November Links

Standing desks, free throws, and mushroom/robot hybrids

What makes an athlete creative?

We tend to think of creativity as a cognitive capacity, but a new study provides evidence that it may be more physical than mental. It asks whether creative play in soccer was better predicted by tests of “divergent thinking”, or physical skills like dribbling and passing.

Divergent thinking has previously been tested by having players watch videos of game situations, freezing the video, and then asking the player to think of as many potential good plays as possible under time pressure. Some players are better at this than others, but they are no more creative on the field. And getting better at this test doesn't improve actual performance. By contrast, basic skills like dribbling, passing and shooting correlated well with on-field creativity.

A quote:

The results support the hypothesis that a broad repertoire of motor skills plays a crucial role in performing creative actions in sports … When players are less constrained by their motor skills, they have more options for action and, consequently, more possibilities to perform creative actions (i.e., functional actions beyond current standards). This notion is in line with the concept of affordances …

in the domain of sports—where creative solutions are expressed on the spot through embodied actions—an individual's competence to generate divergent ideas per se fails to explain actual creative behavior.

The paper also acknowledges that there may be other factors involved in creativity that involve team dynamics, social factors, and emotional state.

Metabolic syndrome and tendons

Metabolic syndrome involves a cluster of related conditions such as obesity, hypertension, arthrosclerosis, dyslipidemia, insulin resistance and diabetes. Here’s a recent paper looking at the connection between metabolic health and tendon health. Some key points:

• Metabolic syndrome has a strong association with a variety of musculoskeletal problems, including skeletal muscle disease, osteoarthritis, bone fractures, and