Why I stopped watching football

This video was sponsored by Brilliant.

Over the middle, and it's Robbie  Anderson and oh, what a hit!

Oh! Sanders gets wallopped.

Oh, what a hit. My goodness.

And he gets smacked down, taking some shot.

Oh, big hit! Man.

Oh no.

Oh my goodness!

Woah!

I don't know how you take this out of the game  

of football. I don't know if  there's anything you can do.

Looking for his possession guy and wow.

Believe it or not, I’ve stopped watching football.

Now, you may think that’s not such a big shocker.

But, I grew up in Wisconsin where it’s basically  

legally required that you  watch football every week.

And so for many years, I was an avid Packers fan.

A bona fide cheesehead.

I was even lucky enough to attend a  game at Lambeau Field many years back,  

thanks to a generous gift from the  parents of a kid I was tutoring at  

the time who gave me a set of  their coveted season tickets.

Every Sunday, it was a tradition to cook  up a big pot of chili in the crockpot,  

crack open a cold beer, pile on the couch with  all my good friends, and cheer on the Pack.

To be honest, this ceremonial get-together  became just as important, if not more so  

than following the ins and outs of football.

It was really fun and exciting.  Who could ask for anything more?

But in 2018, I learned something that made me  completely rethink my feelings about football.

(inaudible) been with this franchise for 25 years.

As Manning has Collie. And the ball's out.

Collie took a vicious hit,  he's still down, hasn't moved.

Collie is absolutely just frozen on the field.

It was a collision with Coleman and Hanson.

I was working as a freelance  writer for SciShow around that time  

and they gave me a topic that I’d  never explored all that much before:

chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

And let me say, what I discovered  while writing that script?

It brought me up short and  totally changed my perspective.

See, the reason I became a neuroscientist  

is because I fell in love with  our fragile, incredible brains.

And football, as well as other  high-impact contact sports,  

is very, very bad for those  precious, delicate organs.

If you’re like me, you’ve  probably heard about CTE before.

It gets brought up in conversations  around football to debate helmet safety  

and whether we should get  rid of helmets altogether.

But there is so so much more to  CTE than what you’ve been told.

Do better helmets make people safer or  do they make people lead with the head?

Yeah, I think it's research. Ya know,  they're researching that right now.

Ya know, looking at new helmets,  new ways to make the game safer.

Researchers have been trying  to figure out a better way.

A better way to test helmets  

to prevent those concussions and now they  say they have finally figured it out.

As concern rapidly escalates over the  long-term effects of taking hits to the  

head on the football field, it's given rise  to an industry aimed at softening those blows.

But can new technology really  prevent dangerous concussions?

He says that quite a few members of the  medical and the research communities  

are also voicing serious doubts about the current  state of science linking concussion to CTE.

I'm just throwing out the  other side of the story to you.

It starts with a concussion  which, by itself, is not great.

Concussions are not uncommon injuries.

It’s totally possible that  you’ve experienced one yourself,  

and even more likely if you’ve  ever played a contact sport.

Heck, I got a mild concussion  when I used to play rugby.

Me and another girl went for a tackle at  the same time and ended up knocking heads.

But really, anything that causes a sudden hit  

to the head or jostling of your  skull can cause such an injury.

From falling off a bike to being in a car  accident to going for a header in soccer.

So it should come as no surprise that  football players, whose literal job is  

to repeatedly ram into other players or be  slammed into the ground after being tackled,  

experience a lot of concussions.

By one estimate, for every  five games an NFL team plays,  

at least one player on that  team will suffer a concussion.

Like I said, earlier on in the NFL, we  had on pads every day. You thudded up  

twice a day in training camp.  You put people on the ground.

How many concussions did you have? Any?

Uh, a few. A few over the years.

If you would've asked me eight  years ago how many concussions I  

had during my playing career, I  would've probably said two, maybe three.

And I'm talking about where I lost consciousness  for five seconds, ten seconds, a minute.

But what we're finding out is that - the old  saying in football was "I got my bell rung".

Well, having your "bell rung", seeing stars,  seeing fireworks, ringing in the ears,  

things of that nature - hundreds, maybe thousands  of times I can say that that happened to me.

Concussions are basically a type  of mild traumatic brain injury.

