Mike Scott

Born 23 years after the summer of love

[George Sessions @GeorgeSessions]

Genuinely crazy that the two English people to ever achieve this feat were both born in Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone, attended Chingford Secondary School and played for Ridgeway Rovers 🤯

[celtic Jaime 🍀 @celtic_jaime]

Boston Americans are loving the Scotland fans 🇺🇸 🤝 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[Mike Scott @mikescott90]

@mattymaitland11 @GarryCarmody Are you not on holiday?

[Sarmo ⚫️🟠 @sarm0161]

Fucking hell!

[Mike Scott @mikescott90]

Ironic from a league with no jeopardy

[Henry Winter @henrywinter]

World Cup Diary. Day 3. Kansas City sports bar seemed a good place to ask how much US really into the World Cup? Showing baseball, basketball but also S Korea-Czechia. Locals explained that Americans will really get into World Cup in knockouts, it’s about winning, jeopardy 1/2

[spor @sporadica]

if you’re not choosing E you have a certified mental illness

[The Screen Rot Podcast @screenrotpod]

Sunday.

[mufcytp @mufcytp]

🗣️ Brilliant from Dougie Critchley on if Bruno Fernandes should win the PFA Premier League POTS award:

“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think some people say, Man United have had so few games, they haven't played in Europe, but neither did Kante when he won it in 2017.

“Neither did Mahrez. Neither did Luis Suarez when he won it.

“And, he hasn't, of course, won the league this year. But nine of the last 16 PFA Player of the Years haven't won the league.

“I don't think it's actually imperative. And this guy has created the most chances in the entirety of Europe. And the last player to create more in the premier league season was Kevin de Bruyne in 2019/20 and he didn't win the league that year either. And he was named PFA Player of the Year.

“So, I think exceptional performance is just exceptional performance and he has been brilliant.”

[via Sky Sports Football | TikTok]

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Piers Morgan asked Russell Brand which passages were relevant to him when he brought a Bible into court.

[Out of Context Football Manager @nocontextfm1]

A Football Manager player "ruined his life" to prove that Arne Slot is a fraud.

Buckle in folks, this is an incredible read... 😂👏

[Mike Scott @mikescott90]

@BashyMc1 @OnlyBangersEth Beaten by a guy in a wheelchair, should be embarrassed

[. @jtferz]

Are Benfica going to be the first team since the leagues switched to 3 points a win to go undefeated but not win the league?

[Mike Scott @mikescott90]

No bloody idea how Gabriel hasn’t been sent off

[Mike Scott @mikescott90]

@JustTierney

[Pubity @pubity]

One man in Ireland is trying to lower the price of a Guinness across the country.

He used AI to create the "Guinndex", a map that shows the cost of a pint at almost 2000 bars. Now bars are lowering the prices of their pint to try and compete with each other.

[Out of Context Football Manager @nocontextfm1]

Manager sacked for UNDERSPENDING their budget. Never seen that before! 😂

[Mike Scott @mikescott90]

@kirawontmiss Why is your god real but the other 2999 not?

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The research behind this is wild. If you played Pokémon as a kid, you have a tiny region in your brain that exists only because of Pokémon. Not a metaphor. Stanford put people in brain scanners and found it.

The study was published in Nature Human Behavior in 2019. They scanned 11 adults who grew up glued to their Game Boys and 11 who never played. When they showed both groups images of the original 151, the players' brains lit up in one specific spot every time. Same spot across all 11 people. The non-players showed zero response.

That spot is a little fold in the back of your brain that normally processes things like animal shapes and cartoon faces. In the Pokémon players, a chunk of it had been permanently reassigned. Their brains carved out a Pokémon department sometime around age 6 or 7 and just never took it down.

And the reason it ended up in the same place in everyone's brain comes down to the Game Boy itself. The screen was 2.6 inches. Every kid held it at roughly the same distance. So those 151 characters hit the exact same patch of each kid's retina, thousands of times, during the years when the brain is still soft enough to reorganize itself. Where an image hits your retina in childhood is what tells your brain where to build the wiring.

Reading works the same way. Humans invented writing about 5,000 years ago. There's zero evolutionary reason for a brain region dedicated to recognizing words. But every person who learns to read grows one, roughly the size of a dime, in the same part of the brain.

Brain-imaging research from 2018 actually watched it appear in children's heads as they learned their letters. It grew by quietly taking over nearby tissue that wasn't doing much yet. Stanford published a follow-up this year showing this region is way smaller or missing entirely in kids with dyslexia, and that 8 weeks of intense reading practice physically grew it back.

London taxi drivers show the same thing in a completely different part of the brain. Brain scans from a 2000 study found the region that stores mental maps had physically expanded, and the longer they'd been driving, the bigger it got. These drivers spend 3 to 4 years memorizing 25,000 streets before they get licensed. About half wash out.

The common thread is childhood. Harvard researchers trained young monkeys to recognize new shapes and they developed brand-new brain regions in predictable locations. Adult monkeys trained on the same shapes never got those structural changes. The young brain wires itself in a way the adult brain cannot replicate.

If you're wondering whether a Pokémon patch in your brain means you lost something else, no. The region sits alongside your normal visual processing areas, not on top of them. Your brain has hundreds of millions of neurons in that zone alone. The lead author noted that every participant in the study had gone on to earn a PhD.

[Mike Scott @mikescott90]

Cc @venga212

[Callum @Callum_HCAFC]

Lad I work with don’t rate him and I find it nuts

[Adam Schwarz @AdamJSchwarz]

Trump to the UK, 6 March: "We don't need them any longer... We don't need people to join wars after we've already won!"

Trump six days later: Publicly begs the UK to send warships.

[NJ McLean @NJ_McLean]

Thank fuck we wurnae playing the All Blacks...