When talent vanishes overnight

Think about the thing you’ve practiced more than anything else in the world. Maybe it’s painting. Or writing. Or playing baseball. Now, imagine you wake up one day, and you just can’t do it. You’re not sick. You’re not injured. But suddenly, that one thing is impossible. (Originally published in 2024) Guests: Rick Ankiel, former Major League Baseball star; Sally Akehurst, sports psychologist and a dean at University of Roehampton, London; Steven Frucht, neurologist at NYU Langone For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 1:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  I've been spending a lot of time recently watching playoff baseball. And the main thought I keep having is just, I don't know how these guys do it. The pressure is honestly hard to imagine. It builds and it builds until every single pitch seems like it has the whole season riding on it. Every player has the chance to make that one mistake that's going to make fans blame him for a generation. It's the kind of pressure that throws some of the best players in baseball into prolonged slumps, as if they suddenly just forgot how to play. And it's been making me think about one of our favorite episodes, an episode about baseball, about high stakes performance,

• 2:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  and what makes some people choke.

• 2:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Think about something you love to do, the thing you're best at, the thing you've practiced more than anything else in the world. Maybe it's painting, or writing, or playing the piano. Now imagine you wake up one day and you just can't do it anymore. Everything else is fine. You're not sick, you're not injured, but that one thing is impossible. You can barely even hold the paintbrush, and you have no idea why. It's happened to some of the greatest performers in the world. To gymnasts like Simone Biles.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  It looked like she got almost lost in the air.

• 2:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  Or world champion darts player Eric Bristow.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  A game I love to play, it used to be so easy to do. All of a sudden, I can't even throw a dart.

• 2:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  There was Leon Fleischer, who suddenly stopped being able to play the piano.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  I was in a state of deep funk, deep depression.

• 3:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  There was talk show host Diane Ream.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  I couldn't go on the air. I'd go.

• 3:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  And this kind of thing can last for years, like it did with a pro baseball player I spoke to named Rick Ankiel.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  I didn't understand the magnitude of what was really happening and what would happen to my career after that.

• 3:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  This phenomenon has a lot of names. Whiskey fingers, the monster, the waggles, dartitis, musician's cramp, and maybe most often, the yips. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, what could cause people at the absolute peak of their profession to suddenly, and often permanently, lose their superpowers? The things they can do better than anything else? The things that, in a lot of ways, make them who they are?

• 3:51Speaker 04

  It's one of the loneliest places you ever want to be.

• 3:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  And once you're there, is there anything you can do to make it back?

• 4:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Before he ever got the yips, Rick Ankiel was a phenom.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  You know, I ended up being the number one prospect in the country at the time in high school. I threw nine no hitters, threw three my sophomore, three my junior, three my senior year.

• 4:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  And when he was just 20, he made it to the majors, the youngest player in the league.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  You're watching all your dreams unfold right in front of you.

• 4:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  He wasn't just young, he was dominant. So at the end of his first full season, his manager tapped him to start the biggest game of his life.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  A huge crowd gathering today as this much anticipated division series featuring the Braves, the champions of the National League East, the Cardinals, the champions of the Central.

• 4:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  It was the first game of the playoffs, over 50,000 fans watching to see if Rick was up for it.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  And on the mound with the Cardinals, the young lefty, Rick Ankiel, first game starter in the postseason.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  All eyes are on you. So your walk from the bullpen when you warm up as a pitcher is like your boxer's entrance. As emotionless as possible, body language, looking like, I want to knock these guys out.

• 5:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rick came out throwing crisp and easy, didn't give up a run in the first two innings. But then, in the top of the third.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  I threw a pitch, I threw a fastball in, I overthrew it, cut it pretty good. So, you know, it darted.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  In the dirt, back to the screen, and over to second base goes Greg Maddux on a wild pitch.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  I'm just standing there looking at it and I remember telling myself, man, I just threw a wild pitch.

• 5:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  Everything seemed normal. The announcers weren't particularly phased. Wild pitches happen all the time in baseball. But Rick thought something felt off.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  It just struck me weird. And all of a sudden, it felt like, I don't know, something I never felt before. I didn't really understand what was happening.