The act of being hit suddenly or slammed  to the ground causes the brain to bounce  

around inside the skull, which can stretch and  damage neurons, and can lead to a cascade of  

biochemical signals that can affect brain  function both in the short and long term.

Together, that all means changes  to the metabolism in the brain,  

which is how the brain processes energy,  which can affect neuronal function.

Most of those changes end up  reverting to their normal state  

eventually, but sometimes brain cells do die.

There are also big changes in the signaling  between neurons, in the ions that our cells  

use to send their electrical signals,  and in the blood flow to the brain.

Collectively these changes can lead  to overexcitation in the brain,  

and make the brain even more fragile than normal.

During the hours and days after a concussion,  

the brain is extremely sensitive to things that  affect blood flow and intracranial pressure.

And a concussion can also stretch neuronal axons,  

which can sometimes lead to axonal  degeneration and inflammation down the line.

So what does all of that  mean, practically speaking?

Well, in my case, I felt a little tired  and disoriented for the first day,  

and then had a headache for a couple of days.

Headaches are a really common  symptom for concussions.

Other symptoms include nausea, dizziness,  and difficulties with balance and vision.

In rare cases, people may experience convulsions.

But concussions can mess  with your mental health, too.

Emotionally, concussions can cause confusion,  

difficulty focusing, and sometimes  irritability or even feelings of sadness.

Sometimes an individual may  briefly lose consciousness,  

and they may experience post-traumatic amnesia.

With dramatic symptoms like that,  

it’s perhaps unsurprising that  concussions are an often-used movie trope.

Like in Bourne Identity, where Jason Bourne loses  

all recollection of who he was and  what happened to him in the past.

Who am I?

You're a malfunctioning, 30-million-dollar weapon.

But that kind of amnesia is super rare.

More commonly, people just can’t  remember what happened in the time  

right before the concussion. Like  a couple of hours or minutes.

And they might have trouble remembering  the actual concussion itself or what  

happened during the minutes and hours afterward.

Every concussion that I had ever gotten by  playing football, I went back into the game.

What's more scary about it, knowing what I  know now, was watching the film the next day  

and not remembering any of the plays that I ran.

Aikman suddenly turns to Steinberg  and he says, "what am I doing here?"

And the next thing you know, they're re-living  this conversation they'd had five minutes earlier.

For a minute, I thought he was joking.

And I went through the same  sequence of answers again,

and his face brightened and we celebrated again.

Maybe ten minutes passed,

and he looked at me with  the same puzzled expression,

and asked the same sequence of questions.

Depending on how severe the initial injury  is, it can take up to a couple of weeks for  

an adult to recover from a concussion, and a  bit longer than that for kids and teenagers.

I realize I’m discussing all of this pretty  casually like it’s no big deal, but none of  

this stuff is a lot of fun, and it’s really  not a very simple and easy recovery process.

And of course, the more severe the  injury, the worse the experience.

Until you've had a concussion, you  really can't imagine how that feels.

It's like an out-of-body experience.

I've had times where I've been hit immediately  and I've seen stars like in the cartoons.

I've been hit where I see black spots.

I've been hit where I see two of you.

I've definitely had concussions before where  you're like, not really sure where you are, but  

somehow your subconscious  knows what to do when you play.

I recovered from my very, very mild  head bump within a couple of days.

But some of the hits I see  football players take are intense.

Sometimes these guys go out cold  for several seconds on the field.

So we’re not talking about “minor” injuries here.

And that’s just one concussion in one game.

Almost every play of every game  

of every practice, they're gonna be  hitting their heads against each other.

Those things seem to happen around a  thousand to fifteen hundred times a year.

Each time that happens, it's around 20 g or more.

That's the equivalent of driving a car  at 35 miles per hour into a brick wall.

A thousand to fifteen hundred times per year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given  the fact that concussions  

often occur during high-risk activities,  people who experience one concussion  

are statistically more likely to  experience additional concussions.

And things really start to get really  ugly when you keep having concussions.

Now, I did sort of walk away  from rugby after my experience.

It happened during my senior year of high  school and I got a little bit worried about  

the possibility of more injuries as I  started preparing to head to college.

