#193 Resonance: the foundation of skill?

Resonance starts as a simple idea from physics. Pluck a guitar string and the body of the instrument starts to vibrate with it. Two systems, coupled, moving together.

James Gibson used the word as a synonym for attunement, to describe something much bigger: the way a perceiving organism tunes itself to the information in its environment. A great defender doesn't compute the game from inside his head. He resonates with it.

In this episode, the first in the new monologue format, the conversation moves from Gibson's original intuition to the work of Vicente Raja, who has spent the last decade turning resonance from a metaphor into a testable scientific framework. Along the way: Anderson's neural reuse, tau-coupling, a study showing ecological resonance in human brain activity, Rúben Dias as a worked example, and what all of this means for how we design training environments. A small detour through Tim Ingold's "lines" too, because they turn out to describe the same phenomenon from a different angle.

The thread underneath all of it: the player and the game are not two things interacting. They are one coupled system, and the coach's job is to build the conditions in which that coupling can develop.

Vicente Raja's research

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Heo, friend! This is ProKiss Sala. We kutan, often misunderstivinäj ja kompleks kana fotballa. A holistic, skiljall andapti journey to betäida humanitele. Weska to ProK Sala. Belera keta' topikana, kupe word. From this episode on, the regular weeklačeni show is a monologue as Gipe Savolainen time no longer allows him to co-host. Big thanks to Gipe for everything so far. The monthly disk show continues with a changing guest each month from football, science or art. Now let's get into today's subject which is resonance. Resonance is a phenomenon that occurs when an object or system is subjected to an external force or vibration whose frequency matches a resonant frequency of the system. At its simplest resonance is vibration. And why are we talking about this thing? So we had a guest last week Vicente Racha and he was speaking about resonance and also it's very interesting that it is actually related to football. But let's talk more about the resonance as a phenomenon. The classic example is a guitar. When you pluck a string, the body of the guitar, the resonating chamber starts to vibrate at the same frequency as the string, or at the frequency that is physically lawfully related to it. The string drives, the body follows, and both end up vibrating together. The important detail for our purposes in football is the second half of that sentence. The two systems vibrate either at the same frequency or at frequencies that are physically lawfully related to each other. And this is the property that inspired James Gibson, one of the founders of ecological psychology, to borrow the term and use it in a very different domain, the relationship between an organism and its environment. In ecological psychology, the central claim is that the human being can couple to information in the environment and through direct perception resonate with that information. So according to ecological psychology, a human is a perceptual system that through learning becomes increasingly attuned to the information. When the information in the environment is structured, for instance light that has been structured by reflecting of various surfaces, the perceptual system can pick that structure up. And Gibson used the term resonance as a near synonym for attunement. From that angle, the long process of becoming skillful is essentially the process of learning to resonate more accurately and more reliably with the structured information that is already out there. You can picture it like tuning a radio. The airwaves around us are full of frequencies. When you turn the dial onto the right one, the radio resonates with that signal, and suddenly a coherent station emergent emerges out of the noise. Our perceptual system, eyes, ears, skin, vestibular system, the whole sensory motor apparatus works in a comparable way. The system tunes itself to particular structures in the energy flows around us and on a football pitch, this is what allows a player to see or feel the game, to pick up the meaningful patterns and act on them. For most of the twentieth century, resonance as a concept in the Skipsonian sense was used somewhat loosely, almost as a metaphor. That has been changing, mostly thanks to the work of Vicente Raha, our guest in Discussao last week. Raja has spent the last maybe decade trying to take the concept seriously and turn it into something we can actually test. In his 2018 paper A Theory of Resonance Towards an Ecological Cognitive Architecture, Raha argues that ecological psychology, if it wants to be a complete account of perception, action and cognition, has to say something about the role of the central nervous system and that the most natural way to do this is through a theory of resonance. He proposes in this article two building blocks. First, a framework, which is based on Anderson's neural reuse, and his claiming that the brain is not a collection of dedicated modules each doing one job. That was the traditional idea of brain. Most neural structures participate in many different tasks. What changes is the pattern of functional connectivity recruited for the task at hand. And interestingly, Gibson actually himself had hinted at something similar. He speculated that a given set of neurons is equipotential for various functions. Secondly, Raha argues for a methodology, which would be multiscale fractal dynamical systems theory, shortly a way of describing brain body environment systems as one coupled dynamical system at multiple scales of analysis. And in the 2020 follow-up Resonance and Radical Embodiment, Racha sharpens this into a unifying claim. Resonance lets us integrate the neural scale and the behavioral scale of cognitive phenomena without falling back on the old computational or representationalist story. For him, the neural scale and the behavioral scale are not rivals and they are not separate. The neural scale is nested within the behavioral scale, and if you describe the same cognitive phenomenon at both