• 5:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  For the first time, Rick started hesitating.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  I'm going through the routines and different things to get yourself back on track as a pitcher, and nothing was working.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  Another wild pitch over the head of Hernandez.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  Pitch coach comes out, talks to me, he slowed it down, and then it just started to unravel.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  Wow, to the screen again, it hits off the backstop and right back.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  My muscles and fingers in my arm were, you know, locking up and the ball's just coming out of my hand like a shot put. Like, I didn't even know how to hold a ball.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  The quietness of the crowd is kind of eerie right now.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  It was like I blacked out.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  And then it was like, okay, oh, God, where'd the ball go?

• 6:39Speaker 05

  So there is the fifth wild pitch of the inning.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  It was like, like, everything I had ever done in the past from a pitching standpoint was gone, and I had no idea how to throw a baseball.

• 6:51Speaker 05

  Thirty-five pitches, tortured pitches in the inning for the 21-year-old Ankiel.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  It was almost like my body was trying to protect me from from death in a way. And I want to know why.

• 7:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  So when you think of someone like this baseball player I talked to, Rick Ankiel, who suddenly starts blacking out whenever he releases the ball, is this just like choking under pressure? Is it something different?

• 7:19Speaker 06

  So choking has been defined as a failure to perform under pressure, but you may well still be in control. However, I think when we've spoken to athletes who have experienced yips, they talk about that just loss of control that is almost just a different level. It's a different experience from performing under pressure and not doing well.

• 7:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  This is Sally Akers. She's a sports psychologist in London, and she's done tons of research on the yips.

• 7:49Speaker 06

  Sometimes we hear from athletes, their performance is automatic. They can't even tell you what their performance was like. Like, it's so unconscious that they're just doing it. And to get that level of automaticity, I believe that an athlete truly trusts themselves that they can perform at that level.

• 8:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  And I guess if someone stops trusting themselves, they might stop being so automatic?

• 8:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I guess when I was teaching students around this, I always get them to think about, you know, when you're driving the car and it's so automatic after you've driven for a few years, isn't it? You can be singing along and doing other things when you're driving. But maybe the police come up behind you and suddenly you become very conscious of how you're driving. And it gets all a little bit less automatic and it's then just a bit more jerky. It's not as smooth. It's not as efficient in the way you're performing and processing.

• 8:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  To do anything at this high of a level, you have to be automatic. You can't consciously think about every small motion you're doing, especially when you're doing something as complicated as pitching.

• 8:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  And once you lose that feeling of being automatic, that ability to do something unconsciously, it isn't easy to get it back. It's like waking up in the middle of the night and trying to will yourself back to sleep. The more you think about it, the harder it gets. But that's exactly how Rick tried to attack this problem. And the next game, he was even worse.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Right back where he left off. First pitch, head high to Perez.

• 9:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  It got so bad, the announcers started making fun of him.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  He's got guys in the third row ducking. Bob, you all right down there? You ducking? You feel like you're safe behind that screen?

• 9:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's Hall of Fame broadcaster Joe Buck right there, making fun of a 21-year-old whose life is falling apart in front of 50,000 people.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  He's lost all his mechanics, and he can't get the ball to the point where the catcher can even catch it. He's throwing like a mechanic right now.

• 9:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  This time, Rick's outing ended much quicker. His coach took him out before the first inning was even over.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Well, that's the end of the night for Rick Ankiel.

• 9:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  And pretty soon, the Cardinals' season was over.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  The Mets are going to the World Series.

• 10:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  But in the offseason, Rick got right back up. He wasn't going to let two rough games ruin his career. He had a plan.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  The only thing I knew was to work harder, throw more, try to figure this out.

• 10:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rick went back to basics.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  I'm trying so many different things.

• 10:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  He broke down his throwing mechanics, step by step.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  I'm thinking about keeping my weight back, and the ball's coming out perfect.

• 10:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Went out the next day.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Same thought, I can't throw it anywhere close.

• 10:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  But he didn't get discouraged. He just kept trying something different.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  I'm driving down the street. I see kids playing catch. It's like, let me try that mechanics. It works for him. And I'd go find a field and throw another 100 balls.

• 10:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  But that didn't stick either.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  Same thing, can't throw it anywhere close.

• 10:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  He tried anything he could think of to get back to that feeling of being automatic.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  There was times I would just sing songs, right? Try to distract your brain from, like, taking over.

• 10:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  But nothing was working.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  It was like my body would start to tense up and lock down.

