I have a new utensil holder.  I picked it up last night at the pottery shed.  I like it but not sure I like the glazing.  Live and learn.

I was listening to the radio yesterday, Quirks and Quarks on CBC radio, and there was a Dr. Zamorano on talking about his research of the brain actitivty of soccer fans.  He and his research team studied the brains of soccer fans using functional MRI to study the brains of 60 male soccer fans.  

“Soccer fandom provides a high-ecological-validity model of fanaticism with quantifiable life consequences for health and collective behavior,” said lead author Francisco Zamorano, PhD, a biologist working at Clínica Alemana de Santiago and associate professor at Facultad de Ciencias para el Cuidado de la Salud, Universidad San Sebastián, Santiago, Chile.  “While social affiliation has been widely studied, the neurobiological mechanisms of social identity in competitive settings are unclear, so we set out to investigate the brain mechanisms associated with emotional responses in soccer fans to their teams’ victories and losses.”

What they were studying was fanaticism in soccer, hoping to understand it better in a broader context.  They found that soccer fanatics had a higher activation in the reward systems regions when their teams scored which helped with group bonding and identity reinforcement.  When their identity was threatened, a loss, they had a momentary self regulatory failure.  They couldn't control themselves in other words.

“Studying fanaticism matters because it reveals generalizable neural mechanisms that can scale from stadium passion to polarization, violence and population-level public-health harm,” he said. “Most importantly, these very circuits are forged in early life: caregiving quality, stress exposure, and social learning sculpt the valuation–control balance that later makes individuals vulnerable to fanatic appeals. Therefore, protecting childhood is the most powerful prevention strategy. Societies that neglect early development do not avoid fanaticism; they inherit its harms.” 

And why does this matter?  Because that self regulation is learned early on in life from parents and caregivers who model the behavior, who can teach children how to name emotions and deal with those emotions.  At Jack's skill group it was called, name it to tame it.  We also learn to deal with these emotions by having warm, responsive adults who help us manage big feelings.  ( Full disclosure, I did not have this growing up).

So early childhood is critical in helping children learn to self regulate, and the consequences of not learning to self regulate, is an increase in fanaticism (because those people feel like they belong, they are with their people, none of whom can really really self regulate their emotions).  It can lead to things like January 6th, 2021 in Washington D.C., among other things.  It can also lead to much milder outcomes but I think all of us have had a moment when we are angry, or extremely happy, and feel connected to those around us who are all experiencing the same emotion.  There is a reason for that and it exists inside our brains neural pathways.  

It's amazing, isn't it?

Into the minds of soccer fanatics — how their brains are wired compared to regular fans | CBC.ca

What brain scans reveal about soccer fans’ passion and rage | ScienceDaily

Brain Activity of Soccer Fans | RSNA