Offseason Episode 3: Inside the Brains of Elite Athletes

This month's Heisman Trophy Podcast is a mega-episode as we take a journey into the realm of neuroscience and what it tells us about brain development in elite athletes. How much do we know about the brain as it pertains to athleticism? What factors help determine which athletes becomes great and which do not?  Are elite athletes wired differently?  Is their development due primarily to nature or nurture?  Guests include neuroscientist Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa, the head of the sports neurology department at the Hartford HealthCare Ayer Neuroscience Institute, Zach Schonbrun, author of The Performance Cortex, former 5-star quarterback, current ESPN color commentator Max Browne, and class of 2027 right hand pitcher Davis Wilson of Fresno (Calif.) North High, an elite Major League Baseball prospect who is committed to Vanderbilt.

Transcript

HEISMAN TROPHY PODCAST
Combined Transcript: Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa, Zach Schonbrun, Max Browne

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PART ONE: DR. STEPHANIE ALESSI-LAROSA
Sports Neurologist, Hartford HealthCare Ayer Neuroscience Institute

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Chris Huston:
We now continue our exploration of athletic greatness and its origins with Dr. Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa. She's a neuroscientist who leads one of the few sports neurology programs in the country at Hartford HealthCare's Ayer Neuroscience Institute. Stephanie, welcome to the Heisman Trophy Podcast.

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Thanks for having me.

Chris Huston:
Great to have you here. One of the reasons I invited you on the show is I really wanted to try to understand, from as many angles as possible, what differentiates an athlete who performs at the very highest levels on the most intense stages from those athletes who may be very talented but never quite figure out how to put it all together. So first, let's get some basic things out of the way. What exactly is a neuroscientist, and how does a neuroscientist typically keep busy?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Well, that's a big world. Neuroscience is certainly the study of the nervous system, which includes the brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, and then certainly the cellular and molecular level and all of the things in between. I'm a sports neurologist, so that obviously involves neuroscience. Our worlds can all look different — some are more research-focused, some more clinical. My particular role as a sports neurologist is treating patients. I'm a physician and a board-certified neurologist, and I did a fellowship in sports neurology. Basically, I'm on the sidelines at football games as part of the sports medicine team. I'm also a ringside physician, so I work with boxers and mixed martial arts fighters — all professionals. It's an exciting space, as you can imagine.

Chris Huston:
Very cool. What led you to specialize in this area of neuroscience?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Great question. My father is a neurologist, but I actually fought it. I was going to be a physical therapist. Then I said, I really want to be an expert in something, and I want that instant credibility that an MD gives me. So I decided to go to medical school. I was open to all specialties, but I was always drawn to neurologic-related issues on every rotation I was in. I couldn't fight it anymore and went with what was calling me, which was neurology.

Chris Huston:
You must have come across dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of athletes over your career. From what you've been able to observe, how do athlete brains differ from those of non-athletes — if at all? Is there actually a difference we can identify?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
It's something that's definitely being researched, and there's a lot we don't know about it. The nature-versus-nurture question as it relates to performance is certainly a very hot topic right now — what are those traits common across high-level or elite athletes, and what causes them to emerge? There's a long list of contributing factors. Coaching is one. Positive experiences in childhood, I think, are really important. There's this idea of adverse childhood events, and those can be genuinely deleterious to brain development and athletic development. So it's an interesting field, because there's not one secret sauce. It is family life, stability, the environments kids are in that promote positive traits.

Chris Huston:
So you're talking mostly about generally positive environments rather than any one specific thing?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Yes. We know what doesn't work, or things that work against somebody. The adverse childhood events — the ACEs score — captures things like a child under 18 being exposed to someone who went to prison, witnessing physical abuse, experiencing sexual abuse, or even something as comparatively mild as parental divorce. Those things do change brain development, and they actually have downstream effects on chronic health issues like diabetes and high blood pressure. So in a general sense, that's a good starting place.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't be a high-performing athlete and have some adverse childhood events. We all know stories of athletes rising above difficult conditions, and that's actually very interesting to me. We don't fully understand what makes that happen, and I don't think those athletes themselves always understand it either. But sometimes having that sports outlet is huge. The risks and benefits of playing sports — especially at the amateur level — I always tell patients the benefits outweigh the risks. Even with what we know about concussions and other injuries, there are still tremendous benefits to playing sports. Physical activity is protective against some of these issues.

Chris Huston:
From a neurological standpoint specifically, is there anything the brain benefits from in athletes playing sports?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Yes. In terms of plasticity, recovery, and resilience, there's an emerging concept of brain fitness — better understood now as a function of hydration, sleep, exercise, and all the things that strengthen the brain and offer protection against mood disorders and other issues. It's not just one lobe or one structure, though. So many areas are involved in the traits we're talking about. The frontal lobes, for instance, handle planning and executive functioning, multitasking — what we might call an athlete's IQ within their sport. Is there hippocampal involvement? Spatial navigation is part of it. Different sports will activate different areas, so it's quite varied and very interesting.

