Seeing the ball like a football

Cricket fans know that a batsman who has spent a lot of time at the crease is hard to dismiss, because he is “seeing the ball like a football”. A batsman who is new to the crease is always easier to dismiss. He struggles to sight the ball.

This is true regardless of the quality of the light. A batsman who is in can bat on comfortably through the gathering caliginosity, while a new man at the crease struggles to sight the ball even in glorious sunshine. This has always been true, something cricketers accept as natural.

The mechanism that makes this natural just became apparent me, from this article by Atul Gawande.

Gawande’s piece is about an emerging scientific understanding about the nature of perception. The new realization: perception is mostly memory. The inputs coming in from the senses are thin/ low fidelity/ low resolution/ highly pixellated compared to the richness with which the brain experiences the sensory input. The mind fills in the blanks.

Our centuries long assumption has been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers and so on contain all the information we need for perception…Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the sensory signals, they found them to be radically impoverished…The mind fills in most of the picture...Richard Gregory, a British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals…

Gawande’s article talks a lot about phantom limbs, and intense itches felt on injured tissues which have no nerve endings. These extreme examples are useful because they make a powerful argument; perception of a phantom limb can’t be determined by objective sensory experience, because there is no sensory experience. But to me, this theory is more interesting because of the light it sheds on everyday experiences.

A batsman who is in is literally seeing the ball better than a batsman who has just come to the wicket. His memory has more readily accessible images of the moving ball. He is therefore better able to make meaning of the sketchy data that his eyes pick up.

This is the reason it is hard to listen to an unfamiliar genre of music. The mind simply doesn’t have enough stuff in memory to fill in the blanks and enrich the music.

This is the reason it is hard to drive on unfamiliar roads. The driver literally sees less of the road. The eyes pick up the same volume of information as on a familiar road. But the mind doesn’t have a stock of memories with which to enrich the image.

This is the reason I enjoy watching cricket on TV more than I enjoy watching football. My mind has a bigger bank of cricket memories to draw on, simply because I have watched more cricket over the years.

There is an elaborate academic literature on how Caucasian-Americans are not very good at recognizing Blacks, and to a slightly lesser extent, how Blacks are not very good at recognizing whites. This has sometimes been interpreted as racism, but sheer lack of familiarity seems a simpler and less incendiary explanation. Interestingly, the effects are smaller in racially integrated schools and among children who live in integrated neighbourhoods.

This might also be the reason for the cognitive biases that Greg Pye's blog (and Kahneman and Taversky), keep talking about. The confirmatory bias happens because people, literally, don’t see evidence which goes against their prior beliefs without making a pretty substantial effort.

Gunther, Mother Cricket and Ice Bath Buddies

It's quite rare for a cricket fan like me, who has been following the game avidly since childhood with an avidity a clinical psychotherapist might worry about, to come across interestingly unfamiliar cricketing words or concepts. This English summer I encountered three. Let's celebrate these three concepts before the hopefully-not-too-emotionally-wrenching India-Australia test series gets underway.

Gunther: "Gunther is a guy who lives in the mountains and doesn't get enough oxygen to the brain and that makes him crazy. As soon as I get thrown the ball, its like a little switch goes in my head. Gunther takes over."

This is Springbok speedster Andre Nel on what happens when he is bowling. Compare that to a typical quote from an English quickie like Ryan Sidebottom, "Hopefully, I'll get the ball in the right areas." Or Mohammad Azharuddin's immortal words, "Well, the boys played very well."

In this age of anodyne political correctness, god bless Gunther.

Mother cricket: "It's amazing. There's a lady up there called Mother Cricket, who doesn't sleep...".

This is South African coach Mickey Arthur, giving credit where it is due, when Michael Vaughan was publicly humiliated for claiming a bump-catch after being morally indignant about AB de Villiers claiming a similar catch that same morning. Was Mother Cricket also behind Jimmy Andersen getting hit on the helmet by Dale Steyn after knocking out Daniel Flynn's tooth?

Cricket does lend itself well to the notion of karma. Maybe Mother Cricket is the sociological reason why cricket is so big in the sub-continent.

Ice bath buddy: Cricket-warriors were introduced on Sky Sports with a little box of fun-facts during the English Twenty20 tournament. This is a marketing tactic I like: any sport is a lot more fun if the viewer knows the player's back-stories. Sky Sport's fun-facts included favourite TV Show (mostly Top Gear), favourite music group, and most intriguingly, ice bath buddy.

Apparently, Duncan Fletcher insisted that all England fast bowlers immerse themselves in an ice-bath straight after stumps, to prevent injury. County dressing rooms were not designed with these sophisticated medical practices in mind. So fast bowlers, like Harmy and Hoggy, had to share ice-baths. The practice has endured into Peter Moore's reign. And so "ice bath buddy" is now county circuit lingo for best friend.

