Ode to the Orbitofrontal Cortex
In 1982 a man called Elliot walked into the office of neurologist Antonio Damasio. He was recovering from an operation that had removed a small tumour from the frontal lobe of his brain. His IQ was unaffected, and yet when, at the end of the visit, Dr Damasio asked him to chose a date for his next appointment between two alternative days, Elliot spent the next half hour enumerating reasons for and against each of the two dates, including possible meteorological conditions, effects on future engagements, cost-benefit balance, etc. It must have taken Dr Damasio enormous self control not to hit him over the head with his stethoscope.
Now watch the last point of the Women Sabre Olympic final: the two Russians are fighting it out all by themselves (as they have the same coach, he's not allowed on the piste). At 14 all, Velikaya stops her attack to draw Egorian's counter: she knows she can parry anything her opponent may throw at her, so she just has to wait in tierce (even more so as Egorian is left handed). But then, the epiphany: Egorian's blade drops past Velikaya thus disappearing from her view, and flicks backward, unparriable. Velikaya never saw it coming, literally. She reacts with a long quinte+reposte but Egorian's blade simply isn't there.
How did Egorian manage to come up with and execute such a plan in less than a second and a half, all the while keeping ready to defend herself from possible counterattacks from her opponent? Sabre bouts are so fast, the judges don't even bother starting the clock, that keeps displaying '3:00' throughout the match even in Olympic finals! It is inconceivable that Egorian may have opted for that solution after carefully parsing Velikaya's movements into neat chains of causation ('if she does this, then I'll do that'). And this is not so just because it looks so, it can be demonstrated numbers in hand.
A typical hit may take around 0.7 seconds to travel from the moment a fencer decides to finish an attack, all the way to the opponent's body. Unfortunately for you, if you decide to defend, it takes about 0.25 seconds for you to initiate a parry (or any response mouvement), leaving you with less than half a second to make up your mind as to where to parry. And even this estimate is too generous, as it doesn't take into account the actual execution time (quite high for certain fencers I know, used to chocking on thought), or, on the invisible side of things, the few milliseconds for the visual information to travel from the object in front of you to your eye (admittedly, that's the speed of light, but it is time nevertheless); and then from the retina to the visual cortex, and from there, right at the back of the brain, to the orbitofrontal cortex where the information is processed and the decision made whether to parry or not, and where.
So how is fencing at all possible? Or tennis for that matter, or saving a penalty. The answer lies in a single molecule called dopamine. A lot of the neurons that communicate using this transmitter are located, you guessed it, in an area right at the back of your eyes, the orbitofrontal cortex, the area that was damaged by Elliot's tumour. They are decision making neurons, and the orbitofrontal cortex is the part of the brain that integrate visceral emotions into the decision making process. When a fencer 'feels' drawn towards one parry rather than another, the brain has already made up its mind, assessed the alternatives and converted the assessment into a positive emotion for the chosen parry, and a negative one for the ones that are not selected ('emotion', 'motivation' and 'movement' have the same latin root, 'movēre', which means 'to move').
'Paganini knew it well, that the devil is lefthanded (and sly), and plays the violin'. Egorian is lefthanded, and we know that the right hemisphere of our brain is particularly good at generating the extemporaneous associations that lead to epiphanies. But it's not all innate, of course, reactions can be trained (to quote Louis Pasteur, 'Chance favours the prepared mind'). Through training, experience is internalized by the dopamine system, and the result is a person who responds very quickly to a given situation.
Among the dopamine cells, there are also some neurons that learn to start firing in anticipation for something else (the bell for Pavlov's dogs, a flicker of the hand for a fencer). With exposure, this chain of reactions can extend indefinitely, with dopamine neurons responding to the movement of the foot, that signals the extending of the arm that signals the rotating of the hand, etc., which is most certainly what allowed Egorian to make such a quick decision (together with the fear of being sent back to Armenia to live as a social outcast and traitor to the Russians).
The crucial aspect of this process (anticipation, not defection) is that it is completely unconscious and totally emotional. Contrary to what Plato liked to think, human beings are not guided by pure reason, the charioteer cannot control the black horse. The famous XIX century neuroscientist William James got much closer to the truth when he wrote that 'the preponderance of habits, instincts and emotions' is what makes the human brain so effective. Hume, a long time before him, had already declared, with heretical delight, that reason is 'the slave of passions'. Elliot could not figure out what to do because his neurological impairment denied him the emotional sting of doing the wrong thing, the unnerving disappointment connected with losing, as well as the thrill that goes with success.
With time, thou shalt learn to read intentions by the light of the moon, and afford to be wise after the event. It's all chemistry, my fellow fencers, all chemistry.
Gianna
