Opinion – Suzana Herculano-Houzel: Cheering is feeling alive

by

I don’t usually have a lot of patience to watch football games. I don’t identify with any club — in fact, I don’t like clubs, period, precisely because of the premise of exclusivity; I’m only a member of the American Neuroscience Society out of professional necessity. What for some is a deficiency in my resume for me is a point of honor. My club is any place where everyone is welcome.

But rejecting clubs doesn’t mean not being able to identify with any team. The yellow of the Brazilian national team shirt on the field, in volleyball and soccer, transports me to the court as if each player in possession of the ball were my avatar in a video game.

It takes some resemblance for the brain to transport itself to the stick figure on the screen. That’s why the customization of avatars in games and now phones is a hit: because, in fact, identification is not optional, it’s a necessity. If the avatar doesn’t represent me, it’s not me — and if it’s not me, I don’t care about the game.

Because my identification with the players in the yellow shirt is huge —the various skin colors, the ginga, the irreverence, the treatment by the first name, the familiarity with the vision of the whole yellow on the pitch. Consequence: in the mirror of the television, this fan’s brain not only gives orders as if she had some control over the actions of others, but vibrates with the well-calculated pass, the bicycle at the right moment, and the ball in the back of the net, the result of the action which, let’s face it, I helped to make it happen with all the mental actions of my fans, right?

Because that’s what team sports fans do: they play the best of video games, one where you don’t need a keyboard or hand controller because the players on the screen seem to magically take your orders telepathically. You send them here, and they go. Tell them to kick, and they kick. And if you order them and they don’t, you give them a thorough scolding, profanity liberally included—because where have you ever seen your on-screen avatar refuse to follow your orders? – and that’s it, they limp and mend.

The result is that discovering yourself as a fan at a football match is an experience second only to playing for real. The completely immersed fan — the one who watches the game, really, and doesn’t take his eyes off the pitch, not the one who glances at his phone from time to time— has all the strong emotions guaranteed by mental and emotional involvement with the match.

I wrote here the other day that it’s strong emotions that make us feel alive, something that good cinema gives us. But a busy football game, one of those in which the players seem to actually follow the orders given from the comfort of our sofa, is even better, precisely because of the illusion of being the agent of events. Little gives the brain more pleasure than commanding an action and seeing the expected result happen.

Cheering is feeling alive — and winning the game is feeling that all your efforts have been rewarded.

You May Also Like

Recommended for you