Protecting Your Brain as an Athlete
Our brains are essential to our daily lives! That might be one of the most obvious statements. Still, it’s worth saying because we can occasionally take our brains for granted. We can see this in athletics sometimes, so it is essential that we make the brain the center of our conversation at times. So it is with that in mind that we take a look at what protecting our brain in the context of athletics means. Protecting the brain in athletics is a multi-layered approach that requires thinking about physical safety, neurobiology, and sports psychology. The brain serves as the “hardware” for our athletic performance and injuries or chronic stress, for example, can impact reaction time, emotional regulation, and physical coordination, to name a few. So let’s dive into our conversation about protecting the brain in the context of athletics!
Fallibility of Human Memory
Memory is a constructive process, not a literal reproduction of the past, which can be prone to errors and distortions (Schacter, 2012; Schacter & Thakral, 2024). Because memories are pulled together from different fragments or pieces of information, that is where our memories become subject to distortion, misinformation, or misidentification. With that being said, this constructive process is functional, allowing us to use our past experiences to help us imagine future scenarios.
In Honor of World Alzheimer’s Day
There are memories that we love to call up because they remind us of the good times and the people we care about. Then there are memories that we would rather forget because they may be traumatizing. Additionally, some memories may not elicit much feeling or reaction but exist because they touched us in some other way. While maybe not all our memories are pleasant, they exist because our bodies were designed to allow us to remember. Remembering is a gift that we often take for granted because memory formation happens so “easily.”
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