• 11:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  At this point, Rick wasn't throwing in front of 50,000 people anymore. He wasn't facing the kind of pressure he was dealing with on live TV pitching in the playoffs. He was just out there with a couple of guys and he still couldn't throw straight.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  I'm just trying to play catch and I'm having trouble just throwing it to the guy that's 15 feet away from me. And that's when I'm like, you know, I don't know what is going on, but something's not right.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  The issue with it, right, is that it's not as if you have a shoulder injury where I could say, oh, look, I was hurt. That's what happened. You have something going on that only you can feel and nobody can see.

• 11:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  He tried asking his teammates if they'd had experience with the yips, but no one would even say the word. It was like they felt it was some kind of curse you could speak into existence.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  People feel like it can be contagious, you know, nobody wants to talk about it. So people are nervous all the time.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  There's really quite a stigma around the yips and almost a fear that if someone says, oh, maybe you've got the yips, it's almost having this, oh goodness.

• 11:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sally says all that superstition can make players obsess even more.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  That initial experience and the reaction of others will be influencing potentially their dealing with it. And obviously that may well impact their being able to overcome it in future.

• 12:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's kind of what happened with Rick. He started over analyzing every tiny action in his life. It was like he was looking for something to be naturally automatic. Did he normally brush his hair with his left hand? Was that the way he always tied his shoes? He wasn't sure anymore.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  I'd have nightmares in the middle of the night that I couldn't throw strikes. I'd wake up, my heartbeat going 100 miles an hour soaked in sweat. I wake up at three in the morning and I would just, I would get out of bed and stay awake. It's just a dark, nasty, you can't get it to leave your mind.

• 12:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Eventually Rick found a sports psychologist who helped him get past the worst of it. He helped Rick manage his frustration, to not obsess over every single throw, to not blame himself for everything. And he got to the point where he could control it a bit sometimes, but it would always come rushing back.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  There was even a time where I could hear what it felt like was blood draining from my brain down past my ears into my neck and I could feel that feeling coming. And it's like, here we go.

• 13:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rick kept struggling for years. He went down to the minors, worked his way back up. But eventually, he decided he couldn't keep going. So in 2005, almost five years after that first playoff game, he walked into his coach's office.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  And I shut the door and I just said, I can't do this anymore. It took almost everything I had to retire, to quit, to whatever you want to call it, because I still felt like a failure.

• 13:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rick's promising pitching career was over. The yips had claimed another victim. But honestly, for the first time in years, he felt okay. He felt good about it.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  I just felt like this giant weight was taken off my shoulders. You know, it felt like I could breathe.

• 14:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  He drove home, lay down on the couch, got ready for retired life. And then

• 14:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  his phone rang. It was his agent.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  I was like, what in the [bleep] are you talking about?

• 14:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's next.

• 14:24Speaker 01

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• 17:44Speaker 01

  What are the Yips? Are you kidding me, you two? We don't say the Yips.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Out loud, you understand?

• 17:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  After years of struggling with the yips, Rick finally decided to just let it go, move on from baseball, clear his mind.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  So I went home. I didn't even turn on the radio. I didn't turn TV on. I was just sitting on the couch in pure silence. And I was like, the first time I'd felt inner peace in a long time.

• 18:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Until?

• 18:17Speaker 04

  My agent calls, hey, are you okay? Yeah, man, I'm good. I'm great, whatever. And he goes, hey, what do you, um, what do you think about being an outfielder?

• 18:27Speaker 04

  I was like, what in the fuck are you talking about?

• 18:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Going from pitching to playing outfield in the majors might not sound like the hardest thing, but only a tiny handful of players have ever been able to do both at the highest level. So Rick basically laughed at his agent.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  He's like, no, I'm being serious. So I hang up. I walked around. I found a bat in my room and I came back out to the living room and I started swinging it. And I had this, just this feeling took over my whole body. It was an outer body experience, so to speak, but I could see it. I could feel it. I almost felt like I could taste it. I felt like the heavens came down and spoke to me like, um, it was like listening to the best version of amazing grace ever.

• 19:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rick dropped the bat, picked up the phone and called the general manager of the Cardinals, who told him,

• 19:18Speaker 04

  be here tomorrow morning. You're an outfielder. Yes, sir. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Click. It was absurd, but the, the thing is that I believed it.

• 19:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rick started at the bottom of the minors and he hit pretty well, played the field pretty well, too. He slowly worked his way up. And finally, after two and a half years, he was back.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  When I walked into that clubhouse, the hugs, the high fives, you know, everybody in that organization knew what I went through and what it took to get back. And the love that I felt in the clubhouse was surreal.

