{"id":134960,"date":"2018-03-12T07:58:52","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T11:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=134960"},"modified":"2022-06-22T08:55:06","modified_gmt":"2022-06-22T12:55:06","slug":"flocking-on-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2018\/03\/flocking-on-the-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain Awareness: Soccer Players May Offer Clues to Collective Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part of a series of posts for Brain Awareness Week, March 12-16.<\/em><\/p>\n

Playing a team sport like soccer requires balance, coordination, judgement of depth, and speed. You might think we can do all these things thanks to our brains. But it turns out that to move in a coordinated group, you don\u2019t need a brain. In fact, sometimes things that aren\u2019t even alive can do it.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/b>UConn psychologist and director of the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action James Dixon and Maurici L\u00f3pez-Felip, a graduate student in his lab who formerly played on the Catalan National Team, are researching why humans move as they do in crowds, on the street, and especially on the soccer field. To do this, they\u2019ve teamed up with UConn chemist Jim Rusling and Dilip Kondepudi, a physicist at Wake Forest University, as well as soccer gurus from FC Barcelona. The first behavior they\u2019re looking at is flocking.<\/span><\/p>\n

Birds flock. Little kids chasing a soccer ball flock, too. Inanimate objects can also flock. For example, little bits of benzoquinone floating on the surface of a pool of water tend to flock, even when they start out randomly strewn across the surface. See video.<\/a> The bits gradually dissolve in the water, and it\u2019s this dissolving action that makes them move around. Inevitably, they end up flocking together. Dixon and the other researchers have shown that when the dissolving particles flock, they dissipate energy more efficiently. Since natural systems tend to move toward lower-energy states\u00a0\u2013 think of rocks rolling downhill\u00a0\u2013 if flocking helps particles spend energy faster, it\u2019s the natural thing to do. <\/span><\/p>\n

What does this have to do with brains? Humans and other living beings are essentially energy dissipation systems that sustain themselves through generations. If flocking is a natural behavior, something that dissipative systems just do, maybe it\u2019s something our brain doesn\u2019t have to think about. There\u2019s probably other behaviors that come equally naturally to us, cued either by the environment or other people. Dixon and\u00a0L\u00f3pez-Felipe are currently analyzing data from FC Barcelona\u2019s soccer players to develop a model of collective movement that includes flocking and potentially other behaviors. The team is interested in learning how they could potentially help their players move better and faster\u00a0\u2013 you might even say instinctually\u00a0\u2013 and win more.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBrains are a good thing, we like having them,\u201d Dixon says. \u201cBut it seems like a good idea to put as little burden on our computational systems as possible.\u201d Evolution doesn\u2019t want us to strain our brain. And neither do soccer coaches.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dixon\u2019s research is supported by grants from the Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences<\/a>, as well as the National Science Foundation’s INSPIRE program (#1344275).<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Read more about UConn research on the brain in the series\u00a0Brainstorm<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flocking as a behavior is found among inanimate objects as well as living beings. Does that mean the brain doesn’t have to think about it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":135154,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2076,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1899],"class_list":["post-134960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-research","category-uconn-storrs","series-brainstorm"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-19 09:55:05","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134960"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135266,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134960\/revisions\/135266"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/135154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134960"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=134960"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=134960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}