a week to work on our marching. This one time, I was cranked to the gills, but was really “in the zone” and beat everyone in the march-off…
…at least I think I did. Like I said, though: I was cranked to the GILLS.
[...] Heidegger added an interesting post on How We Decide (Sports Edition)Here’s a small excerptI stepped up my game, but I don’t remember it that way and, anyway, I barely knew how to play volleyball. … to the one you had on a football [...]
Back in September 2005, I entered into such a “zone”, when I accurately predicted, batter by batter, a bottom-of-the-ninth, five-run comeback victory by Oakland over Seattle. Weirdest damn thing I’ve ever done. I wrote a blog entry about it on Baseball Toaster (click on my name).
I had this exact feeling in the home half of the tenth inning of Game Six, 1986 WS. Seriously. I was 14. Everyone else in the house had this game written off, but dammit, I knew the Mets were winning that game. I’m normally nervous to the point of nausea at tense moments, but I remember being oddly calm throughout the whole sequence. The downside is, everyone else in the house completely freaked out when Ray Knight came in with the final run, but I didn’t feel it at all – just a shrug. Eh.
The only other thing that came close was a weekend hockey tournament I played in about five or six years ago. Both the semifinals and finals went to shootouts, and I was completely wired in. I knew that they weren’t going to beat me. I stopped seven out of seven and we won both games.
Funny thing is, I’ve been a huge sports jinx ever since. Guess I used up my zone. It’s a pity, I have a big playoff game tomorrow night and it would be nice not to be nervous 28 hours ahead of time, like I am right now.