• 19:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  It wasn't a particularly important game. It was mid-August, dog days of summer for a Cardinals team that had more losses than wins. But the stadium was packed. And as Rick walked out for his first at bat as a major league outfielder, Right fielder Rick Ankiel. He got a standing ovation.

• 20:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Rick was amped. He knew just how big this moment was.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  What is going through his mind right now? His heart has got to just be racing.

• 20:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  He blocked out all the noise and swung.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  First at bat, he pops it up to short, handled by Blum for the first out.

• 20:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Then, his second time up.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  A high strike, looked to be a ball, and Ankiel strikes out, and he's 0 for 2.

• 20:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  But then, his third time up.

• 20:40Speaker 05

  Fans are ready to erupt with a base hit, a homerun, something positive for Rick Ankiel.

• 20:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  He took a huge swing.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  2-2, and Ankiel strikes out, 0 for 3.

• 20:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Finally, in the bottom of the 7th, Rick came up with runners on first and second. And this time...

• 20:57Speaker 05

  Ankiel out to deep right field.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  I'm running to first. I'm looking at the outfielder, I'm looking at the ball, I'm looking at the wall, trying to judge if it's gonna be enough.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  Has a chance to leave the ballpark, gets gone! A 3-run shot for Rick Ankiel, back in the major leagues.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  Remarkable.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  I could feel the ground shaking from the people in St. Louis, the fans going crazy, the explosion of emotions. I don't even, I felt like I floated around the bases on a magic carpet.

• 21:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  And these fans are pretty happy along with him. After so many baseball players before him had been beaten by the Yips, Rick had made it back. But he didn't get there by just working harder and harder, trying to beat the Yips into submission. He found a way around them.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  I knew if I didn't give this a shot, that I was gonna wake up days and be like, "Well, why didn't I try that? Why didn't I try to make it back? I already felt like a failure as it was, and this was a way for redemption."

• 22:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  He stopped trying to figure out an explanation for the Yips, and he just accepted what he didn't understand.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  Up to that point, I wanted to know why. Not everything. Doesn't matter, why that happened? Why that happened? I had to adapt to the fact that sometimes we don't always get to know why. There's not always a why. I think that's a powerful lesson, too.

• 22:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  But as the year went on, something strange started happening. His arm came back to him.

• 22:28Speaker 05

  Here comes that throw from Ankiel. Look at that! On a fly! He threw a strike from about 300 feet away. Watch this. He got him! Another one!

• 22:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  His arm was strong, it was accurate, it was feared. He was that same 20-year-old phenom again. Not thinking anymore, just throwing. All of a sudden, it seemed like his yips were gone.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  But the surprising part is that I couldn't do it from 60 feet. And then I could go out there and probably throw more strikes from 180 feet away than I would be on the mound.

• 23:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  One kind of throw, pitching from 60 feet, Rick couldn't do it. Another kind of throw, from way farther away, back to automatic. Which is a sign that maybe his yips weren't actually a psychological thing. They might have been caused by something else entirely.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  The idea that you can't throw 60 feet, but you can throw 300, that's perfectly reasonable to be physiological. Okay, not psychological. Because they're totally different motor activities.

• 23:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  This is neurologist Steve Frucht. And he told me scientists used to assume that the yips were psychological. But in the last few decades, there's been new research showing that for a small number of patients, there's a physical cause. Like this one study on golfers.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  You can put sensors on their wrists, on their fingers, on their hands, and you can actually show millisecond by millisecond that right before the clubhead hits, certain muscles over-activate. You can actually show that physiologically.

• 24:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  A lot of these golfers twitched the same exact way, with the same muscles, which suggested they had an actual disorder in their nervous system. A disorder called focal dystonia.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Dystonia is a very unusual disorder in which involuntary movements are triggered by a very specific task. In this case, just by this athletic performance. That's not just a performance anxiety.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  That's an actual movement disorder.

• 24:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Movement disorders are neurological conditions that lead to involuntary movements. So things like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, essential tremor. And just like a lot of movement disorders, scientists still don't know exactly what causes focal dystonia. But they do know a couple of basic things about the symptoms. One, these twitches happen in only one specific part of the body. And two, they only happen during a specific action.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  For example, things like writer's cramp, which is a task-specific dystonia. Everything about the hand's OK. But when they pick up a pen, the task of writing induces the dystonia. And for musicians, it's not uncommon for somebody to develop dystonia just on one instrument. So they can't play flute, but saxophone and clarinet? Just fine.