Chris Huston:
It's my understanding — and I'll say upfront this is a thin, pop-neurology understanding — that in general the brain is trying to find the most efficient route and expend less energy. So repetitive tasks over time may not be the best for creating new neural pathways; the brain almost goes on autopilot with routine. Is that a generally correct picture?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Yes. And that raises a good question, because we do talk about brain routines. Routines are very good in general for all people, athletes aside. The brain likes to know when it's getting its meals, its hydration, its sleep — these predictable things it appreciates. In terms of training and muscle memory, those repetitive things are necessary for any sport. But to your point, learning a new skill is protective against dementia, for example. There's a lot of research showing that when you learn a language, or learn something new, or encounter unpredictability in your day or your sport, you're building connections and giving the brain that fitness we're talking about. So I think it's a combination.

There's also a concern in sports medicine right now about sports specialization — where a child plays one sport year-round because there's travel team after travel team, and they're not developing other skills or engaging other muscle groups the way multi-sport athletes in different seasons used to. That can predispose them to earlier injuries and earlier surgeries. In a general sense, both having a routine and having some unpredictability are good. I always use boxing as an example — and I actually work with professional bull riders — and in the ring, or on a bull, it's always unpredictable. Those are the cases that come to my mind. Sports specialization at a young age has become a real concern.

Chris Huston:
The best athletes are just amazing at handling pressure. We've talked a lot on the show about Fernando Mendoza and the extraordinary moments he faced during his Heisman season. It's almost like he was born to be in those moments. What part of the brain is responsible for regulating that?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
There's a balance that has to happen. We talk about a curve of stress and performance. When people reach a peak level of stress, that produces their peak performance. But too much stress can make performance drop. So it takes a lot of balancing. The mental side is huge, and sports psychology is where you start to see real differences.

I don't know the specifics of Fernando's case, but I would say there has to be some healthy level of stress management, and obviously being well trained and prepared for those situations. Having that sports IQ — the ability to integrate all the scenarios and make decisions — it's complex. It uses all areas: the motor area, the sensory area, the auditory system, the planning of the frontal lobes. Heart rate and other autonomic functions are brainstem-level functions, which are even more deeply seated. I think people don't give athletes enough credit for how neurologically complicated they are. Even to hit a baseball at the speed those pitches arrive takes a great deal. So in the case of a Heisman winner, I would say a lot of each of these pieces is in play.

Chris Huston:
Are people of this caliber born with this ability, or can it be developed?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
That's the question. I think some people may have a genetic component — we've seen multigenerational elite athletes, Olympians where the grandparent, the parent, and the child and an uncle are all high-level competitors. Maybe there's a gene component. Is that more the musculoskeletal anatomy of the person? That's certainly part of it. But the training lifestyle and the environment you're raised in are also pieces of it. If someone comes from a family where high-level sport is generational, you're brought up in that environment.

At the same time, someone from an adverse situation who finds their way to elite performance is impressive beyond what anyone would expect. Those stories resonate with us — especially as a sports neurologist, because we know what that brain was up against psychologically and in terms of resources. Maybe they didn't have the best coach, or the best social situation. If we fully understood what that was, everyone would be an Olympian or win the Heisman. We're all staying tuned for that answer. The variability and heterogeneity are what make sports special — having your favorite player, having players who are interesting in their own way and their own position. It's kind of fun that way.

Chris Huston:
Forgive me if this is an ignorant question scientifically, but is this something that could be epigenetic at some point — where the imprint of a high-pressure moment, like a grandparent in the World Series, creates something that passes forward? Is that completely out of bounds, or is it a possibility?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
I think it's on the table. I don't know. There are so many variables, and it's hard to say at what scale. We see these anecdotal families where you notice a pattern, but maybe not at a large scale. I think there is something to it. I don't know to what scale we'll see it develop, but it's impressive when it's person after person in the same family. It's cool.

Chris Huston:
Does the ability to handle pressure in a sport theoretically carry over into other areas of life? And if not, why not?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Great question. I treat a lot of high school and college athletes, and that student-athlete dynamic, I think, prepares people to operate at that other level too — they have to perform academically and athletically. I see that push-pull. When someone comes to me with an injury, it throws them off their normal routine, but they still feel the pressure of academics and everything else. So I think there's a lot to be said for the idea that the traits that make someone a good athlete can also carry over into how they approach all tasks. Now, that's not everybody. Some people are more athletically inclined than academically, and vice versa. But the people who operate at a high level in both — that's always impressive, because from a neuroscience standpoint, it's genuinely hard to be cognitively and physically elite simultaneously.

