In an ancient Aztec cultural practice, priests would choose a man to represent one of their gods, Tezcatlipoca. The man would be worshiped as a god for a year, but at a preordained date, the priests would sacrifice him, sometimes cannibalizing his body. Each year the priests turned from the sacrifice to select a new “god,” repeating the cycle of reverence and destruction.
I wonder what the Aztecs would make of the view in front of me. I am in a sports bar with my family, eating after a walk around town. The other patrons’ eyes mostly rest, enthralled, on the many football games televised before them. One can’t avoid watching the flatscreens that hang off every wall, or the brutal athleticism they capture.
The high-definition flatscreen TVs show it all, but don’t provide a deeper, more physiological look. Inside a football helmet is a skull, and inside each skull is a free-floating brain. Inside the brain are billions of neurons, chattering with each other in a code we scarcely understand, wired to each other with long and slender projections called axons. An internal scaffolding structure holds each axon in place. The axons crisscross the brain, side to side, forwards and backwards, up and down.
As force is applied to the brain, a shockwave ripples through. If large enough, the shock tears the axons and can result in catastrophic injury. Smaller forces stun the neurons, their electrical firing decreases, and symptoms of concussion occur. The player may go limp, or stumble and appear unfocused. He is usually amnestic of the event. If the force is milder, none of these symptoms may manifest, but the changes are still felt in the long and slender axons. Their supporting scaffolds, on a human scale akin to bridges from San Francisco to Taipei and Perth to Cape Town, experience an earthquake.
Over and over, every head blow stresses the scaffolding. A protein called tau normally stabilizes the scaffolds, but the tau proteins become dysfunctional, pathologic, then malignant. The tau binds together, twists in on itself, assembles into sharp aggregates that poke holes in the fragile cell wall and kill the neuron. A neuron goes silent, its axonal bridge crumbles. As the brain digests the dead neuron, it leaves behind the twisted skeleton of the tau aggregate, a “tangle.”
We also declare ourselves different and more civilized than those today who watch dogs fight to the death, and those who in the ancient world watched gladiator death matches. We like to imagine there is a comfortable margin. After all, most of us watch these events via divine technology, each of us a modern Zeus, removed from visceral immediacy in the Olympus of our living rooms. But our view is suspect. The TV’s divine eye feeds an unchanged, insatiable, human lust for blood sport, death, and celebrity. When considering the victims, Owen Thomas and others like him, it is difficult to distinguish between their game and those we pretend to be so different.
What is the good? And where does it lie? I do not know. I am not a moral philosopher. Nor am I a fan, nor one whose salary depends upon not understanding football’s risks. I am a neurologist. Perhaps I place too great a value on brains, not enough on selling cars and beer, and not enough on divine amusements.
- More Here , every word in this article is worth reading. It's insane to sacrifice young brains for a sport. 60 minutes had a segment on this in 2009 - 3 million sports related concussion happens in sport every year and most of them in football.
I wonder what the Aztecs would make of the view in front of me. I am in a sports bar with my family, eating after a walk around town. The other patrons’ eyes mostly rest, enthralled, on the many football games televised before them. One can’t avoid watching the flatscreens that hang off every wall, or the brutal athleticism they capture.
The high-definition flatscreen TVs show it all, but don’t provide a deeper, more physiological look. Inside a football helmet is a skull, and inside each skull is a free-floating brain. Inside the brain are billions of neurons, chattering with each other in a code we scarcely understand, wired to each other with long and slender projections called axons. An internal scaffolding structure holds each axon in place. The axons crisscross the brain, side to side, forwards and backwards, up and down.
As force is applied to the brain, a shockwave ripples through. If large enough, the shock tears the axons and can result in catastrophic injury. Smaller forces stun the neurons, their electrical firing decreases, and symptoms of concussion occur. The player may go limp, or stumble and appear unfocused. He is usually amnestic of the event. If the force is milder, none of these symptoms may manifest, but the changes are still felt in the long and slender axons. Their supporting scaffolds, on a human scale akin to bridges from San Francisco to Taipei and Perth to Cape Town, experience an earthquake.
Over and over, every head blow stresses the scaffolding. A protein called tau normally stabilizes the scaffolds, but the tau proteins become dysfunctional, pathologic, then malignant. The tau binds together, twists in on itself, assembles into sharp aggregates that poke holes in the fragile cell wall and kill the neuron. A neuron goes silent, its axonal bridge crumbles. As the brain digests the dead neuron, it leaves behind the twisted skeleton of the tau aggregate, a “tangle.”
We also declare ourselves different and more civilized than those today who watch dogs fight to the death, and those who in the ancient world watched gladiator death matches. We like to imagine there is a comfortable margin. After all, most of us watch these events via divine technology, each of us a modern Zeus, removed from visceral immediacy in the Olympus of our living rooms. But our view is suspect. The TV’s divine eye feeds an unchanged, insatiable, human lust for blood sport, death, and celebrity. When considering the victims, Owen Thomas and others like him, it is difficult to distinguish between their game and those we pretend to be so different.
What is the good? And where does it lie? I do not know. I am not a moral philosopher. Nor am I a fan, nor one whose salary depends upon not understanding football’s risks. I am a neurologist. Perhaps I place too great a value on brains, not enough on selling cars and beer, and not enough on divine amusements.
- More Here , every word in this article is worth reading. It's insane to sacrifice young brains for a sport. 60 minutes had a segment on this in 2009 - 3 million sports related concussion happens in sport every year and most of them in football.
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