During those years, problems emerged such as why it was so difficult to perform the chest pass, the hook shot, the behind-the-back dribble, the under-leg dribble in a basketball game… It seemed that no matter how good the technical execution was in the abstract, there was something “wrong” with its application in a game situation.
More complex still, what was the relationship between diving into the pool and the movements with the ball in the air on the way to the basket during leisure time at the Clube Nacional de Natação, in Rua de S. Bento? It was quite obvious that those who were most capable of acrobatic dives into the pool… were also the most capable of “aerial acrobatics on the way to the basket”… Why is there no relationship between a swimming pool and a basketball court?
I needed to study… to understand… So off I went… INEF… Anatomy, Physiology, Biology, Psychology, etc. Technical and tactical preparation, physical preparation, psychological preparation… in short… the human being studied by “separating the parts”…
This was followed by neuroscience and the dominance of the brain!
- First alert: Manuel Sergio…quote… “Science is not enough to explain a human tear. This is how we understand that the human vocation is not only to rationalize, but to live.”
- Second alert: Antonio Damásio… Descartes’ mistake… also… The strange order of things… quote… “Feeling is therefore not a passive process”. “Emotions and feelings are not a luxury, they are the way we communicate our mental states to other people. But they are also a roadmap for making decisions.”
- Third alert: Motricity understood as the human being in action…Merleau-Ponty… quote… “The whole universe of science is built on the lived world, and if we want to think science itself rigorously, to appreciate exactly its meaning and its scope, we must first awaken this experience of the world.”
- Fourth alert: Behavior and its “strange” conditioning factors… What is yes today… no tomorrow… How can we understand that… a player “here” was “very bad” and “there” was “very good”? That a team today, with this coach… is “very bad”… and two days later… with another coach… is “very good”?
But then this coach’s “magic” solutions… applied by another coach… “don’t work”? Why not? How can we accept that the same coach, the same team… “excellent results” today… a month later, despite the same solutions that worked before… everything seems to…”fall apart”?
What was this phenomenon of behavior? And so I ended up with Merleau-Ponty, through “The Structure of Behavior” and “The Phenomenology of Perception”. But up until that point there had been an intellectual journey… Which included six books by different authors, among many others, as elements of study and research:
- Um corte Epistemológico da Educação Física à Motricidade Humana, from Manuel Sérgio;
- O Livro da Consciência e A estranha ordem das Coisas, from António Damásio;
- How the Body shapes the mind, from Shawn Gallagher;
- Introdución a una Fenomenologia de la Vida, from Renaud Barbaras;
- The embodied mind, Cognitive Science and Human Experience, from Varela, Thompson and Rosh.
Beyond almost five years of life in search of a philosophical understanding of behavior… 2017/2022…
As someone once said… life is a journey…
