This is Your Brain on Sports, L. Jon Wertheim
This is Your Brain on Sports, L. Jon Wertheim
6 Rating(s)
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

This is Your Brain on Sports
The Science of Underdogs, the Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon

Author: L. Jon Wertheim

Narrator: Sam Sommers, Keith Szarabajka

Unabridged: 8 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/02/2016


Synopsis

This is Your Brain on Sports is the book for sports fans searching for a deeper understanding of the games they watch and the people who play them.  Sports Illustrated executive editor and bestselling author L. Jon Wertheim teams up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild ride into the inner world of sports.  Through the prism of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, they reveal the hidden influences and surprising cues that inspire and derail us—on the field and in the stands—and by extension, in corporate board rooms, office settings, and our daily lives. 

In this irresistible narrative romp, Wertheim and Sommers usher us from professional football to the NBA to Grand Slam tennis, from the psychology of athletes self-handicapping their performance in the boxing ring or the World Series, to an explanation of why even the glimpse of a finish line can lift us beyond ordinary physical limits.  They explore why Tom Brady and other starting NFL quarterbacks all seem to look like fashion models; why fans of teams like the Cubs, Mets, and any franchise from Cleveland love rooting for a loser; why the best players make the worst coaches; why hockey goons (and fans) would rather fight at home than on the road; and why the arena t-shirt cannon has something to teach us about human nature. 

In short, this book is an entertaining and thought-provoking journey into how psychology and behavioral science collide with the universe of wins-and-losses, coaching changes, underdogs, and rivalry games.

— Boston Globe, Best Books of 2016, Sports

About The Author

L. Jon Wertheim is the executive editor of Sports Illustrated.  A sports journalist with a passion for psychology and economics, he is the author of such New York Times bestsellers as Scorecasting (written with Toby Moskowitz) and You Can’t Make This Up (written with Al Michaels).  A huge sports fan, Sam Sommers is an experimental psychologist at Tufts University who studies the psychology of everyday life. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Situations Matter.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Allen

[URL not allowed] We as a culture love sports and the men and women who play them. We are fascinated by the nature of competition; we make connections that become passionate lifelong commitments. We root for the home team and admire superstar performers. But ... why? That’s the q......more

Goodreads review by Laura

Loved this book! It's basically Freakonomics/Predictably Irrational/Thinking Fast and Slow combined with David Epstein's The Sports Gene. Full review here: [URL not allowed]-re.........more

Goodreads review by Jenny

* Based on a reading of ARC This is a fun read broken down into 20 chapters dealing with various familiar sport topics from "Why quarterbacks are good-looking?", "Why we love underdogs?" to "Why the best players make the worst coaches" and so on. What this book is not is a book you will devour in......more

Goodreads review by Halle

“so often the appearance of lunacy in sports isn’t lunacy at all. As outlandish as sports conduct might seem, it is rooted in basic human psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive tendency.” Listening to this was like taking a class that has talks about practical, real life stuff and you start seeing t......more

Goodreads review by Natalie

The Sports Industry Revealed and It is far from Disappointing This Is Your Brain on Sports is a book written for the purpose of informing people who love anything and everything about sports and are willing to read example after example of the industry. This book is far from a bore and it is hard to......more