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A comment on When You Watch Sports, Your Brain Thinks You’re Playing.

Re:When You Watch Sports, Your Brain Thinks You’re Playing by mfsch on Sunday July 15, 2018 @10:55PM (#17538444)
The whole notion of “your brain thinks …” is a common interpretation of fMRI studies, but I think it is not very accurate or useful. It contains the idea that what your brain does is somehow separate from what “you” are thinking and doing. In practice, what we see in fMRI pictures is just the what the current thinking and activity looks like in the brain. So even if you saw the same patterns of activity for people watching and playing sports, that wouldn’t mean that the brain “thinks you are playing”, it just means that your thinking might be similar during both activities. As others have mentioned the article does not reference the title, so this is a comment on the title only.
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Re:When You Watch Sports, Your Brain Thinks You’re Playing by taneq on Monday July 16, 2018 @12:41AM (#17538824)
> It contains the idea that what your brain does is somehow separate from what “you” are thinking and doing

It's like those studies that can detect decision making a split second before the person is consciously aware that they've made the decision. It's usually presented as "'you' don't really make the decision", as if that person exists apart from their brain.

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Re:When You Watch Sports, Your Brain Thinks You’re Playing by mc32 on Monday July 16, 2018 @12:52AM (#17538847)
>can detect decision making a split second before the person is consciously aware that they've made the decision.

I think the revelation is that the decision people make is the negative one, that the affirmative one is the default and the negative one is the one which requires conscious effort.

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Re:When You Watch Sports, Your Brain Thinks You’re Playing by Negative1 on Monday July 16, 2018 @11:54AM (#17542285)
Right, seems like a better way to describe this is to say "Watching sports activates the same neural pathways as playing sports".
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Re:When You Watch Sports, Your Brain Thinks You’re Playing by izzydata on Monday July 16, 2018 @12:36PM (#17542622)
Which is not very profound. The thought that looking at a ball being kicked and kicking a ball activates similar neural pathways sounds incredibly obvious.
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Re:When You Watch Sports, Your Brain Thinks You’re Playing by Brockenstein on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @10:02AM (#17549776)
One might assume that is the case, but human beings assume a lot of things that are dead wrong. So while you might have an assumption, it's a pretty good practice to check and see if your assumptions align with reality.

There's quite a few things about our brains that might seem obvious, but are actually quite counter-intuitive in practice.

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Re:When You Watch Sports, Your Brain Thinks You’re Playing by ggg9990 on Monday July 16, 2018 @11:34AM (#17542090)
fMRI studies are like studies showing which transistors are active during certain computations. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t.
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