Reading this article on Michael Jordan’s retirement speech and if there really is a way for him to come back to basketball at age 50, I found the part on purposeful hallucination to be the most interesting.

Michael Jordan knows purposeful hallucinations. His Hall of Fame induction speech tells us as much. Jordan might be alone among humans in having essentially zero claim to being an underdog. He had, it seemed, purposefully hallucinated a world in which he had not won everything on the earth, a world in which he actually had meaningful rivals and a world in which he still had a ton to prove. That night he skewered, teased, showed up or taunted just about anyone who ever doubted him.

There isn’t much out there on purposeful hallucination, but I think it’s a more sophisticated term for visualization. Regardless, I’d like to hear more about purposeful hallucination…seems very interesting.

Also mentioned is a New York Times piece on Jury Robic, an ultra-endurance athlete, who is one of the athletes that shows muscles DON’T only perform for a set amount of time.

Maybe we will see MJ at 50 in the NBA. I, for one, would not mind.

Tags: michael jordan, sports, sports psychology

Purposeful Hallucination was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 14:17 and is filed in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.