But many folks who play high-impact  contact sports, like football,  

play them for years or even decades, putting  them at high risk of repeat head injuries.

And we used to think that while it might take  up to a month to recover from a concussion,  

once you were recovered, that was that.

You were all good.

And now it’s turning out that’s not so true.

And that’s where my change of heart about football  

really starts. Because one concussion  is bad, but more than one is really bad.

Basically, if you experience repeated head injury,  

the resulting trauma is more  than the sum of its parts.

The damage can get worse almost exponentially.

This can lead to things  like second impact syndrome,  

a rare situation where a second  head injury shortly after the first  

causes the brain to suddenly swell, causing  catastrophic damage and, often, death.

And with enough hits and enough time,  

you can actually end up causing permanent cellular  damage that your brain just can’t recover from.

These days, I feel like the term  “chronic traumatic encephalopathy”,  

or CTE, is pretty much everywhere,  

so it might be hard to believe that we only  really started using that term in the early 2000s.

Before that, people referred to the symptoms  of repeat head trauma as being “punch drunk”,  

or more technically, dementia pugilistica.

It was in 2005 that neuropathologist Bennet Omalu  and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh  

published the first paper describing  CTE in the brain of a former NFL player.

Specifically, Mike Webster,  who exhibited unusual behavior  

shortly before he died of a  heart attack at the age of 50.

No, I'm just trying to find - yeah, well  traum--everyone went through trauma as a kid.

I'm not saying I was different  from that, I'm just saying...

The things we do to one another...okay?

Uh...

Hell, I don't know what I'm saying.  I'm just tired and confused right now,  

that's why I say I can't really--I  can't say it the way I wanna say it.

I can have --I could answer this really easy  at other times, but right now I'm just tired.

The NFL is a billion-dollar empire. Billions!

Instead of being proactive, they are reactive.

Behind closed doors, they'll tell  us, "We're gonna take care of that".

And you know what? They don't.

Mike Webster, my former center,  passed away. A lot of head problems.

Living in a car, living under a  bridge. The NFL take care of him?

No, not at all.

Nowadays, the majority of cases of CTE are  diagnosed in athletes in contact sports,  

or in military personnel who  are exposed to the concussive  

force of extremely large weapons repeatedly.

And in somehow even more depressing  news, the condition is also sometimes  

seen in people who have experienced  significant, ongoing domestic violence.

CTE is basically what happens when you experience  

multiple concussions from which  your brain can’t fully recover.

So all of those disturbances in the  brain actually end up killing neurons.

And over time, that can progress  into full-blown dementia.

I mean, we’re talking atrophied  brain, scarring, tau plaques  

like those seen in Alzheimer’s Disease,  neurofibrillary tangles - the whole shebang.

Essentially, your brain is trying to heal  itself, but in the process causes more damage.

And, like Alzheimer’s Disease  and other kinds of dementia,  

CTE can’t be fully diagnosed in a living person.

It can only be diagnosed after an autopsy of the  

brain uncovers the hallmark  signs of the condition.

But that doesn’t mean that  you won’t see some signs.

Similar to any other kind of dementia,  

CTE has all kinds of impacts on  behavior, memory, and lifestyle.

Often, the first symptoms appear a decade  or so after the repeated head trauma begins.

It can start with symptoms  similar to those of a concussion.

Confusion, dizziness, and headaches.

I get a lot of headaches. Every  morning I have a headache.

It's just a number of things  that a player goes through, man.

Life after football is not fun.

From there, it can start to look more  like stereotypical early dementia.

Memory loss, poor judgment, and erratic behavior.

Just talking to you, I can tell it's a little  bit difficult for you. Do you remember my name?

(laughs) Oh, Sanjay.

You got it.

Oh, right! Okay. Good.

The man on this video is agitated,  

disoriented, and scaring people at  a Washtona County auto parts store.

They have no idea this man is actually this man.

Brian Price, elite NFL tackle for teams like  the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Chicago Bears.

In late stages, patients experience  dementia, sensory processing issues,  

difficulties speaking, movement disorders and,  quite frequently, depression and suicidality.

That last bit is really how CTE  started to reach public awareness  

because there were a disconcerting  number of former football players,  

and other contact sports athletes, whose  families reported that they had exhibited  

concerning behaviors near the end of their  lives, and in some cases, died by suicide.

