TRANSKRIPT 🔗
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He frames! It is Rupert Sala.
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We luckle bouncella of misunderstood jawnista football.
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It's a holistic, skillful, and elaptic journey to better management.
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Welkom to ProK Sala! I'm your host Jani Sarajarvi, and this is part two of our space and time relative time.
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Last week we were talking about the way football usually talks about space and time, a meter of space, two seconds on the ball, and this is borrowed from physics, and that it misses what the great players actually live inside.
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We leaned on Robin's 2023 paper and on Bergson's old idea of duration to begin naming an alternative.
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Maki Ahawa's example in ice hockey and the divers turning one second into two.
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So this week we go into perception itself.
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What it maybe actually is, and if it's not kind of a snapshot of something or internal kind of computer ism, then what it is, maybe.
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So if you missed part 1, go back for it because it's it's based for this episode.
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Let's go.
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So if Makiho is not blessed with a different clock, if they live inside a richer duration, then what's actually happening in their in his perception that lets him do it?
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So what's perceptual act itself and why why this is different for for the skillful player and the unskillful player?
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Let's start with a sentence we have all heard from coaches.
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Take a picture of the situation.
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Take a picture.
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And this sentence comes from the right instinct basically.
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We want the player to see the whole field before deciding.
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We want their head up, we want them to notice the free teammate for example on the other side.
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But I feel that as a description of what perception actually is, this is wrong.
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And maybe it also matters, let's see, during this episode.
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Because if perception were snapshot taking and then stitching snapshots into a sequence, basically then the bad defender, frantic defender from last week who was losing this 1v1, would be kind of equipped.
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They see every frame, but the idea is this that what they are missing is not a frame.
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What they are missing is the flow.
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And these are two different things.
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The bad defender is not short of pictures, the bad defender is short of duration.
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And what does this then mean?
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Let me come at this through Gibson one more time because he said it very nicely in 1966 book.
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So Gibson pointed out that the whole way we usually divide experience into perception and memory.
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Perception is about the present, memory is about the past, is an introspective distinction.
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It feels true from the inside, but it's not true at the level of what is actually happening for him.
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And he said roughly that information doesn't exist exclusively in the present as distinct from the past or the future.
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So the stream of consciousness, as William James described it, the travelling moment of now, with a past extending backward and future extending forward, is a description of self-consciousness, Gibson said, not of the process of perception.
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So the process of perception for him is different.
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The process of perception deals in successive order, motion, event, episode, whole sequence.
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We don't perceive a parade of frozen instants and then combine them in a head, but we perceive the motion, the ball flying, or in one V1, the whole dynamic of the situation, the relative speeds of the players, the angle between the defender and striker, the teammates running in behind, and these are not kind of instants, they are events.
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So where does the snapshot picture come from?
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It comes from the same classical metaphysic we took a little bit apart last week.
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If space is an abstract continuum of points and time is a parade of instants, then of course perception has to be constructed out of static elements.
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The frames would be the real things and perception would be the glueing.
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But if the field we live inside is actually a continuously transforming reality per Bergson's duration, then perception doesn't have to construct anything out of frozen pieces, and perception is already in the flow.
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And Robbins in his 2023 paper reaches for an image to describe this.
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Bergson's picture of reality as Robbins is reading it is a continuously transforming field.
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The brain in that picture is not a container generating experience from the inside, like a projector showing a movie to someone sitting in a cinema in your skull.
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The brain is a resonant wave embedded in the transformation itself.
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The brain or the whole body picks up or more exactly is specific to the invariant structure of the environmental event because the brain or body is itself part of the field, time extended like the field.
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So when Makiho reads an
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incoming Forcheck, there is not little Makiho sitting inside his school watching a screen, but the whole of Makiho, the body, the whole body is coupled to the whole of the incoming Forcheck as one unfolding event.
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So the brain is not generating the perception from the inside, but the brain is resonating, it's kind of going outside and resonating with what is already out there.
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And this is where Robins has, I feel, similarities to Vicente Raha.
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And Raha's work on resonance, which we spent a whole episode on earlier this year, and we were also interviewing Vicente, says kind of similar thing but from different angles, I feel.
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So the player together with the environment is one coupled system.
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Being tuned to the game is a measurable property of that coupling.
