The Control Experiment

I was sipping my morning chai (at noon) and gingerly punching my own thigh. A recent football injury, where an opponent's knee had smashed into the meaty front portion of my thigh  just above the knee had left me sensitive in this region.

Immediately after the incident, I was able to carry on playing. It was after I got back home that the intensity of the pain searing through my legs became apparent. The next 2 days I could hardly walk and the region was swollen. Over time though, the pain became less intense and a visit to the doctor revealed that though the injury was of a painful nature, it was local and not serious - I just had to wait it out and it would be alright.

Now, ever since the injury, I have been eager to get back to playing football or at least jogging, but the past few days have seen a different kind of confusion - am I still injured? Sometimes the pain returns, sometimes I feel I am completely healed. This morning, while punching my own thigh, I noted the slight pain where I had received the blow. At this moment a thought struck me - I am a scientist. I have to truly assess whether I am experiencing injury pain. Think about it - have you ever punched your own thigh softly to know how much it hurts with how hard a punch? So unless there is a really sharp pain for a very soft touch, it is hard to say whether it is a normal pain or an injury-pain. So there was only one way to find out. I punched my other thigh softly in the same place with as near the same intensity as I could manage and felt a similar sting. Still I couldn't discern whether it was of lesser intensity and so I repeated the exercise until I felt ridiculous - here I was, tea in hand, punching my own thighs repeatedly with different forces in different spots.

My conclusion right now is that the lingering effects of the injury are still present and it would be unwise for me to get physically active again soon. And my other conclusion is that the human body (or at least mine) is really really sensitive to even light blows. I don't know how I withstood the blow from the original football incident without fainting.

I have always been an over-enthusiastic sportsperson with not too much talent for any sport nor a very resilient body. It has made for an unfortunate combination and I am thus the veteran of several injuries. They say you live and learn. And I have lived (thankfully) and learnt. My assorted wisdom from my most serious injury (a ligament tear in the knee that kept me limping and in pain for nearly 6 months) is that we have no clue how we do things. I started walking slightly differently to avoid the pain and forgot how I used to walk. I have no idea how my knee used to feel before injury, so now I still don't know whether it feels right. I just go with it in the changed circumstances and there is no way of ever returning truly to the state of my body pre-injury. And this happens with every injury.

When one part of one leg is injured, you will avoid putting your weight on it, so another part of your hip or other knee feels more strain. Then as you slowly heal, you adjust your walking to avoid that other pain and very quickly the "feel" of your own body becomes unrecognisable. You cannot simply say "Ok, the injury is gone, let me go back to how I was doing stuff before the injury". That is simply not possible. Through some indirect, cascading way, your body has a stored memory of each thing that has happened to it. Some incidents are remembered very strongly, others are swept away with time. That one day you had to pretend to limp because you told your class teacher than you missed the previous day due to an ankle-injury. Well now you have lost a bit of your "normal" walk. In fact, there is no normal, I think. It keeps changing but we feel it is constant. I feel I am more aware of this solely because of my numerous injuries. (Once after I sprained my shoulder playing Table Tennis, a great joke I heard at my expense was that my next injury would be from playing chess!)

"A game of two halves" is a common cliche in football, where one team plays really poorly for the first half and then plays really well after the 15 minute break at half-time. In English commentator parlance, this is known as "taking the game by the scruff of the neck". But why does this happen? There are many explanations. You see, the manager yelled at them at half-time so they came back to the field with renewed determination. But also the opposition put in a lot of effort playing so well in the first half that now they're more tired. But also there was a small but crucial tactical change by the manager. And also this one player who was having a really bad game suddenly started playing at his usual level. So what is it? A change in mentality? A change in tactics? The one crucial player? There is no control experiment again. A lot of it is to do with the mind.

One last football analogy - when a team takes the lead, they automatically seem to be more focused on defending only. No matter the coach says "Play as if the score is still 0-0". There is the instinctive desire to defend more. That's why there is a football saying that "You are most vulnerable as soon as you score". It's impossible to play as if you don't know the score when you actually know the score, no matter how hard you try. The act of scoring fundamentally changes how you think and hence who you are on the football field for the rest of the game.

When I was mid-way through my 5 year undergraduate course, my grades started falling. Well, actually they didn't "start" falling. They were alright and then suddenly they fell and also stayed down for a while. I began to think how I can rectify this situation. First step to rectify this is to find out why it is happening. Excellent question!

Well, college is harder than school. But the first few semesters were a breeze. Well, first few semesters are designed to be easy. But also I've lost a bit of interest in the subject and in studying in general. Also, have my initial good grades made me little complacent? The fear factor of exams is completely absent. But it was the same even during the initial semesters, I still studied without any fear or anxiety. What made me study then? Or am I studying the same amount, but that is not enough? Or my mind is getting less sharp? Maybe the first instance of a bad score demoralised me and I'm in a vicious cycle. Ok, let us take a step back. Grades dipped in school also. How did I get out of that cycle?

Of course, at that point of time I didn't think with so much clarity. And I didn't give this so much precise thought, just random questions in the shower or while sleeping. But now I understand something else - no solution from school would ever have helped me. I had changed so much as a person. From a structured school life staying at home to the complete freedom of hostel life. From learning really random things (like how some p-block elements react differently with cold sulphuric acid and hot sulphuric acid) to having courses in Humanities on "rational enquiry" and "scientific communication". These fundamentally altered who I am, how I think and how I do things, so I couldn't fall back to what I was doing before to solve the same problems. Priorities changed, opinions changed.

But maybe I noticed this in this phase because I was thinking about how to tackle one particular challenge after a drastic change in a short period. Maybe we are always changing. Every step alters fundamentally how we walk, every thought alters fundamentally every next thought we will ever get, and before we know it, we are constantly becoming a new person while being in the illusion that our personality is very constant. It is like the ship of thesus situation. Old solutions will not work anymore. Or maybe old attempts at solutions will suddenly become fruitful. Maybe changing the formation is counter-productive at 0-0, but at 1-0, it completely changes the game. But we can never know what works precisely. Because there is no control experiment. There never will be. No football game where only exactly one thing changed at one time. The change in formation changed your attitude along with it. And the opponents' attitude. In football and in life.

And now I will return to trying to re-create and remember how I used to walk when I have never paid attention to how I used to walk. I will return to facing new challenges everyday that I am clueless about how to solve, but 5 years from now I will write a grand blog post on how to think about it and what to learn from it and throw some more gyaan at you!