Some of the old guard are mocking this trend. David Lloyd, the former England coach and now Sky Sports commentator, would rather share an ice bath with Beyonce than some "hairy bloke".

Not sure if planting the mental image Ravi Bopara and Samit Patel, or for that matter, David Lloyd and Beyonce, frolicking together in tubs full of ice makes the game more or less appealing. Time will tell.

Morning Raga

Worth the watch, mainly because the music is so much fun.

Here's how I hope this film was made:

A film maker was listening to Sudha Raghunathan singing Thaiye Yashoda. She was moved, moved to tears imagining the love of Yashoda - the foster mother who loved Krishna and Balarama as her own sons. She felt sad that Yashoda is not celebrated in popular culture. Bollywood is saturated with Nirupa Roy like mother characters, who draw on the Jungian archetype of Kunti. But where are the characters like Yashoda? Or Radha - the charioteer's wife who loved Karna as her own son?

So the filmmaker decided to set things right. Despite not having much money, she decided to make a film that showcases both the spirit of Yashoda and Sudha Raghunathan's rendition of Thaiye Yashoda, and to give both a contemporary multi-cultural flavour. And so she made Morning Raga.

If that's how the film was conceived, it worked. Because the last scene, the rock concert in a Deccan fortress with a pulsating Carnatic fusion performance of Thaiye Yashoda, it was cathartic. It washed away 90 minutes of grumbling about amphigory art-house films.

By the way, or, bye the bye, do not watch this scene for the first time on Youtube. I considered posting a link and decided against it. The sense of catharsis, and the emotional resonance of Thaiye Yashoda are greater for having sat through the whole film.

Before the grumbles, what else worked?

Location. Or was it Rajiv Menon's camera work? Almost every location was a visual treat...the traditional south Indian home, the temple, the rock fortress where the concert was held, the bridge.

More music. Pibare Ramarasam was sung beautifully by Kalyani Menon, Rajiv Menon's mother. The reflective, introspective way it was sung made more sense in the context of the movie. The beat version of Mahaganapathim was also fun.

Associations. The film brought back memories of Shankarabharanam and Shubha Mudgal's Ab ke Sawan, both favourites.

Shabana Azmi and Nasser were excellent, as usual.

And the newcomer Sanjay Swaroop was brilliant as a restaurant owner. He asks a searching and insightful question about whether Indian youngsters who want to be rockers think they white, or black? In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to declare that I am generally sympathetic to Sanjay Swaroop. His father, Lakshman Swaroop, is a dashing sportsman who played cricket and hockey for the Madras Cricket Club, and was once featured in a print advert for Enfield Bullet motorcycles.

And the grumbles?

The script and acting were cringe-worthy.

Prakash Rao played Abhinay, the central character, Krishna to Shabana Azmi's Yashoda. He reminded me of the cricketer Yuvraj Singh. The only emotion he communicated was angry, disgruntled arrogance. Though his task wasn't made any easier by the scripting, like "I don't want to write jingles for bubble gum. I want to make music that is remembered for five hundred years. Like the Charminar."

Other cringe-worthy elements included a psychedelic-shirted, wild-haired drummer called Bajali. Alias Bals. Not Balls, just Bals. A guitar player who is stares in fascination at women's bottoms and (literally) gets picked up off the street. A villager who talks to his cow, Annapurna. A south-Bombay-ish socialite who scandalizes the villager by leaning on his arm. Pleeze. A stylish script is the one thing a budget film can afford.

But don't walk out on the film even when the cringes start to hurt. Redemption is around the corner. The cringes make the cleansing release of Thaiye Yashoda that much more welcome.

The Point of County Cricket

Here is Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the eve of a gripping finale to the county cricket season:

...county cricket... fulfil its primary function, the production of a sufficient supply of tough England cricketers for the rigours of the international circuit...

What?

Surely the point of playing county cricket is to win the county championship. At least 90% of the England qualified players competing for the championship have no real chance of playing for England. If nobody cares about winning the championship, not even CMJ, its not surprising that the county scene has "greater issues".

What really got me was that this was not CMJ's main point. It was a point made in the passing. In CMJ's mind, county cricket being nothing more than a talent screening service for international cricket is an unremarkable truism.

Unfortunately, what CMJ thinks is usually a good reflection of what the ECB establishment thinks. They seem to have learnt the wrong lesson from the BCCI's success and concluded that the point of cricket is to promote national pride through international success.

The point of the English Premiership is not to produce England internationals. The point of the ATP Tour is not to produce Davis Cup heroes. The point of the IPL is not to produce Indian internationals. These contests are worthwhile as ends in themselves. Players push themselves to the limit because they care about winning. That intensity of effort, that edge, is what produces the drama which brings in the fans. National flags don't need to be flying for sport to fascinate.