Chris Huston:
You've done a lot of work with concussions. Does head trauma early in an athletic career affect how the brain ultimately develops from a performance standpoint?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
There's a lot of research being done on that, and I can't offer causation or certainty, but in a general sense, the brain does not like being struck. It doesn't like being injured. The frontal lobes still don't fully myelinate until the early twenties — people often don't realize the brain is still developing at that age. At even younger ages, at youth-level sports, having concussions or mild traumatic brain injuries — honestly, it's unknown how harmful they are, because we can really only track the symptoms presenting to us as clinicians. It's hard to say. If it wasn't from sports, it might be from the playground, or a car accident, or any number of things. And I don't like when patients are worried about their next hit — there's no controlling a lot of that.

But I do think that as much as we can prevent or reduce exposure to unnecessary hits, we need to be doing that. Not having contact practices at very young ages, promoting flag football at those ages, building skills — those are the public-health interventions that make the most sense to me.

Chris Huston:
We often talk about how elite athletes are wired a certain way. Is that a real thing, or is that just society trying to explain something with its own lingo?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
I think there is something to it. In terms of patients, a lot of them — certainly high-level athletes — want to lie to me. I accept that as part of my job. They want to get back to play and not be seeing a neurologist anymore. In terms of how they're wired, I understand it, because I can tell in the room what kind of athlete I have in front of me. This is someone who's been a self-starter, who has goals all lined up, who has future plans. Some people are wired to just go, whether they're injured or not. They will push through. And the brain does not love that. It won't get better on their timeline — it will get better on its own timeline. Every brain is different. And the saying is, if you've seen one concussion, you've only seen one concussion.

Chris Huston:
There are a lot of great athletes out there, but not a lot of elite ones. It seems like at a certain point in an athlete's development there's a trigger — a realization that if they focus and work hard, they can become elite. How do brains develop that trigger?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Honestly, I think the biggest, most important next area — in terms of being the full package — comes from sports psychology. That mental toughness, that ability to be resilient when something's not going to take them down, the ability to push through — that is really what takes athletes to that next level. It's a huge part of it. Everyone can train. You can have the best coach, the best program, all the resources. But the difference, I think, comes from a lot of sports psychology. Genetics and childhood environment are certainly part of the story. But the sports psychology component doesn't get enough mention. If they can visualize where they want to be, if they have that mental toughness and resiliency, know how to push through and when it's appropriate — when they have all of that, I think that's what really gets them there.

Chris Huston:
If you could do a fantastic voyage and go inside a section of the brain of LeBron James during the closing seconds of an important game, would you go? What do you think you'd see?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Yes. I think in terms of the cerebrum — that topmost part of the brain — and its connections from hemisphere to hemisphere, down into the midbrain and brain stem, there'd be a little of each area that would be exciting. But the frontal lobes are the most exciting, because that's where the planning is happening, the executive decision-making. That directs motor function and communicates back and forth with heart rate control and the like. It all starts to generate from the frontal lobes because that's where the cognitive decisions are being made. So I would go there.

Chris Huston:
Your specialty, sports neurology, is still fairly young. What does the future hold for this area, and what research are you hopeful will produce real answers about what's going on inside the brain?

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Great question. The landscape is pretty wide. As a sports neurologist, my job takes me to exciting places — I meet athletes doing all kinds of things, including extreme sports. In terms of research, CTE is such a big topic, and everyone's worried about it. But clinically, and I think this gets missed in the media, we have associations between head injury and these outcomes — we do not have causation. Those are not the same thing. These more longitudinal, long-term studies that are coming out — those are going to take time, take funding, and take participants on both sides, injured and not injured, for proper comparisons. And that's what every parent wants: to know what this means for their kid thirty, forty, fifty years from now. We don't have those answers yet.

But I think there is a lot of hope in terms of what we can treat. When someone has signs or symptoms of degenerative issues down the road related to sports, we do have treatments, and they need to meet with a sports neurologist to find them.

Chris Huston:
Dr. Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa, thanks so much for coming on the Heisman Trophy Podcast and having this informative discussion. I really appreciate you taking the time. Best of luck to you in the future.

Stephanie Alessi-LaRosa:
Thank you so much for having me. Take care.


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PART TWO: ZACH SCHONBRUN
Author, The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius;
Deputy Editor, Business and Tech, The Week

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Chris Huston:
This off-season, the Heisman Trophy Podcast is exploring what separates Heisman winners and other elite performers from regular athletes — how that talent is first discovered, how key developmental attributes come together with unique athleticism, why these players are wired the way they are, and so on. This week's episode focuses on the origins of elite athleticism as it pertains to brain development and neural elasticity, especially in young athletes. To guide us on that topic, we have Zach Schonbrun, the deputy editor for business and tech at The Week. More importantly, he wrote a book on this very topic back in 2019 called The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius. He spoke to neuroscientists and people on the cutting edge of athletic development. Zach, welcome to the Heisman Trophy Podcast.

Zach Schonbrun:
Thank you very much, Chris. Happy to be here.

