The Fantastical Brain (And what it has to do with tennis)

The brain. It’s a weird thing, really. It’s what’s allowing me to write this article. It’s what’s allowing me to think about this article while I’m writing it, and think what the article would be about in the first place before I even opened my word document on the computer. It’s what’s allowing me to breathe and regulate my body’s activities without me consciously thinking about it, like my blood circulating and my fingers sensing the keypads underneath my fingertips.

Funny thing, it is, the brain. I learn about it often in my own studies, and it has always been an object of fascination for me. How is it that we learn? How is it that I can hit a tennis ball without thinking, instead focusing on how the other person is hitting the ball so that I can coach them? How is it that while I’m thinking about instructing kids on moving their feet, my lungs and my heart and my body temperature is regulated by this gray, electric blob in my skull, as if to say “I got you, no worries.” I can write a whole book on what fascinates me, and I can write a whole book for you to read and understand how the brain functions. What interests me that may interest you, however, is what happens when you are learning as a tennis player.

Let’s start with a bit of background—some basic biology and other b words to continue my rant with fine-tuned alliteration. Your gooey, gray brain is made up of matter—it’s this stuff that is covered in goo that allows for electronic signals to fire. That’s right, your brain is so fantastical that it even is electric! Nerve cells are your brains chess pieces, while the brain is the board. They, for lack of a better metaphor, bounce around together and send each other electronic pulses through something called the axon and the myelin sheath, a little tail and it’s covering goo that is attached to the actual nerve cell. Unlike other cells that die off and quickly replenish in your body, like blood cells, nerve cells typically do not regenerate. Hence, after losing nerve cells during a stroke (lack of oxygen to the brain that starves off cells), the issues with certain functions, like language and balance. You have the most amount of nerve cells when you are 3 years old. As you grow older, these nerve cells die off, but become smarter due to practice. For example, if you learn multiple languages as an infant, because you have a lot of new, green, and ready to go nerve cells, you learn that language quickly and develop strong “firing” in your language center. Essentially, the ol’ “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” has a neurological explanation—while your older brain has “smarter” nerve cells that can fire language signals in different ways, like with added vocabulary, it needs more and more practice to develop new language skills that have, in essence, died off when you are young because you never utilized them (in other words, if you don’t learn the language, those nerve cells die off).

But, the cool thing about older brains is that our nerve cells are a little more chill. They don’t fire when they’ve encountered a stimulus (a fancy way of saying something that provokes us) that they’ve experienced before. They don’t send the “Oh crap” fight or flight reflex and instinct when provoked as much—hence why an angry teenager yelling at a line judge is said to be immature. If it were an adult, that instinct to “fight” and that electronic fire between nerve cells that say “Hey let’s get angry” simmer down, and don’t fire as much.

In fact, there are some instincts and thoughts that aren’t fully developed in teens yet. For example, the “I probably shouldn’t do that” instinct isn’t fully developed yet—teenagers learn more from experience actually getting hurt than from the wariness to certain situations. Essentially, this means that teens on the court will remember to stretch after practice if they have ever pulled a muscle—they are less likely to stretch if they are simply told to do so to avoid stretching said muscle.

In addition to the developing nerve cells, teens are also still developing in their cerebellum, a part of the brain that controls balance and movement—hence the clumsiness of a developing adolescent. The cerebellum is in the back of you head in your brain, and it’s a pretty awesome place because it explains why tennis is good for you in the first place (or any sport or exercise, for that matter). Remember how I said nerve cells die off without practice? The cerebellum doesn’t die off without practice, but with practice it develops quicker. If a 12 year old engages in sports, they are training their cerebellum, and hence more likely to develop balance and more coordinated movement as they grow up. The awesome thing about tennis is that it is a mental and physical sport, a part of the cerebellum that is often left untrained—not only do you have to visually assess the ball, which triggers different parts of your brain, but these nerve cells that fire the visual recognition of the ball have to fire back to the cerebellum to signal “Hey let’s get moving to that ball.” Nerve cells that are chilling in your cerebellum then shoot a signal down your spinal cord through nearby nerve cells down to your muscles, making them move. Did I mention this is all happening within 2 seconds? A firing nerve cells takes about half a second to transmit different signals. If you didn’t know to move to the ball when your brain transmits the visual signal that you see the ball, this process slows down—hence younger kids and how they sometimes move clumsily to the ball, or do not see to register that they need to move to the ball at all until there is a verbal cue (i.e. a sharp yell “Move!” from the coach). The more you practice, the quicker this signal becomes. Moving to the ball then becomes a reflex rather than a registered and conscious decision.      

Okay, so now lets talk about learning. It’s pretty cool, actually (maybe my fellow nerds will agree). See, there is a part of the brain called the frontal lobe. It is one fourth of the major lobes in your brain. As it’s name suggests, it is located in the front of the brain, and is also your major learning center. This is where short term memory is processed, and makes its way to long-term memory. This is also where emotions are processed, as well as decision-making, thought processing, and all the cool conscious things we do with our brains. As I’ve mentioned before, there are nerve cells here too. They fire signals to this part of the brain that then signal processing, from thoughts like “Hit the ball with spin” to emotions like “I’m terrible at this game.” Without practice, this part of the brain doesn’t fire signals in an easy connection with the cerebellum—this isn’t because they aren’t as close to each other as other parts of the brain, but rather because the nerve cells still need GPS directions to the movement part of the brain (cerebellum) from the frontal lobe. Just like you travel the same road to and from the courts, after a while knowing these roads well, the same way your nerve cells travel to each other, just, well, much faster. They still need practice though to develop the comfort of traveling without those “directions,” if you will. With practice, this part of the brain develops tennis awareness, where as you hit the shot thoughts are run through your frontal lobe, typically adjusting the shot. What is unique about the tennis swing though is that the visual part of your brain typically can’t do much—it’s can’t see your swing. Because you cannot see yourself swing outside of yourself, video can help with this, as well as a coach that you trust.

There is lots more that I can write about—I’m already at three pages in length and have just begun talking about the brain and learning in tennis. Hopefully you take away from this blog the fascination that I have with the brain, as well as the essential moral of the story here—to be decent in tennis, you have to practice and train those nerve cells of yours.