And what terrible timing to be damning the county game with faint praise.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the finale to this season's championships. Notts, the team I support, are in the race. Notts' victory march has just been checked by Imran Tahir, an exciting young leggie from Natal. I'm clicking into Cricinfo between meetings to check the latest scores on Notts v. Hampshire, Somerset v. Lancashire and Durham v Kent. Sky Sports are covering the Notts game live. Exactly what the guys responsible for marketing county cricket should have been praying for.

Anybody want to swap Mark Mascarenhas for CMJ?

Fubsies skirring into the caliginosity

Harper Collins is running a campaign to save rarely used words from oblivion. Heard about it on on Radio 4. They asking influential cultural figures - humorists, poets, bloggers :) - to use these rare words so Harper Collings have a basis for including them in the next edition of the dictionary. Some of the endangered words, and their definitions on the Merriam Webster (since Harper Collins don't have a free online edition): - skirr: to leave hastily. Webster thinks the etymology may be an alteration of scour. The Radio 4 show suggested onomatopoeia, the sound a bird makes when beating its wings in flight, which sounds more plausible - fubsy: chubby and somewhat squat. I can't believe this beauty actually fell out of usage - Caliginosity: dimness or darkness. Has already vanished from the Webster's, so the link is to the free Wikipedia style dictionary. Radio 4 thinks caliginosity deserves to die. But to me, it evokes a sense of the eerie, an image of a hooded candle flickering in the nave of an enormous cathedral casting shadows into the vast stillness, that mere darkness does not convey. Gloaming feels closer to the mark Harper Collins claim that this exercise is needed because they need to drop words from the dictionary. They need to make room for terms like equity injection and credit crunch by dropping fubsy and skirr. I smell bullshit. Surely, in today's world, the real authoritative version of any dictionary is the soft copy, which is not constrained by size. A physical print edition can be cut to any arbitrary number of words. This seems to be an effort to raise the public profile of rare words. A worthy and noble effort in any circumstances. Lets just drop the bs.

Schism in the Soul?

Many elites in the United States are disavowing what is best in our culture and imitating what is worst. Some are trying to reinvoke old norms and reverse the process, but most are succumbing to "proletarianization." This rift is similar to ones experienced historically by disintegrating civilizations.

These words were written by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute in 2001. Charles Murray is both an arch-conservative and a genuine intellectual. Murray is invoking Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, a chapter beautifully titled Schism in the Soul.

In a disintegrating civilization, the creative minority has degenerated into elites that are no longer confident, no longer setting the example. Among other reactions are a "lapse into truancy" (a rejection, in effect, of the obligations of citizenship) and a "surrender to a sense of promiscuity" (vulgarizations of manners, the arts, and language) that "are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of 'proletarianization.'"

Murray was writing in the aftermath of the Clintonian scandals, when the meaning of "surrender to promiscuity" was obvious.

Eight years later, what does this election tell us about the spirit of America, and more generally of of Western Civilization? Is the schism in America's soul going to heal? Or widen?

In Obama and Palin, both parties have nominated candidates from outside the traditional elite, candidates from what Toynbee would have called the internal proletariat. Is the internal proletariat aspiring to be a part of what is best about America? Toynbee would consider this a sign of a healthy growing civilization.

Or is the internal proletariat rejecting the values of the American elite, invoking a mythic "archaist" indentity, and hastening the disintegration of a great civilization? Time will tell. Either way, for an observer like me, this is politics at its most compelling.

My Blueberry Nights and the Theory of Script Writing

All great stories are built around one essential element: somebody wants something really badly, and has difficulty getting it.

Frodo Baggins really wants to destroy the ring. Dorothy really wants to go home to Kansas. Jai and Veeru really want to get Gabbar Singh. Bhuvan, in Lagaan, really wants to beat the British. Hamlet really wants to avenge his father's death. Romeo really wants Juliet. There is no story if Romeo and Juliet are just sort of fond of each other. Or if the Montagues and Capulets are willing to let bygones be bygones.

My Blueberry Nights fails because it ignores this basic rule.

Its about a charming, pretty and kind girl (Norah Jones) who is abandoned by her boyfriend. She leaves her apartment keys with a hunky guy who owns a cafe (Jude Law), sets off on a journey to nowhere specific, randomly runs into interesting people on the way, and returns to New York to fall into the arms of the hunky guy who runs the cafe. At no stage is the desire powerful enough, or the obstacle to attaining that desire steep enough, for the viewer to care about what happens next.

The real tragedy is that so much good work is wasted because of this lack of purpose. There is a beautifully crafted sub-plot about an alcoholic cop. Natalie Portman is electric in a bit role as a roving gambler. The sound track is moody and hypnotic. The photography is completely stunning. Not enough; because film isn't about visual technique. It's about story-telling.