Chris Huston:
It's been six years since your book came out, and I imagine that feels like a lifetime given how fast things move in this kind of research. First tell me what moved you to write on this subject, and if you were updating things now, what would you focus on that you didn't do before?

Zach Schonbrun:
Yeah, great question. I used to be a sports writer — a freelancer for the New York Times and ESPN the Magazine and a variety of other outlets for about eight years. I got into sports because I love sports, and I was enamored with great athleticism. Like most people, I considered great athletes impressive because of how fast they moved and how high they jumped and how strong they were. I would watch someone like Michael Jordan and be impressed and enamored by all of that.

But as I thought more about what it actually takes to be skilled at that level, the more I questioned how big a role muscular strength and speed really play. Through visiting science labs and talking to neuroscientists, it became clear to me that the root of great athleticism — the bigger contributor to skill and talent — is not the muscles, not the strength. It's really the ability to process information very quickly. It's decision-making. It's memory for schemes and recognition of what's unfolding in front of you and how it relates to what's been memorized from playbooks or from what coaches have communicated. It's the ability to handle pressure. And ultimately it's the multitude of signals being sent from the brain to coordinate a large number of muscles, joints, ligaments, and limbs — all in coordination. Those are the things that define great athletes more than the measurables we test at the NFL scouting combine. It's what's happening underneath the hood. That's what I wrote the book about.

As for where things would go today if I were rewriting it — honestly, not a whole lot has changed. The hard thing about assessing athletes from a neuroscience standpoint is that the imaging equipment just isn't there yet. It wasn't there when I started writing, and there are ways to approximate things, but it's still not perfect. There's still a long way to go technologically and scientifically. Athletes also aren't rushing into neuroscience labs to get scanned any more readily than they were six years ago. My book followed a company using an EEG scanner with professional baseball players, and they're still doing that work today. So things really haven't changed too dramatically.

Chris Huston:
Since we're not looking inside the brain as much, has there been any research into the external factors that influence it — especially for young athletes whose prefrontal cortex hasn't fully developed and yet who are already capable of extraordinary split-second decisions?

Zach Schonbrun:
From the access that neuroscientists do have — in laboratories, using MRI machines and screen-based simulations to approximate what athletes do on the field — what they've found is that athletes are absolutely wired differently. The famous example, and he's not a football player, is the rock climber Alex Honnold, who did the free-solo documentary and more recently climbed that tower in Kuala Lumpur. A few years ago he participated in a neuroscience study and had his brain scanned, and what they found was that his amygdala was not functioning the way a normal person's would. The amygdala is the region responsible for fear — the production of the emotion of fear — and that made sense. The guy is fearless. But what's interesting is that Alex himself isn't sure whether he was born with an amygdala that wasn't as large or as responsive as normal, and that that's what led him to climbing, or whether it's something he trained over time to overcome. With neuroplasticity, it's possible the rest of the brain overwhelmed that amygdala response. We'll never know, because we didn't scan him at birth.

And neuroplasticity is real. The more you use your brain, like a muscle, certain regions will change structurally in response. So are there running backs out there, running full speed into 350-pound linemen, who may have a less-than-fully-functioning amygdala — and is that what gives them the fearlessness to perform? It's certainly possible. My belief, and we can unpack this if you want, is that it's probably more on the nurture side.

Chris Huston:
Based on what you found, what kinds of childhood experiences do you think would best wire the brain for elite performance?

Zach Schonbrun:
It's hard to say exactly what the right way to nurture a budding athlete is. What seems most evident is that exposure — actual experience, actual practice — is what trains the brain to better handle what it's actually going to encounter. Playing a video game is not going to make the next Tom Brady. Playing an entirely different game like Tetris absolutely will not prepare your brain for what it will encounter in a basketball or baseball environment. The more a young athlete can be exposed to real practice in the actual sport, the better. It gets back to the axiom that practice makes perfect — not necessarily about perfection, but about preparing the brain for what it's going to encounter. That is what boosts decision-making, improves processing speed, and enhances the recognition and memory for where teammates are supposed to be, who you're going to pass to — all the things I mentioned earlier that are the bigger contributors to athletic success. The best way to nurture those aspects is through experience and through practice.

Chris Huston:
Do you think there's a golden window in development where the brain is especially responsive to sport-specific training?

Zach Schonbrun:
I'm not entirely sure, but there's certainly evidence that neuroplasticity and brain development are most flexible and most plastic at a younger age. Kids who learn a language young tend to retain it far more easily than adults trying to learn one later in life. I suspect something similar applies to athletic training — learning to swing at a pitch at a young age probably helps the brain get accustomed to what a pitch is supposed to look like and the timing of how a swing should meet the ball.

