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Are You Rubbish At Sport & Games? This May Be Why

Steven

Steven

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Nov 5, 2023
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'If you have wondered why your partner always beats you at tennis or your annoying child always crushes the living poop out of you at poxy Fortnite or whatever it's called, it might be because you are crap at everything. Alternatively, it seems there is more to it than pure physical ability.

Some people are effectively able to see more “images per second” than others, research suggests, meaning they’re innately better at spotting or tracking fast-moving objects such as tennis balls or the speed of the Guardian's lawyers once they realise that I've polluted this article with nonsense.

"The rate at which our brains can discriminate between different visual signals is known as temporal resolution, and influences the speed at which we are able to respond to changes in our environment", claims non-baffled boffin Sid Excalibur of Hobnob University.'

Etc:
https://www.theguardian.com/science...ing-tennis-you-may-see-more-images-per-second
 
Temporal resolution - it's a thing.
 
Yithian said:
Yes, it is.

Slightly bizarre, though.

The article has now been substantially edited.

They've turned an April fool's article with fake references into a real one with the jokes removed.

Looks like an editor was playing a prank.
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A bit silly, that, mocking serious research.

The Guardian ran two entire April Fool editions in the '80s. One was about a mythical island and the other concerned the invention of a weather-controlling machine.
 
Steven said:
Some people are effectively able to see more “images per second” than others, research suggests, meaning they’re innately better at spotting or tracking fast-moving objects such as tennis balls or the speed of the Guardian's lawyers once they realise that I've polluted this article with nonsense.
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Yithian said:
The article has now been substantially edited
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I don't think it was the Guardian that did the editing. :)
 
I am a lost cause, honestly. After reading Yith's posts, I began thinking that I'd been fooled by a Guardian April Fool's joke (and so I then studied the article for giveaway clues)...only now do I finally realise that I alone was responsible for the feature's editing and not the newspaper's staff.

*shoots self*
 
Steven said:
I am a lost cause, honestly. After reading Yith's posts, I began thinking that I'd been fooled by a Guardian April Fool's joke (and so I then studied the article for giveaway clues)...only now do I finally realise that I alone was responsible for the feature's editing and not the newspaper's staff.

*shoots self*
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Please don't do that. It causes a mess that no-one wants to clean up, plus you forgot to leave a code word so that we know it is you when you come back to haunt us. Plus this thread gave me a laugh. :)
 
Steven said:
My code word will be 'incompetence', Min - that way you'll definitely know that it's really me. :D
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Change that to 'incomplete' instead so you can buy yourself more time should you so wish to later on become competent. I prefer being a bit crap sometimes instead.
 
I had to admit - I was interested in this before I realised it was a jape.
I'm lousy at sports in general and have no interest in them at all. Since childhood, I've been healthy and active. Climbing, walking, running, hitting things etc. all I can do. I enjoy martial arts (aikido and what would now be called HEMA).
But sports? Nah. No interest in trying to improve my 'badness' in them.
My reason? They were 'beaten out of me' at school. Apart from cross-country running and the high jump, I was rubbish in school sports. And my experience is that PE teachers are more interested in pupils that show a 'natural talent'; at first, you are forced to participate in general. No good? Then you are sidelined. You're not encouraged to 'get better' or persist in learning the sport ... you get the honour of being the last to be picked for a team, shoved into defence at football while 'the stars' score goals etc.
 
Yep. 50% of my teachers were rugby internationals, and so they had miniscule interest in anything bar rugby & in getting the pupils to play the sport. This was a time when, in Wales, such (amateur) internationals were given teaching jobs to stop them heading to professional Rugby League clubs in England.
 
Stormkhan said:
I had to admit - I was interested in this before I realised it was a jape.
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It is not a joke. @Steven wrote a jokey intro, that's all. And apparently wreaked more havoc than the time the BBC claimed that spaghetti grows on trees.:chuckle:

Here is a snippet from the article.
Previous studies have suggested that animals with high visual temporal resolution tend to be species with fast-paced lives, such as predators. Human research has also suggested that this trait tends to decrease as we get older, and dips temporarily after intense exercise. However, it was not clear how much it varies between people of similar ages.

One way of measuring this trait is to identify the point at which someone stops perceiving a flickering light to flicker, and sees it as a constant or still light instead. Clinton Haarlem, a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, and his colleagues tested this in 80 men and women between the ages of 18 and 35, and found wide variability in the threshold at which this happened.

The research, published in Plos One, found that some people reported a light source as constant when it was in fact flashing about 35 times a second, while others could still detect flashes at rates of greater than 60 times a second.

This is still some way off the temporal resolution of peregrine falcons, which are able to process roughly 100 visual frames a second.

Haarlem said: “We think that people who see flicker at higher rates basically have access to a little bit more visual information per timeframe than people on the lower end of the spectrum.”

Prof Kevin Mitchell, a neurobiologist at Trinity College Dublin who supervised the research, said: “Because we only have access to our own subjective experience, we might naively expect that everyone else perceives the world in the same way we do. This study characterises one such difference. Some people really do seem to see the world faster than others.”
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It is very interesting but I expect in reality there may well be many other reasons why some people are not good at sport.
https://www.theguardian.com/science...ing-tennis-you-may-see-more-images-per-second
 
Min Bannister said:
It is not a joke. @Steven wrote a jokey intro, that's all. And apparently wreaked more havoc than the time the BBC claimed that spaghetti grows on trees.:chuckle:
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My mum still believes that.

With certain sports I have been good at and with others I have just had no interest so never tried at them. The one I have excelled at did require fast reflexes etc so presumably I have a fast refresh rate. With CRT tvs i have at certain times seen flicker so i guess this confirms it. Would like to try a proper test.
 
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