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It's not only a metaphor.
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Resonance in Raha and resonance in Gibson are two kind of labels for the same phenomenon.
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So the organism and the environment are co-specifying each other in motion.
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And because perception is time extended, there is no clean dividing line between the per perception ends and memory begins.
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The just past of the current moment is still live inside the perception of the current moment.
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It has not yet fallen into some archive of the mind, it's still present.
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And Berkson wrote this, and this is really really nice.
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Perception he said is always already a memory.
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Makia reading the force forcheck does not perceive instant A.
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Stor it, perceive instant B, retrieve instant A, combine them and then act.
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He perceives the force check as a motion, as an unfolding event with its own just past and its own not yet, all of it present inside the current act of perceiving.
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So there is a continuous attunement to the shape of the thing as it unfolds.
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And this is important for a coach.
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The subset of the field our perception picks out is not neutral.
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We don't perceive everything and equally.
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We perceive the subset that is relevant to our possible action.
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The gap between two defenders that this particular body with this particular skill set can pass through.
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The space behind the fullback that this particular runner can reach, the deception that this particular opponent will fall for.
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And Bergson was kind of saying that perception is virtual action, and this is related to Afrodances, I feel.
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We are seeing or feeling how we can act.
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So if you have been listening to this podcast for a while, the ecological psychology concept of Afrodans, what the environment affords us, Gibson's famous idea.
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And now shown to be the same kind of at least kind of same insight Bergson had a century earlier, but in a little bit different language.
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Virtual action in Bergson, Afrodans in Gibson.
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And for Maki Aho, the Ice doesn't present a mutual configuration of players and spaces.
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The Ice presents a set of invitations to act, each one scaled to his particular body and his particular skills, and continuously shifting as the game shifts.
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He's seeing or feeling the game he can play.
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The player next to him sees the game they can play together.
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And this is based for synergies and cooperation.
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When we think about cinema, cinema has been really, or some directors have been really skillful in this idea.
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Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a book called Sculpting in Time.
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His argument about what cinema actually is turns out to meet Bergson and Gibson quite nicely.
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Tarkovsky said that cinema's unique art is not montage, it's not image, it is not story even.
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Cinema's unique art is time itself.
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The long take, the quiet shot that's not cut, the camera that stays with the field while the field keeps transforming.
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And that Tarkovsky said is what cinema can do that no other art form can.
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Film gives the viewer time.
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Actually live time, shaped or sculpted.
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If you have ever watched Stalker or Andrey Ruplev or any of his films and felt the field around you slow down, you have been living maybe briefly inside Bergson's duration, a filmmaker's duration built on purpose.
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Tarkovsky was not calling this thing duration or resonance or something like this, but he was talking about sculpting in time.
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Good football match is like a Tarkovsky film with 22 authors, something you as a player or coach or a fan can be inside in duration together with a stadium full of people.
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Again back to Makiho.
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He's not stitching snapshots, he's not making snapshot images of the field, he's not running internal simulations of future positions.
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He's embedded as resonant waves in the transforming field of the game.
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His perception is virtual action.
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He sees what the environment is affording him right now in a duration that still carries the just past and reaches into the not yet.
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He don't have more clock time, he's more deeply incited duration than the opponents are.
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So Bergson, William James, Gibson, Listo Taut Theory, Arauch's ecological cognition, Rachas Rosonans, Robbins pulling the whole thread together and similar things.
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The brain doesn't live inside the physics space time we got from Newton.
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It lives inside the duration and extensity that Persson described.
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And when we try to coach as if physics space time is the real territory, is the real thing, we end up with players who look at the pitch like it is a diagram and get beaten by players who are inside the duration of it.
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And same applies for coaches.
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In the end, Robbins writes essentially that time and space are concepts, intellectual achievements, not perceptual categories.
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The brain doesn't dwell in the world of the classical metaphysic.
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The brain or body, mind don't dwell in the world of the classical metaphysic.
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It is a mistake, he says, to exalt the metaphysic into a reality.
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It is a mistake to confuse the abstract space we build with our thinking for the temporal reality of that indivisibly transforming field in which the mind, brain, body is actually embedded and in fact dwells.
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One quick note Professor Book being translated into English.
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Until next Tuesday.