Fully Engaged Brain Is Crucial in Game of Life from Joe Streator

This article concerns a Marquette professor and basketball fan who has a more scientific view of the skill of free throw shooting than a typical casual fan.
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Fully Engaged Brain Is Crucial in Game of Life
Neuroscientist focuses on teaching, research
By Bill Glauber of the Journal Sentinel

Basketball free throws are simple, right? Form matters. So does ritual.

But to William E. Cullinan, Marquette University neuroscientist and basketball fan, there is something else at play, hidden, internal. It's called a motor program, in which signals are transmitted from a player's brain through pathways of the central nervous system.

"There is a very big difference between standing in your driveway and shooting 50 free throws and standing on the foul line in front of 18,000 screaming maniacs with the game on the line," Cullinan says.

And as he continues to talk, Cullinan's world, so complex to a casual sports fan, comes to life, the free throw as neurological event.

"What we can describe in neurological terms is the idea of optimal length of a motor program," he says. "If a motor program is too short, you are not allowing the brain to be engaged fully to do what it does so well. On the other hand if it's too long, if it's too elaborate, you're engaging the brain but you're allowing more chances for error to be introduced in that program and it predicts a lack of success."

Examples? Of course he has them. Cullinan sat through a Marquette basketball season a few years back and concentrated on two players at the free-throw line. One, a point guard who made around half his free throws, had a "fatal flaw."

"He would go through his ritual, bounce the ball however many times, took the ball over his head and he stopped," Cullinan says. "He stopped. You can't stop. Your motor program now effectively is everything from there (with the ball over his head) going forward. His motor program was tiny."

The other player was a terrific scorer but he, too, had a flaw.

"I noticed, he bent his knees so far that his butt almost hit the ground," Cullinan says. "He was down so low, and he would come all the way back up. I'd say that was a program that was just too long. All that meant was there were just possibilities of errors being introduced. That's just going to knock you down 15 to 20%.

"There's no such thing as muscle memory," he adds. "It's all in the brain."

Cullinan's work is the stuff of life.

He is the dean of Marquette's College of Health Sciences and director of the Integrative Neuroscience Center, which focuses on collaborative research.

He is 52, a New Jersey native, tall and rangy, with sleepy eyes and a soothing voice. He teaches courses in anatomy, neuroanatomy and neuroscience. He leads undergraduates in the delicate task of dissection of human cadavers, teaching young students not just about human anatomy, but also about respect for those who have donated remains to the anatomical gifts registry.

And Cullinan is deep into research.

"You've been in places no one has ever been before," he says of the work in the lab. "And then you see a pattern that is replicated across all individuals, something that you describe that has never been seen before. We don't always know what it means right away. We may not be the ones to know what it means in our lifetime. But someone will because it's out there and that's how science advances."

He and others in his lab study stress pathways. They focus on brain circuits that regulate neuroendocrine responses to stress.

"We're particularly interested in a hormone that is over-secreted with stress," he says. "It's called cortisol."

"Cortisol isn't bad," he says. "It helps you cope. What does cortisol do after it's released? Well, it's not there to create problems - it's there to shift priorities. So it shifts metabolic priorities. You shift energy resources, you put off housekeeping functions that can wait and focus them onto more or less an emergency situation."

But an over-secretion of cortisol has been linked to depressive illnesses, Cullinan says. To study the effects of stress, and those pathways traveled by the hormone, he and his lab partners study rodents.

"My grandmother used to ask me a question, 'Why was I interested in rodent mental health?' " Cullinan says. "No grandma, it's really not about the rodent. That's right. We can't have depressed rodents roaming around our sewers."

A rodent's brain, he says, "may be tiny compared with the human brain, but it has all the same structures, pathways, transmitters, receptors. It's a microcosm of the human brain."

And in this microcosm, Cullinan and others in the neuroscience research group at Marquette can study pathways as they seek to understand the neuroscience of stress. They are on a journey to help contribute to breakthroughs in the realm of addiction and neuropsychiatric disease.

"It's astonishing how many people have a loved one affected by mental illness, schizophrenia, addiction, and how it has changed not only the life of the individual but the whole extended family," he says. "It's never the same again. It's just rampant. And of course it's stigmatized."

But Cullinan says there is no reason for depression and illness to be stigmatized.

"With other physical ailments we don't resist treatment," he says. "There is a taboo about brain illness. We feel that it's somehow philosophically out of bounds. It's not right. It could help a lot if people understood that some things are brain based."

Cullinan's work never stops, teaching and researching, exploring the circuitry of the brain.

Neuroscience, he says, "is a complicated business. The fun of it is when you can actually get a sense of how things work at a deeper level. The human brain is, in this sense, a microcosm of the universe."