Marco Tardelli
By Dr Paul: It is the deep breath before the plunge. The calm before the storm. The gasp before the roar. The eve of the World Cup!
In the build-up to this event, an event World Cup College has been set up to accompany my excitement levels have become almost fever pitch. This week I bought a Panini sticker album, and today I been planning where I’ll be watching Serbia v Ghana, Ivory Coast v Portugal and Italy v Paraguay. In short, my love of the World Cup extends further than the football on the pitch: the social interaction, the cultural experience, and tapping into memories and emotions first experienced during childhood.
Everyone can remember their first World Cup experience. For me it was Spain 1982. Coming from Italian stock, I remember my mother getting more and more excited as the tournament wore on. I remember excitement attached to games like England v France, Algeria’s unlikely victory over West Germany, Honduras, New Zealand, West Germany v France in the semi-final, Italy v Brazil – the list goes on. Spain 1982 has underwritten every World Cup I have experienced since. For every frenzied goal celebration of pure joy, I immediately think back to Falcao and Tardelli. For every Portuguese away kit, I think Peru. For every cultured midfielder, I think Socrates. And for every African team, I think Cameroon.
Nineteen-eighty-two was a safe place. I was nine-years-old, living with my family in bucolic Warwickshire, and replayed every game I saw in the back garden in what I remember to be golden sun light. It is these pure memories of excitement I plug into on the eve of every World Cup.
Although Michael J Apter’s study of excitement focuses on risk takers such as racing drivers, mountain climbers, stuntmen etc who crave excitement, his conclusions do extend to memory attachment and the way our mind works when excitement takes hold. Parapathic emotions, he explains, describe experiences where all emotions are enjoyed, even unpleasant ones like fear, anger, grief and disgust, in the presence of detachment.
In a World Cup context, one enjoys all the emotions that one experiences out of empathy with the players, coaches and fans. We watch from the television, which supplies the crucial levels of detachment that parapathic emotions need to function. Apter goes on say that this safety zone and detachment is associated with a particular zone of experience (or arousal). Within a specific zone, any arousing emotion (even supposedly negative feelings) will be agreeable. It’s this arousal that makes us crave more.
In a recent university paper (‘Visual perception, motor action, and the video game experience’ by Assistant Professor Ole Ertloev Hansen from Aalborg Univeristy), it takes Apter’s theories one step further by using Torben Grodal’s Moving Pictures book and theories of PECMA (Perception Emotion Cognition Motor Action) on people experiencing video games. Hansen writes: [Grodal] demonstrates how the experience of film can be perceived as a flow from perception to actual motor action, although this action is suppressed. The level of tension is derived from emotional labelling and cognitive processing which is applied to the specific emotional stimulus. This model suggests that the organic system which enables humans to apprehend and negotiate their immediate environment, the embodied mind, is also used to comprehend audiovisual depictions.
Grodal also contemplated the means by which we process and retain narratives. Light stimulates the retina and is converted into signals that are passed to the visual cortex, where the signal follows a series of mechanisms. These activate further parts of the brain in order to fortify significant forms and activate memory patterns so that corresponding items can be located. These sense-making mental processes relate closely to narrative schemes.
If we use Grodal and Apter’s ideas and theories, and apply them to real world narratives, it’s obvious that my World Cup memory patterns were created in Spain 1982 and will now reverberate in South Africa 2010. The arousal process has already started. By 4pm tomorrow afternoon, they should be off the scale and the narrative I am all too familiar with will start all over again.
Indeed. I was born already 9 years old in 1982 and I distinctly remember my visual cortex mis-representing that Falcao face as a new modernism. Great times and nice article
Indeed. I’m another one that was born to football that year, under Naranjito’s spell. I was 11 and that Brazil-Italy match was the first time I ever cried over a football match… So, as you can see, tomorrow and the following weeks will be all about rememberance, arousal and pure excitement.
Thanks Dr Paul for another excelent article.