• 25:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  I asked Steve why this kind of thing couldn't just be psychological. And he told me you can actually see signs of dystonia with a functional MRI.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  These are disorders of the way the brain activates, particularly the motor and sensory networks within the brain.

• 25:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  And because this is a physical thing, people with dystonia tend to yip in the same way, whether they're under pressure or not, which might explain why Rick had trouble just playing catch, even when no one was watching.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Now, how could that be psychological? No, come on. This is a physiologic disorder.

• 26:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  A diagnosis like this can be hard for patients to accept. Steve says that people he works with can find it hard to believe they could have some kind of involuntary twitch they don't even feel themselves doing. So they're often convinced that the whole thing is just in their head.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  So what do they do? They work harder and harder. The musician locks the practice room door and says, I'm not coming out of here until I fix this. And usually, that's exactly the wrong thing. It just accelerates the development of the problem.

• 26:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Practice on its own isn't going to make dystonia go away. It might actually make it worse. Medicine or even Botox injections can help stop twitches in some cases. But even when these treatments do work, they just blunt the effects of dystonia. They don't fix the underlying issue in the brain.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Neurology has lots of therapeutics, but it doesn't have a lot of cures. It's just tumbling how little we know about this, really. You know, I think 50 years from now, people will look back derisively like, I can't believe they thought that. I can't believe they were treating it this way. You know, didn't they know this? They're probably going to think that of people who are seeing these patients today.

• 27:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  To actually cure someone with dystonia, scientists would probably need to know what causes it in the first place. And right now, they just don't. But when Steve looks at what scientists still don't know about dystonia, he thinks it's an opportunity to learn something even bigger, something that goes beyond the yips. Just think about what connects tasks like writing, throwing, or even playing music.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  They're all tasks that require teaching, and it's not something that happens overnight. It requires multiple repetitions, probably over many months to years.

• 27:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  These are all things we need to learn. And how we learn them, or even how we learn anything really, is still pretty mysterious. But Steve thinks that by looking into this one failure in the system, the moment when someone stops being able to do something they've practiced their entire life, scientists can get a better understanding of how that learning system works in the first place.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  There isn't another disorder that I know of that gives you a window into talent and cognition and motor learning the way task-specific dystonia can do so well.

• 28:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Dystonia is just one potential cause of the yips. We still don't know whether it was at the root of problems for Rick or with so many other people who've dealt with these issues. But it might be able to help scientists get answers to questions that used to seem unanswerable.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  How come one person will practice the 10,000 hours and only get so far, and another, you know, lapsed them by three years in? Well, what is that, quote, talent? You know, we take it for granted that, of course, in sports, there are those that are more talented than others. But where is that in the brain? And what made that so? Was it inherited? Was it chance? You know, they're profound questions.

• 29:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  Maybe the most surprising thing the yips reveal isn't that people can suddenly stop being able to do the thing they're best at. Maybe it's that they were ever able to do it at all.

• 29:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  This episode was reported and produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. We had editing from Jorge Just and Brian Resnick, with help from Byrd Pinkerton. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from me, fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Meredith Hadenot manages our team, and Manding Nguyen is turning inside out. If you want to hear more about Rick's story, check out his book. It's called The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch That Changed My Life. Thanks to Charles Adler, Debbie Cruz, and Phil Clark for their help on this episode. And if you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at [email protected], and we'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you can, leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. This

• 30:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  podcast and all of Vox is free, in part because of gifts from our readers and listeners. You can go to vox.com/give to give today. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back on Wednesday.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Support for today's episode comes from Delta, official airline of the National Women's Soccer League. Traveling is basically magic. It creates opportunities, it fosters understanding, it expands horizons, it connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential. Those are the values that drive Delta. With up to 5,500 daily Delta and Delta Connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents, Delta is committed to helping you explore your world. Whatever gives you the travel bug, Delta is here to help you get there. Visit delta.com for more info. Delta, wherever the journey takes you.

• 31:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. Your work lives in scattered places, and it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too. Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together. Across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more. And makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Purser, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly, or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time hunting for context. Less time asking, "Wait, what did we decide?" And more time actually shipping with Jira. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.