Of late I've been exploring the intersection of psychology with the sport. I know that Psychology - as an academic field of study - is basically psuedoscience and it's so often derided as something like "astrology for moderately smart people" I sometimes feel bad for all the unemployed psychologists in the wild.
Since ending my table tennis hiatus, I've come to see some utility in some colloquially known "psychology" tactics - to win points in sports. But that as it applies to table tennis is a difficult-to-explain area for another day. What I'm more interested here are questions like: can adverse psychological conditions have positives in such competitive racket sports? More broadly, does being neurologically "different" hurt or help one more?
Firstly, consider what entrepreneurship, music composition and competitive table tennis have in common. We could say they are all scientifically / technically oriented and competitive endeavors that one typically engages in at a young age. So what do Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, JJ Lin and Tomokazu Harimoto have in common? They are all considered highly competitive and outstanding individuals in their respective fields, easily, geniuses. And they all happen to be autists. (The social awkwardness, the inability to sustain the kind of eye contact and normal verbal patterns that come to other celebrities naturally, and the obsessive dedication to their craft / passion. These are undeniable signs of autism.)
The question then is do these autists just happen to be some of the biggest name tech founders, musicians and table tennis players of the day - the exception not proving the rule - or is there a deeper pattern at play?
Listening to or going to a studio or mega stadium performance by JJ Lin or imagining life without Zuckerberg's Facebook and all the social media on which it was modelled, one cannot deny both Zuckerberg and Lin are highly idolized men with world-changing talents. Although table tennis is much more limited in reach, it's hard to avoid hearing mention of Harimoto every time a major international match is played, so charismatic is his playing style, at least to the commentariat. When Harimoto burst onto the table tennis scene, he was recognised as a once in a generation TT genius, but perhaps because we live in an epoch when it is no longer fashionable to make further judgements, his autism was barely mentioned. Yet it strikes me as an undeniable reality everytime I watch him play. I believe it is precisely this neuro-cognitive divergence that enabled or contributed to his sporting success. The autist's capacity for obsessive, intensely focused repetition is a rare gift that allows them to reach a very high level of practised precision. For Harimoto, the gift was put into table tennis and his name has since become synonymous with the sport.
Mainland China style rote learning might be all the rage in table tennis now, but might we not tap upon autists to show us how table tennis can be played brilliantly without the aches and tribulations of overtraining like we see happen to the once badly injured Ma Long? Sure, top players from Wang Chuqin and Timo Boll to Truls Moregardh are not autistic and can owe their successes to rather conventional styles of play and mental training. You may even say "but it's not real science" to those who take psychology too seriously as a sports science. I'll be first to advocate skepticism towards claims of special knowledge about the psychic realm. Ultimately as long as TT remains a big tent for all kinds of brains, there'll always be infinite possibilities and no falling into boring patterns - in this purest of spectator sports.
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