But sports change and get more complex as you get older. My seven-year-old's little league is getting soft-toss pitches — that's a nice step toward recognizing how a ball comes to you and how you're supposed to swing, but that experience won't necessarily help him when he's facing 95-mile-an-hour pitches ten years from now. The brain has to continue developing to counter those changes. The bigger point is the same one I keep returning to: it's not the muscles, it's not the combine metrics. Those are fine, but they're missing the larger contributor to what defines great performers.

Chris Huston:
What really inspired me to start this exploration of what separates elite athletes from others was watching Fernando Mendoza on his Heisman run, seeing him in those specific pressure situations — and that's something all Heisman Trophy winners face. We've talked to Olympic athletes in previous episodes about what's going on in their heads when the whole world is watching. It fascinates me to see how someone like Fernando Mendoza can have 100,000 people screaming at them, knowing he has to win the game for his team, and also knowing the Heisman itself is on the line. Are the brains of elite athletes better built for pressure, or just better trained for it?

Zach Schonbrun:
It's probably both in some sense. The world of sports psychology has grown exponentially in the last fifteen or twenty years — athletes and teams today have therapists and sports psychologists on staff specifically training athletes to better handle those pressures. That's been a huge factor. But I think there might also be a cognitive component.

I remember interviewing a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins who studies stroke and stroke recovery. A big factor in stroke recovery — and in what contributes to how a stroke unfolds and how you recover from it — is dopamine, the neurotransmitter often called our "happy" neurotransmitter. It helps us feel good and is actually a significant contributor to muscle movement and how quickly we can move our muscles. What he found was that when the brain supplies little squirts of dopamine, we can move faster than we ever thought possible. This sometimes happens in the fight-or-flight reflex — when adrenaline kicks in, we can move faster than we thought was possible.

What that neuroscientist was telling me is that in certain situations, athletes who thrive under pressure, who embrace the pressure situation, may be getting a squirt of dopamine from that. And that neurotransmitter can actually make their muscles move a little quicker than they normally would — a little pep in their step, a boost. So part of it is psychology — training themselves to embrace the situation — but once they do, it can actually contribute to a small performance boost at a biological level. I'm not sure that's totally definitive, but it's an interesting way to think about why certain athletes respond the way they do in certain situations.

Chris Huston:
There are a lot of schools of thought on identifying talent early and training young athletes. Do you think early specialization helps build elite neural circuits, or does it narrow them too soon?

Zach Schonbrun:
There are obviously two schools of thought here, around generalization and specialization. I'm always hesitant to say I favor one over the other. I think it's important for kids to play a lot of different sports and not bog themselves down with just one from a young age. That's probably physically harmful — it's what can lead to injury and wear bodies down faster. That's probably the real downside of specialization from a physical standpoint.

From a brain standpoint, though, the more you expose yourself to the scenarios and situations you'll actually encounter in a game, the better prepared your brain will be to handle them. From that standpoint, I do think sport-specific specialization is probably beneficial. There are a lot of similarities between being a basketball point guard and a football quarterback, but they're not the same. Playing point guard in the winter can help in some ways, but it's probably not going to transfer directly to the decision-making and scene-recognition that unfolds on a football field.

I think what I like to say — and I wrote about this in the book — is that our brains weren't built exclusively for being baseball players. They're doing everything else too. Even though it might seem like Fernando Mendoza was born to play football and breathes it all the time, his brain is also walking around in the morning, eating breakfast, driving his car. It's constantly soaking up environmental cues and making decisions moment by moment. What his brain has to be able to do when he gets under center is lock in and say: I know what's going to happen here, I know these situations from the playbook and from film, I know where my teammates are, and I can make decisions quickly when linebackers are coming. A certain amount of specialization isn't strictly required to get there, but it's probably helpful.

Chris Huston:
It sounds like thousands of reps in the right perceptual environment matter more than just reps alone — and that those reps in a football context might not necessarily transfer to other areas of life.

Zach Schonbrun:
Yeah, probably not. I don't think the fact that he can make decisions quickly while throwing to wide receivers necessarily helps him when he's crossing the street. But there is a certain amount of intelligence required for memorizing a playbook — that's not an easy thing to do. Quarterbacks going from one team to another, or from school to school, learning new playbooks and new teammates — that's a skill in itself. That's unusual ability.

Chris Huston:
Why do you think society is still more comfortable calling a chess player brilliant than calling a point guard or a quarterback brilliant?

Zach Schonbrun:
I think there's long been an unfortunate stereotype about the dumb jock. And it's partly because athletes aren't articulate about what makes them great — not because they can't be, but because it's genuinely hard to explain. I was a sports writer in locker rooms asking athletes questions after every game. I saw brilliant moves, brilliant skill on the field. And you'd ask a player, how did you do that? And they'd say, I don't know, I just did it, it came naturally. It's an unsatisfying answer, and I think it contributes to a perception that they're incapable of articulating what makes them great. But that's not really their fault.

