The Penalty Kick as Ontological Dilemma

How can a goalkeeper react so fast to a penalty kick? Because there’s no such thing as a continuous Self.

During last winter’s World Cup (remember when they held the World Cup in the winter?), the Washington Post ran a piece prosaically titled “Soccer Players React In Milliseconds In Penalty Kicks. How Do They Do That?”

The obvious answer was: Because there is no such thing as a continuous Self.

To say the least, I was very disappointed that the piece never did get around to noting that fact.

Let’s redress that glaring omission now.

Kicking a Ball and Pretending to Be Hurt

The Post piece, part of its Brain Matters strand, was by Richard Sima, a Hopkins- and Harvard-trained PhD in neuroscience who has also written very memorably about the neurological basis for the stickiness of fake news. Sima wrote that “penalty kicks at the professional level strain the limits of human reaction time,” describing the process in physiological terms:

(Goalkeepers) need to defend a goal that is 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall against a kick from just 12 yards away. That kick is also fast — traveling, on average, at 70 mph. From the time the kicker’s foot makes contact, the ball takes about 400 milliseconds to reach the…