Initially, the NFL didn’t really want  to believe that CTE was a real problem.

And I mean, who would?

NFL players are at high risk  of repeated head trauma.

Acknowledging the reality of CTE in former  players would be a huge hit to the industry.

But the data kept piling up, including one  study in 2017 where, in an examination of  

the brains of 111 former NFL players,  110 of them showed evidence of CTE.

That’s over 99%.

Now, since these brains were donated for the  express purpose of investigating this question,  

it’s possible - and I would say  probably even likely - that this  

sample set skewed heavily toward  people with concerns about CTE.

But even so, 110 is a lot of football  players with serious neurodegeneration.

Now, you’d think this kind of evidence  would be enough for me to quit football.

And you’re right. This is heavy stuff.

Many of the men who have later been found to have  CTE had extremely difficult ends to their lives,  

struggling with serious mental health  issues and dying at unusually young ages.

Sometimes by their own hand.

But, one could maybe argue that this is a  risk football players are choosing to take on.

Especially nowadays,  

when we have a much better understanding  and awareness of the realities of CTE.

And it’s not like professional football  players are playing for peanuts.

These guys are making pretty big bucks to  slam into each other out there on the field.

So, maybe in their own internal risk-benefit  calculus, it’s worth it to roll the dice on CTE.

But then, back when I was working  on that freelance assignment,  

I read a study that stopped me cold.

Like, I can vividly remember the  horror I felt reading the paper,  

and it pretty much immediately  turned me off of watching football.

And, a content warning here:  this next bit is really heavy,  

with discussion of death and suicidality in kids.

It was a paper published in the journal Brain in  2018, where the researchers examined the brains  

of four teenage athletes who had died within  a few months after experiencing a head injury.

Two of the four teenagers died by suicide.

One of those two kids had  already experienced at least  

10 concussions during his time playing football.

Neither of those two kids had any history  of anxiety, depression, or suicidality.

One of the teens died due to cerebral edema,  which is when your brain fills with fluid,  

increasing the pressure in the skull.

This happened following a  light weight lifting session,  

a couple of weeks after sustaining  his second concussion in two weeks.

The last kid died due to a head  injury during a football game.

It was his fourth head injury in a month.

And all of these kids were 18 or younger.

During the post-mortem  examination of their brains,  

the researchers noted phosphorylated  tau protein in two of the four cases.

Tau protein being one of  the major biomarkers of CTE.

In one case, they were able to  straight-up diagnose early CTE.

And in all four cases, they noted signs  of inflammation and brain cell damage  

that are thought to contribute to CTE over time.

Reading that paper, all I could think about was:

These were kids.

Teenage boys who liked to play football, who went  to high school and maybe hadn’t even voted yet.

Maybe they were in the midst of  their first relationship or they  

were looking ahead to their  plans for after graduation.

And all four of them were dead,  because of repeated head trauma.

Something that, at least in their  cases, was fully preventable.

Did they know what they were getting  into when they decided to play?

So many parents, whose sons want to play  football, they are looking for that device,  

that add-on, that helmet that  will protect their children.

Correct.

Is it out there?

It is not. Absolutely is not.

As a father of a four-year-old son.  

If you were to ask me, "Greg, are you  going to encourage him to play football?"

Absolutely not.

They're even talking about not letting  youth leagues have tackle football at all,  

which I'm an advocate for. I don't  think there's a point for it.

Like my kids, my sons are not gonna play football.

No?

No.

If you have two--three hundred  pound guys running at full speed  

and they collide, or the whiplash effect, one in  five concussions are when your head hits the turf.

There's only so much that helmets can do.

How do you make the game safer? You don't play.

And that was what turned me off of football.

Because professional players making the  choice to play despite the risks is one thing.

But kids dying because of brain  trauma from a game is another.

And frankly, the biggest reason we have  

kids playing football is because  of the popularity of the NFL.

I get that people love football. Not  just watching it, but playing it too.

I played rugby. I know those  contact sports can be super fun.

And I am not passing judgment on people  who still watch and enjoy football.

Again, I’m from Wisconsin.

Being a Packers fan is practically  as important as breathing up there.