What the Performance Cortex was arguing is that the cognitive demands required of an athlete to perform at the highest level are just as impressive as those of a chess grandmaster. It's a different arena, a different skill, but what athletes are able to do is a form of athletic intelligence. The greatest ones — the LeBron Jameses, the Tom Bradys — they're geniuses. They really are. Just because they can't explain why is unfair grounds for calling them dumb. We have to reinterpret what intelligence actually means.

Chris Huston:
Everything is about storytelling, which is why sports culture may have over-romanticized grit and underappreciated neural development. Is that something that's starting to change — a sea change in how sports psychology and athletic development are understood?

Zach Schonbrun:
I think so. The Wonderlic test used to be a real joke in football, but teams have tried to do better with more neuroscience-based scouting. Some teams have made real efforts to get under the hood and understand what athletes are actually doing cognitively. And the psychology component — bringing mental coaches and therapists into clubhouses to prepare athletes for psychological demands — has grown considerably.

That said, the technology still isn't quite there. The ideal would be a mobile EEG cap, or even better, mobile MRI imaging a player could wear under their helmet or in the batting cage — something that gives a real sense of what's happening while they're doing what they do. But there's also resistance from the players themselves. They're already pretty good at what they do. They don't need to explain it, they don't need to know why. It'd be helpful for scouts, coaches, and fans who are curious — but maybe not for the athletes themselves. There's a gap between what athletes want, what teams want, and what curious science writers like me want. Hopefully as time goes on, there'll be more overlap. And maybe no one wants to share their secret sauce anyway.

Chris Huston:
After all your reporting, and with some years of perspective now, what do you believe is the biggest hidden ingredient in how elite athletes are made?

Zach Schonbrun:
It's hard to limit it to one, but I'd say rapid decision-making — which incorporates a lot of different elements and different brain regions. Being decisive more quickly than other people is a really big factor.

We saw this most clearly in baseball, which is a useful arena because hitting involves essentially one single decision: I'm either going to swing at this pitch or I'm not. And even if you don't swing, there's still a decision happening in the brain — to lay off. What the neuroscientists found is that baseball hitters were faster and more accurate at making those decisions than normal subjects. That's a function of having seen a lot of pitches over a lot of time and knowing what looks good or bad. There's a recognition component, a memory component, and a physical component. If I were trying to apply neuroscience to understand what makes a great quarterback or a great point guard running a fast break, it would come down to how quickly they can decide to make a pass. That, to me, is a key factor.

Chris Huston:
I like to geek out on Robert Sapolsky. He talks about how the brain makes the decision before you consciously think you're making it — they've tested people reaching for a cup, and the brain has committed before the person believes they've decided. Did any neuroscientists talk about that aspect when you were reporting for the book?

Zach Schonbrun:
You're getting very philosophical. I don't remember specific conversations about it, but I read a lot of the theories. There is a lag between what the brain is signaling and the time it takes to reach the muscles. The signal from the brain down to the hands for a swing — that takes time, on the order of hundreds of milliseconds. Very fast, but when you're facing a 95-mile-an-hour pitch, that's a big chunk of your available time.

One of the most interesting things I found in reporting, and it also connects to the nature-versus-nurture question, is that those signals are not always totally clear. You're firing signals along a pathway through the spinal cord and out to the periphery through motor neurons — it's a chain of command. And there is sometimes interference, noise, that disrupts the signal. That's why it's very hard to move things in a perfectly smooth, precisely repeatable manner. It's why the game of darts exists. We're not robots. If we could move without interference the same way every time, we'd throw bull's-eyes every single time. There's always some imperfection in our movements, and a lot of that can be traced to the tiniest bit of noise in the signaling from the brain to the body.

And going back to nature versus nurture — it's possible that certain people are simply born with clearer signals, with less noise in their bodily systems, which means less disruption of those pathways from the brain to the periphery. That clarity, that lower noise, contributes to better coordination and smoothness of movement that others might not have. It's theoretical at this point. But if you assume that all of us have some amount of noise in our signaling, then some people simply have less. And maybe at a younger age, those people figured out that they're more coordinated, that things came more easily, and that's what brought them into sports early and set the developmental process in motion.

Chris Huston:
This is just fascinating stuff. Zach Schonbrun, thanks for coming on the show and discussing this great topic — genuinely insightful. His book is The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius, available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Zach, thanks for coming on the show.

Zach Schonbrun:
Chris, thank you so much. It was great talking to you.


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PART THREE: MAX BROWNE
ESPN College Football Analyst; Former Quarterback, USC and Pitt

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Chris Huston:
Max Browne of ESPN is a former college quarterback who played at USC and Pitt. He runs a very successful channel called Max Browne 04 on YouTube and across all platforms — great college football content and much more. He's been on the show twice before. Max, how's it going? Welcome back.

