I posted last year (see "It's a team") about the 2023 movie Nyad starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster. The film is based upon open water swimmer Diana Nyad's 2015 memoir, Find a Way (which I've since had a chance to read) and tells the story of Nyad's multiple attempts in the early 2010's to swim from Cuba to Florida across the treacherous Straits of Florida. Nyad was successful on her fifth attempt at the age of 64 years, which is absolutely incredible!
When she finally made it all the way to Key West, Nyad proudly told the crowd that had gathered at the beach to welcome her and cheer her on, "I got three messages. One is we should never, ever give up. Two is you are never too old to chase your dreams. Three, it looks like a solitary sport, but it's a team."
I am not going to argue that Nyad's accomplishment was a team effort! While my personal and professional accomplishments will never equate to swimming across the Straits of Florida, I will readily admit that everything that I've achieved in life has required a great deal of help from my wife, my family and friends, and my colleagues. However, today I wanted to focus more on Diana Nyad the person. There is no question that her own personal perseverance and resilience played a major role in her success. Elite athletes are just wired differently. The question I have is whether that is nature, nurture, or a combination of both.
The writer Elizabeth Svoboda wrote an article for Discover magazine in 2014, "The Brain Basis of Extraordinary Feats of Will" in which she wrote, "It’s easy to assume that Nyad and other champions of endurance — Olympic medalists, Navy SEALs, marathon dancers — are freaks of nature, capable of feats of will the rest of us could never accomplish. But according to University of California, San Diego, psychiatrist Martin Paulus, who studies how the brain responds to stress, perseverance isn’t just an inborn trait. His work suggests that toughing it out Nyad-style is a specialized skill that’s potentially accessible to all of us — with a little training."
Now THAT caught my attention! One of the reasons that I find science so cool is that every new finding builds upon the last one. Martin Paulus (now head of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research at the University of Tulsa) and his team conducted a number of studies, each building upon the last one in an iterative fashion, before Svoboda was able to make that statement. They first used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that elite military personnel in the U.S. Navy (Navy Sea, Air, Land Forces - SEALs) showed greater activation in the right insular region of the brain and attenuated activation in the left insular region of the brain when shown angry and/or happy emotion faces compared to normal subjects (see "Differential brain activation to angry faces by elite warfighters: Neural processing evidence for enhanced threat detection"). In a follow-up study, when compared to normal subjects, Navy SEALs showed an attenuated activation in the right insular region when exposed to angry emotion signals (see "Altered insula activation in anticipation of changing emotional states: neural mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility in special operations forces personnel").
The next study (see "Subjecting elite athletes to inspiratory breathing load reveals behavioral and neural signatures of optimal performers in extreme environments") studied what is compared the interoceptive response between elite adventure racers and normal subjects. Interoception is what the body does to sense or perceive the internal state or physiological condition of the body and is heavily involved in how we perceive effort and exertion. Elite athletes, for example, could have an attenuated interoceptive response allowing them to push past what others "feel" as maximum effort. Again, Paulus' team performed fMRI while subjects performed a cognitive task requiring focus and attention and while wearing a specially fitted mask that significantly increases the difficulty of breathing (without causing an increase in blood carbon dioxide or oxygen levels). There were three key findings: (1) breathing through a straw (basically) was difficult and very unpleasant and resulted in "profound" activation of the bilateral insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate; (2) adventure racers, compared to normal subjects, showed greater accuracy on the cognitive task with fewer mistakes in spite of having to breathe through a straw; (3) adventure racers showed decreased activation of the right insular cortex during the breathing load. In other words, as predicted, elite athletes actually do show an attenuated interoceptive response, allowing them to push past the pain and discomfort of vigorous exercise or activity that would cause the rest of us to stop.
All of these findings are very interesting and make sense. Maybe elite athletes, like Diana Nyad, and special forces military personnel, like the U.S. Navy SEALs are just wired differently from the rest of us. But here's where things get even more interesting. Paulus' team took things one step further and enrolled more than 200 U.S. Marines in an eight week Mindfulness Based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT) course. Those Marines who participated in MMFT showed an attenuated right insular and anterior cingulate response after a stressful combat training session (see "Modifying resilience mechanisms in at-risk individuals: A controlled study of mindfulness training in Marines preparing for deployment"). Similarly, in yet another follow-up study, using the same inspiratory breathing load used in the Navy SEALs experiments above, Paulus' team were able to show that Marines who had participated in the MMFT course had an attenuated right insular response compared to those who did not participate in the course (see "Mindfulness-based training attenuates insula response to an aversive interoceptive challenge"). In other words, we can be trained to ignore the signals that our bodies generate to tell us that we are exerting maximal effort!
Please don't get too excited. I'm not going to say that with extensive training, any one of us could swim across the Straits of Florida. Diana Nyad probably does have some physiologic tools that she inherited from her parents and that allowed her to be successful at long-distance swimming. However, the suggestion that we can all train ourselves to push beyond our self-perceived limits is an important one. Perhaps there is a little bit of Diana Nyad in all of us.
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