18 Aug The Incredible Brain of Simone Biles
Telluride First’s 2nd annual Integrative Wellness Summit takes place Friday, September 9 – Sunday, September 11 at the Telluride Conference Center, Mountain Village. This year’s theme: Looking Forward, Aging Backwards: Frontiers of Health, Wellness & Brain Science. Speakers include Dr. David Agus, Dr. George Pratt, Dr. Marc Siegel, Dr. Deepak Chopra (streaming live), Chris Crowley and Bill Fabrocini, Dr. Alan Safdi, and more. In the run-up to that event, I ran across a very interesting Huff Post blog by Bahar Gholipour about how neuroscientists are finding brains like Simone Bile’s could well be wired differently than yours or mine. Read on to learn more about how elite gymnasts are able to perform extraordinary movement sequences.
Gymnast Simone Biles poses for a portrait at the U.S. Olympic Committee Media Summit in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California March 7, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
Team USA gymnast Simone Biles twists and flips through air with a seemingly gravity-defying buoyancy. With great precision, she lands on the balance beam as if the 4-inch-wide ledge is an extension of her own body.
As the 19-year-old gymnast competes in the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this week, pulling out the types of combinations that have been repeatedlycalled “impossible,” you may ask what it is exactly that sets her apart — is it only practice? Or does Biles have a particular brain wiring that’s given her a repertoire of movements far beyond a human’s humble ability to walk straight and a traditional gymnast’s perfect 10?
Scientists haven’t looked into Bile’s brain, but if they were given the chance, they wouldn’t even necessarily know which area to peek at first.
“It’s a difficult question,” said Thomas Jessell, co-director of Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and a neuroscientist who has studied movement for over three decades. Understanding how someone like Biles acquires her athletic skills is “an issue where no one bit of the brain or the spinal cord is going to give you the definitive answer.”
The closest idea we have as to what makes someone a super-athlete like Michael Jordan or Biles is that they may have been born with a slightly better-wired motor system.
“It could be that the wiring that happened in early development was particularly precise,” Jessell said. “So you have the opportunity to refine and perform motor tasks more effectively…”
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