Max Browne:
It's good to be back. Happy to be here for a third time. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Huston:
You recently put out a piece of content that I want to talk about. You've been turning out fantastic, insightful work. So let's pick it up from there. We talk a lot on the show about Fernando Mendoza and how he's one of these guys who has a lot of outside interests, and that clearly did not hurt his development. You talked about Alyssa Liu and Scottie Scheffler in this piece. Tell me what got you thinking about this concept of a new type of athlete.

Max Browne:
Yeah, it started just as an observation. I'm 31 years old, so I grew up in what I call the Mamba mentality generation, where the role models were Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady — and all those guys were cut from a similar cloth, at least from an outsider's perspective, in terms of their work ethic and how they approached the game. They approached it with a ruthless, dominance-first mentality. And to take it a step further, if you had any interests outside your sport, or if you weren't locked in all the time, there was a connotation that you weren't fully committed.

I'm not sitting here saying I was Tom Brady or Kobe Bryant, but I think I approached my athletic career with that kind of mentality. And when I reflect on it — it did not end successfully. I was the number one quarterback in the country coming out of high school but did not have a successful college career, relatively speaking. When I reflect, I think: I wish I had been able to turn off more. I wish I hadn't been so intense all the time. I wish I hadn't felt the need to stay an extra hour after every practice. And as I get older and remove myself from the sport — I'm 31 now — nine of my former teammates are still in the NFL. Were those nine guys the hardest workers when I was at USC and Pitt? Not necessarily. They weren't slackers by any means, but the common thread is that they all had fun. They all showed up to practice and played football. They didn't work football.

Then the observation really crystallized when Scottie Scheffler and Nikola Jokic rose to the peak of the sports world around 2021. I was like — that is the polar opposite of the Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant mentality, and yet they're the best players in their sport. And I think it's especially relevant in the digital age, where every time you open your phone you're getting fed sports content. When you're living it as an athlete, there really is no off switch. You're constantly consuming your sport.

So the take is this: I think it's actually a superpower and a skill for athletes to be able to turn off and remove themselves from their sport. Rather than being all football all the time, twenty-four seven — that can be a recipe for literally not playing your sport as well, because you lose the fun and the joy aspect of it.

Chris Huston:
Where do you think this idea originated — that you have to whittle everything down to one obsessive focus? Obviously you mentioned Jordan, Kobe, Brady — those were the images projected, and everyone talked about how Jordan would play a game and then immediately go lift. But at the youth level, say middle school, when does that switch get turned on, and who's turning it on?

Max Browne:
That's a good question. I'd say parents drive it mostly. I'm old enough — I have three older brothers — to have observed what the youth and AAU travel ball culture is like. Parents are intense. And the funny thing is, when you're watching another parent, everyone thinks those people are crazy. But when you're the parent yourself, it becomes: no, I'm just being a great advocate for my kid. There's a real double standard there.

For me personally, my parents were amazing. I remember Pat Narduzzi and Steve Sarkisian both saying, to varying degrees, that Max doesn't have a quarterback dad. In the football world, the quarterback dad is usually the one who's head of the booster club, sitting at the 50-yard line, living vicariously through his kid. My dad was much more low-key, off in the shadows, still advocating for my sports journey — but not that. So I was lucky.

For me, though, I was on that trajectory as a five-star quarterback since as early as I can remember. Things ramped up around seventh grade — I was playing up a year, so I was the quarterback on the eighth-grade team, and I could already see who the ninth-grade starter was. I was like: give me a couple of years, and by my sophomore year I think I can take that spot. So that was the age where it ramped up. It came from a small push from my parents, but really from an internal drive I'd always had, and I was fortunate enough to have the supporting cast around me to channel it.

Chris Huston:
There's been a lot of discussion in recent years about mental health among athletes — openness and honesty about burnout in particular. Is burnout the main issue when it comes to this Mamba mentality approach?

Max Browne:
Good question. I think it's an aspect of it. But for me, it was less burnout and more that it was never enough. I truly loved football. I was the teenager who'd come home and watch NFL Network rather than Nickelodeon or Disney Channel. It was more that I was my own worst critic. If I stayed after practice to throw thirty extra routes, the thought was: well, why didn't you throw sixty? We had a great week of lifts — well, you could have added one more. You had that extra ice cream on Sunday — you're going to pay for that in the fall. That train of thought was something I struggled to get out of.

I was never the type of athlete who needed a coach to get on me about showing up on time or hustling through drills. But I could never just get into flow state in my college career. I played some good ball at times, but never truly just went out there and did it. And when I look at my former teammates, I'm envious of the guys who could do the work, work hard, and then when it was time to play football — just play football. Make a mistake? All good, next play, that's what the game's about. They never went to that fourth or fifth or sixth level of analysis that I fell into.

Chris Huston:
Do you think that if you had been a really good pianist in high school in addition to playing quarterback, would there have been whispers that Max Browne wasn't dedicated enough?