scales, the two descriptions do not contradict each other. They reveal different facets of the same coupled system. This is the same multiscale logic we use whenever we look at a complex system. We can analyze a football match at the level of a team or at the level of an individual player or at the level of a single coordinated action. Choosing one scale doesn't abolish the others, it just brings a different aspect of the system into focus. Very interestingly, until recently, this was almost entirely a theoretical proposal, but that has now started to change. In 2025, Raha and Krahman published Ecological Resonance is reflected in human brain activity. They set up an object interception task in virtual reality and used mobile brain body imaging. Essentially, they recorded brain activity while people moved naturally to intercept incoming objects, and the aim was to test two core hypotheses of radical embodied cognitive neuroscience: the ecological resonance hypothesis and the information-based control laws hypothesis. The ecological variable they focused on is tau or time to contact. Tau is a perceptual quantity that specifies directly from the optic flow how long it will take for an approaching object to reach the perceiver. It is exactly the kind of key information Gibson was talking about. You don't need to compute it from internal models, the information is there in the structured light. They found ecological resonance to Tau at the level of neural activity, the brain signal tracked the Tau structure of the incoming simulation. Additionally, Tau coupling, so between the stimulation, the participant's behavior, and the neural activity. Tau coupling between the stimulation, the participant's behavior, and the neural activity. In other words, the same lawful pattern was detectable across all three scales at once. This is the empirical picture the theory has been waiting for. It's one coherent system, environment, body, brain, coupled through ecological information with no need to postulate internal models as central controllers. For us in football, the symbolic value is actually important. When we say a player is tuned in to the game, that's no longer just a coaching metaphor. There are now data showing that the brain itself resonates with the same lawful information that constrains movement. And we can have a case example of this. Huben Diaz. What's so striking about him is the precision of his positioning. So when the ball moves, he is very precisely moving with the ball and of course with the opponent and the whole situation. He's very attuned to the situation. In the framework we are building today, what's going on is this, maybe like this. Diaz is exceptionally well attuned to the environment of the match, to his teammates, to the opponents, to the ball, etc. From very small changes in the environment, for example the ball traveling 5 meters during a single pass, a slight shift in a striker's body orientation, he extracts information that allows him to act with great preciseness, skillfulness. He doesn't run more than necessary, he resonates with the meaningful information and his body responds accordingly. If you imagine a ball flying towards his head and you track his head movement against the ball movement, you would almost certainly find a tau coupling pattern of the kind Raha and colleagues measured in the lab. Two trajectories, the ball, balls and the heads, running in lawful correspondence. And you plot them and you get something close to what anthropologist Tim Ingold describes when he is drawing his lines. So Ingold is talking about lines related to the living phenomenon. The players' line, the balls line, the teammates' line, all becoming parallel for a moment. Correspondence. Ingold's lines, Gibson's resonance, Racha's tau coupling. These are different ways of describing the same thing. An organism and its environment as a single mutually responsive system. We have been talking about correspondence about this in the earlier episode. And I'm increasingly convinced that this correspondence is a good work because it captured what is actually going on. The player corresponds with the game. The game and the player co-vary, coact. Maybe interesting in this moment is that what of what about if a skillful player resonates with the game, what does it look like when a player does not? At the behavioral scale, the scale most of us as coaches and analysts work at, non-correspondence is surprisingly easy to spot. A player who is not tuned to the game stands out. They look out of place. They don't belong to the game. They arrive a bit too late or a step in the wrong direction, they make decisions that are reasonable in the abstract but wrong for this moment. Interestingly, some of the very best players are hard to analyze precisely because they correspond so well with the environment. They blend into the flow of the game, and when you watch them, you might ask yourself, what exactly did they do? Because maybe sometimes nothing they did stuck out. That is one sign of high attunement, maybe not low contribution. If we take all of this seriously, the practical consequence is one we keep coming back to on this podcast, which is representative learning design. So the training environment has to contain the same key information that the competitive environment contains. Not just the visual information but the auditory and haptic information too. Over the past few years we have seen a clear shift in this direction at the elite level and increasingly at the youth level too. Sessions are being designed not just as a technical drills, but more as full ecological environments. In summary, resonance in Gibson's broad sense is the attunement of the perceptual system to structured information. Vicente Raja has turned that intuition into a serious theoretical and now also empirical research program, neural and behavioral scales nested in one coupled system with tau coupling as a measurable case in point. In football, this gives us a more honest description of what we mean when we say a great player is in tune with the game, and it gives practice design a clear direction, a clear North Star, and it gives pra practice design a clear direction also. Build environments that carry the right information. See you next time.