Through the clarity of vision we call genius.
The human race has raised its gaze from the bog of our beginnings
to a limitless universe of possibility.
Before and after genius, the world is not the same.
Its sleep touches all lives, even other geniuses.
So Isaac Newton once said,
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
We need the giants, the geniuses.
For by standing on their broad shoulders, we are offered a unique vantage point.
Enabling us to gaze far into our future, or look back and learn from our past.
Yet despite their seeming superior powers, they always remain human,
needing our support and affirmation, even as we crave their inspiration.
Perhaps if we have learned anything about the mystery of genius, it is this,
that no matter where we find it, or how it is reached,
it is our most defining and prized characteristic.
For it is the fuel for the engine that both unites us and drives us forward
toward the greatness that is the destiny of our human race.
We now return to the mystery of genius.
When someone can leap so high, but land gracefully,
spin wildly,
that maintain perfect balance,
hit hard,
yet so great delicacy.
We are left awestruck and inspired.
To be able to know how bodies orient themselves in space
and how to manipulate those bodies in very creative ways
and interact with the music requires intelligence not assessed at all
by any standard IQ test.
They seem to defy gravity and the very laws of nature itself.
Is this gift a unique form of genius?
With athletes, there are two things here.
One thing is talent, and some people have exceptional talent
and take their sport and enables them to master the sport much more rapidly
to reach levels of performance much higher than people who have practiced
at the same level or the same amount of time and had the same approaches and so forth.
Genius on the other hand, in the case of athletic,
is something I would consider different.
And that is where someone so dominates the sport that they're in,
that they transform the way that sport is done from then on,
that all of a sudden, everything has been raised at several notches
and completely changed the field.
And that gets back to the original definition of genius
that made a stamp on your field. It's indelible.
It's going to endure forever.
Athletes train, practice, and sacrifice for many years
for a few moments of glory.
What they deliver is genius in motion,
a blend of talent and dedication, nature and nurture.
The genius results from intense focus on a specific task.
Physical performers soar into a unique realm few others ever experience.
How do they get into the zone?
You gotta stop thinking. You gotta get a feel for it.
Try to maybe even speed up your routine a little bit.
Dr. Dan Kirschenbaum is a sports psychologist and author of Mind Matters,
Seven Steps to Smarter Sports Performance.
People talk about the zone as a type of peak performance experience.
It's a state that athletes report about that has been studied pretty carefully
that it feels effortless. It feels easy.
And it seems like a sudden shift for a lot of people.
All of a sudden, I can do what I want in this sport.
And it's a wonderful feeling. It's like a high.
Achieving the zone for an athlete is no different
than achieving success for other forms of genius.
It takes hard work.
The top level, the genius level performers,
have all, you know, played their sport
and have delivered practice going for many, many years,
four hours a day or more.
Tremendous amounts of energy expended in that sport.
Good instruction, firm foundation in every way.
The top level of performance have that consistently.
Does the physical genius have something that the rest of us don't?
One thing the top athletes can do is that they can focus on the task at hand.
They have to be able to take the world around them
and put it away for a minute or two or seconds or two
and then deal with the situation
and just put their entire brain into that situation.
But the brain is only one component of performance, the body, the other.
If you have a very good psychology and mental ability
and all this thing and bad physics,
you're going to be a very happy loser.
So you got to have the physics first.
You cannot have the mental ability that I want to throw the shotput put 75 feet
and you don't have the physics and you're going to do it.
The other way around, it's possible.
You have the physics to do it, you have the physics.
If you don't have the mental ability, we can bring you up.
A good coach, a good sports psychologist can bring you up
but you got to have the physics.
Dr. Gideon Ariel was a pioneer in the field of biomechanics,
the study of the physics of body movement.
He was one of the first to use technology to improve human performance.
Each athlete has its own potential
and this potential is unknown.
Utilizing high technology, you can estimate what this potential is
and we try to achieve this potential.
So if you take an athlete that's 1 to 100 meters, let's say, 10-2,
we find out that there is some discrepancy in the angles, the heap,
or he does use his arm or her arm correctly.
We can make alterations based on these alterations.
We might bring these outlets to 9998.
In the arena of world-class sports, a few inches and fractions of seconds
are often the difference between victory and defeat.
To narrow the gap, Dr. Ariel first videotapes an athlete in performance.
He then makes a digital image of each joint on the athlete's body,
which is then used to create a digital stick figure.
Now after you have the stick figures, you can do the next step
and find different what we call kinematic parameters.
You can find position, velocities, acceleration, forces.
You can calculate all that.
Once the calculations are done, Dr. Ariel makes suggestions
to improve an athlete's performance.
But a fair performance is one thing.
Genius in motion is another.
Dr. Ariel believes that genius is, for the most part, genetic.
You have to be born a great athlete in particular sport.
The biomechanics is number one. That's the essential.
These are the tools. This is the engine.
I mean, you cannot take the small Volkswagen into the Indianapolis 500.
It just won't go. Doesn't have the engine.
So you've got to have the engine.
And when you have the engine, you need drive.
And then you need the mental ability and all the other psychological characteristics
so you will be a happy winner, not a happy loser.
MUSIC
Rarely does genius cross its own boundaries.
Michael motion is the exception.
By combining the grace of a dancer, the scale of an athlete,