But it just didn’t seem worth it to me.

I realized I didn’t want to prop up a  multi-billion dollar entertainment industry  

that I knew was actively leading to serious,  life-long physical harm for its participants.

Especially not when most of those participants  first got involved at such a young age.

Think about it. If you play a sport,  or if you used to play a sport,  

how old were you when you started?

Six? Ten? Fourteen?

Do you think you were fully capable of  understanding all of the risks involved  

in something like football and the  future potential for CTE at that age?

I appreciate that there have been a lot of  efforts to ensure that families and kids  

are aware of the dangers of head injuries  and rules have been changed to discourage  

the most dangerous kinds of behavior  but, these are imperfect solutions.

Contact sports are still contact sports,  even if you enact penalties for unsafe play.

And though concussions  happen in many other sports,  

football is the leader in high  school concussions by a wide margin.

Nowadays, the NFL is much more  open about the risk of CTE,  

and there have been more conversations  about how to prevent it and protect players.

A really key part of that strategy is  to ensure that players who suffer head  

trauma don’t just get back up  and go back out on the field.

Because experiencing two head  injuries back to back is one  

of the things that seems to be the most dangerous.

There have been efforts to help  players feel more comfortable being  

honest about whether or not they’ve  experienced a hard hit to the head.

And rules have been changed to try and discourage  moves that are likely to cause head trauma,  

and to penalize situations where players are  left defenseless and vulnerable to such a hit.

They now also impose hefty fines on teams and  players who don’t follow proper post-injury  

protocols for ensuring the wellbeing of the  player before sending them back on the field.

So, the NFL is trying, and  I’ll give them credit for that.

But even with those changes, I just  can’t really enjoy watching it anymore.

So that’s why I stopped watching football.

And I’m sorry if this has brought up complex  feelings or if now I’ve put you off of it too.

The social experience of watching a football  game is quite something, and I sometimes miss it.

But there are other ways to socialize  with my friends and other sports to watch.

Plus, this way, I don’t have to feel so  bad about the Packers quarterbacks always  

breaking my heart and turning  into problematic dudes.

So, now that my Sunday afternoons are freed  up, I have more time to do other activities.

Like finally learning some computer science!

And I’ve found a great way to  do it, too, thanks to Brilliant.

Brilliant is an online learning  platform for STEM that replaces  

lecture videos with hands-on, interactive lessons.

It’s way more fun to learn with Brilliant than  

it is to try to learn through a  book or a regular online course.

Like, their computer science fundamentals  course involves a chihuahua in a turtleneck!

Now, I’ve always wanted to learn basic coding,  and this course is a great place to start,  

helping me build a foundation for understanding  how computational systems function,  

what algorithms do, and eventually, I’ll even be  able to take their programming in Python course.

And because Brilliant is so  interactive and hands-on,  

I know I’m gaining real skills that  will actually help me learn to code.

I recommend that anyone who’s considering a  career in neuroscience check this resource out,  

because learning some basic  computational and coding skills  

is a great way to bolster your  research and analysis work.

And Brilliant has tons of other topics  and learning paths for you to check out.

Just pick a course you’re  interested in and get started.

They're all designed by award-winning instructors  and built upon the principle of active learning.

So you're gaining useful STEM  knowledge by actually doing it.

To check out Brilliant for yourself,  go to brilliant.org/NeuroTransmissions  

and sign up for free.

And the first 200 people that  go to that link will get 20%  

off the annual Premium  subscription, so don’t wait!

If you want to learn more about how different  kinds of head trauma can affect the brain,  

and especially how injuries to different  brain regions can lead to different kinds of  

neurological issues, you should definitely make  sure you check out our book, Brains Explained.

Available now wherever books are sold.

One of my favorite sections is this spread where  we point out exactly what happens if you damage,  

say, your occipital lobe, or Broca’s area.

So call up your local bookstore today  and see if they’ll order a copy for you.

You can even ask your local library  to add it to their collection!

I promise it’s worth it.

So, did I change how you feel  about professional football?

Where do you stand? Are there  reasons you watch or don’t watch?

Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for watching this  episode of Neuro Transmissions.

Until our next transmission, I’m  Alie Astrocyte. Over and out.