The Upper Boundary of Human Potential
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in an edition of NOVA’s email newsletter, NOVA Lens, and has now been repurposed for NOVA Next. Sign up for NOVA Lens here (select “NOVA Newsletters”).
The Winter Olympics are in full swing, and with each icy pirouette and snowy tumble, we’re seeing athletes compete at seriously high levels. They’ve honed their strengths and skills to fine points, but could they get any finer? Some experts and commentators are wondering if athletes can improve much beyond today’s performances.
An interactive from The New York Times on the subject inspired us to dig a little deeper. Will we ever see a quadruple Axel in competitive figure skating? Could speed skaters glide any faster?
“In mature sports, we’re entering a time of diminishing returns,” said Alex Hutchinson, a journalist whose new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, was published in January. “It’s going to be unusual for someone to come and totally rewrite the books.”
He says that it’s useful to juxtapose human athletic progress with the evolution of thoroughbred horse racing and dog racing. “They improved just like humans for a long, long time, until about the 1950s. At that point, those [race] times started to plateau.” Evidently, the methods we used to build horses’ and dogs’ strength—good nutrition and rigorous training—weren’t enough to push them past a certain point. Are humans destined for the same physical fate?
Not necessarily. What sets people apart from horses and dogs is our sophisticated brains—and with sophistication comes advanced psychology. “If a human runs a marathon in 2:03, other humans know it’s possible to run a marathon in 2:02:59,” Hutchinson said. “I think we’re going to keep seeing records inch forward slowly.”
Of course, he acknowledges that there are limits—no one will run a marathon in a minute, for example. But the bounds of human performance are surprisingly flexible still. In 2008, Usain Bolt soared past the previous record for the 100-meter dash, about as mature an event as there is. “There’s always going to be the possibility of some Usain Bolt outlier,” Hutchinson said.
Our psychology propels us forward, but it can also hold us back. We can see that in the pacing patterns of world records for running, which are relatively consistent. “They’re always able to speed up at the end, which to some people is evidence that their brains are basically holding them back because of uncertainty or self-preservation,” Hutchinson said. “When they approach the finish line, they’re able to tap into some of that reserve.”
Hutchinson points out that every sport, though, is subject to changes in technology. “It may well be that if humans get faster 20 years from now, it’ll be because the shoes have better energy material,” he said.
Even for more subjective sports, we can measure objective physical progress. Figure skating is a prime example. It’s often judged by a combination of aesthetics and physical feats. But getting past the triple Axel, which U.S. competitor Mirai Nagasu landed last weekend, would require a huge leap in ability. “The quantization of that leap is very big,” Hutchinson said. “I’m pretty confident in saying we’re not going to see a sextuple Axel with humans in their current form.”
Part of what limits us is our muscles’ ability to produce energy via mitochondria. “We have about 2% mitochondria per cell volume,” said Jaci VanHeest, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut and former director of physiology for USA Swimming. “An athlete is about double that. If we look at a hummingbird, they’re 40%. So have we reached a limit in terms of what we can fit into a muscle cell, in terms of mitochondria? No. Can we train an athlete to make them look like, seem like, act like a hummingbird? Probably not,” she said. But, she speculates, with some cellular or genetic tweaks, “can we get more than 4%? Maybe.”
So where do we draw the line? We don’t know yet, VanHeest says.
“As technology advances, and our understanding of biology advances, we’re going to confront the ethical side.”
P.S. Don’t miss Hutchinson’s fascinating New Yorker article about extreme breath-holding here.
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WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND
We were pleased to see this comment from neurobiologist Erich Jarvis:
The video Erich is referring to is here on Facebook. Valentine’s Day may be over, but it’s not too late to watch some animals engage in weird mating rituals. Also, coincidentally, Erich is featured in NOVA’s upcoming series, NOVA Wonders, which premieres in April. Stay tuned!
WHAT’S ON OUR MIND
NOVA development producer David Condon saw this article in Quanta Magazine about quantum computing and wanted to share his thoughts:
This article really helped me understand how the quantum weirdness that makes quantum computing potentially so powerful is also what makes it so difficult to do. Quantum superpositions are hard to maintain and get harder as the number of qubits grows. So quantum computer scientists are engaged in an arms race to figure out how to keep enough qubits together long enough to 1) run powerful algorithms and 2) correct the inevitable errors that arise in order to get useful answers as output. It’s not clear if it can be done––but if it can, the results could be truly revolutionary. And we seem to have arrived at a key inflection point…
—David Condon, NOVA development producer
For more background on what David’s talking about, check out the article here.
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On an unrelated note, we noticed a trending topic on Twitter that was too fun not to mention. Monday was Darwin Day (i.e. the celebration of Charles Darwin’s birthday), and many scientists flocked to Twitter to explain why #IStudyEvolution. Here’s one our of our favorites:
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POSTSCRIPT
What the heck is this? And how did they do that?
The answer is math—and to get to the bottom of it, I contacted Frank Farris, a mathematics professor at Santa Clara University. His book, Creating Symmetry: the Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, deals with the intersection of art and math.
The first key to understanding this GIF is to know that the movement of the dot—or pencil—is dictated by what’s called a parametric equation, in which coordinates are determined by some variable or parameter. In this case, Farris says, “the parameter is time, so for different values of time, the pencil is in a different place.”
As you can imagine, the parametric equation for the outline of a Vermeer is going to be pretty complicated.
So to help visualize it, the GIF decomposes the parametric equation into its up-down and left-right parts. The left-right position of the pencil over time can be mapped on a normal X-Y graph as a complex, jagged curve—and the equation for that curve can be described as the sum of a lot of smoother, simpler curves, called sine and cosine waves (see the GIF below). Same goes for the up-down position of the pencil.
This series of waves that make up the more jagged curve can be represented as a collection of circles, or wheels, which you see at the top and the bottom left of the Vermeer GIF. That’s because the sine and cosine of the angle, ϴ, as it goes around the circle, moves in the shape of a wave. The smaller the circle, the higher the wave’s frequency (meaning the space between crests is smaller).
A simple way of thinking of this is just that the circles represent a bunch of different equations (waves) that, together, determine where the pencil moves.
Impressive stuff. And comprehensive, too. “It’s a brilliant representation,” Farris said.
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