Max Browne:
Probably not, actually. Something like that probably would have been viewed as cool and unique. But it is interesting how much the sports world has changed. When LeBron started venturing into acting and business around 2012 to 2014, the reaction was: look at this guy, who does he think he is, he's checked out, he's not all-in on basketball. Now it's almost weird and looked down upon if you're an athlete who isn't leveraging your brand for business opportunities. LeBron had to take the brunt of the criticism so the next generation wouldn't have to.

I look back on my own career and playing basketball in high school was one of the best things I did — not just athletically (and I genuinely believe playing basketball makes you a better quarterback; three months of hoops versus three extra months of quarterback training, you become a better athlete), but from a mental health standpoint. Being able to shut the football door for four months and go compete in a completely different arena, where a big primetime Friday night basketball game against my rival felt like zero pressure compared to the football stakes — that was genuinely good for me. And I think I got my offer from Oklahoma partly because they saw me play basketball. So it can work to your advantage as well.

Chris Huston:
Do you think the remaining athletes who still subscribe purely to the Mamba mentality might eventually be at a disadvantage as more athletes become well-rounded? Or is this a real trend, or just isolated cases?

Max Browne:
My take is it's not really a trend either way — it's so dependent on the specific athlete. The Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants are going to be successful in whatever generation they're born into. Tiger Woods is in that bucket. Scottie Scheffler and Nikola Jokic are too. To me, the zone where this really matters is in the middle — athletes who fall into the performance anxiety bucket. Looking back, I think I was that type. I had more of the Mamba mentality wiring and could have used more of the Scottie Scheffler, Nikola Jokic approach. That said, there are also plenty of athletes who think they have the relaxed, laid-back mentality and probably could use more Kobe, more Tiger, more Tom Brady in them. It's just so dependent on the individual kid.

But I do think we've taken the Mamba mentality too far, and I say that with genuine respect for Kobe's legacy — the work ethic, the accountability, the discipline all started from a great place. What I watched firsthand is that we ran with it in ways that led to performance anxiety dynamics that affect certain kids deeply, while never even appearing on other kids' radar at all.

Chris Huston:
If you were talking to 16-year-old Max Browne right now and giving him advice about his future development — what would you tell him?

Max Browne:
A few things. First, I would hammer home: have fun every single day. It sounds so basic, but I think that gets lost with high-level athletes. In my mind I always knew it was a blessing and it was fun, but it felt so intense. I think at a certain point that intensity hurt the way I played on the field.

Second, I would try to drive home that the athletic journey is all upside. There are articles out there calling me one of the biggest college football busts ever. And yet my life is forever better because of the game of football. When you come at it from that mindset, it can take the pressure off. My college career was not ideal, but what football gave me is still remarkable.

And third — because my wife and I talk about this, she was a Division I athlete too — if we ever have kids who are on that kind of trajectory, I would have them see a sports psychologist in high school, as soon as it's clear they're heading there. I had a strength coach and a private quarterback coach growing up, and those were valuable. But I probably would have benefited from a sports psychologist three or four years earlier than I actually saw one. When I finally did see one, it was my redshirt freshman and sophomore years, after losing a quarterback competition at USC and then losing a second one. I went in with the mentality that something was wrong and needed to be fixed — rather than seeing it the way I saw my strength coach or quarterback coach, as just part of the athlete's toolkit, part of developing that muscle. If it's introduced early and naturally, it doesn't come from a place of crisis. It's just: this is part of my process.

And obviously it depends on the individual kid — for another type of athlete, maybe the priority is the weight room. Every conversation is different.

Chris Huston:
Just out of curiosity, how old were you when someone first told you that you had real arm talent — that you could actually throw?

Max Browne:
Probably third or fourth grade. I remember playing tackle football and my team was the only one in the league that was actually throwing the ball. As early as that, which is crazy to say. I have a nephew in fourth grade now and I'm like — this kid's a baby.

But it really went in phases. I always knew I was decent, I was captain at recess in second grade, quarterback on my team in third and fourth. Where it moved to the next level was having a quarterback coach who had trained other guys that made it to Division I. My older brother was the state player of the year in Washington and ended up playing Division I football as a quarterback, so in my little bubble, D1 wasn't unthinkable, but it was the dream. Then around seventh or eighth grade, my quarterback coach looked at me and said: yeah, I think you have something here. If we stay at it, it's not crazy to think scholarship offers could be coming in a couple years. And fortunately, that happened. That was when I was like — okay, this is different now. This is real.

Chris Huston:
12,951 yards, 146 touchdowns at Skyline High, National Gatorade Player of the Year, and three-time Heisman Trophy Podcast guest — Max Browne. Thanks for your candor. You're always so honest and insightful, and I really appreciate you lending your thoughts to this topic. Good luck this fall with ESPN and with the channel. Have a great summer.

Max Browne:
Appreciate it, Chris. This topic lights me up. It's fun to get a break from just the standard football takes. I'm sure we'll be back chatting in a few months when the next football season rolls around.

Chris Huston:
All right, talk to you later.

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