#shandong

The organisation he had been sent to live among had never declared their intention to him. They had never explained why they repeatedly chose to interrupt his creative thought with debilitating chemicals. Today he had realised why. They wanted full control of intellect. They wanted the ability to inhibit intellectual impulses as and when they decided. This of course was an illegal activity and so their desire was dangerous and obsessive. It was designed because they wanted for only their own people to choose who won and who did not.

He knew intellect wasn’t a mechanism, it was a capacity. If you asked whether “athleticism” had a single process you would discover it didn’t because It’s made of parts like strength, coordination, endurance. Intellect worked in the same way as this. It was a bundle of processes working together.

Recognised Cognitive Processes

Reasoning — drawing logical conclusions from information

Inference — working out what must be true based on clues or patterns

Abstraction — forming general ideas from specific examples

Concept formation — building mental categories and understanding relationships

Judgement — evaluating ideas, arguments, or evidence

Executive function — planning, inhibiting impulses, shifting attention

Metacognition — thinking about your own thinking

Did a tennis player use all of these categorized processes during a match? Was it the silent function of intellect that made or broke champions?

🎾 What makes athletic intellect unique

Athletes rely on fast, embodied cognition. Their intellect is expressed through:

split‑second decision‑making

pattern recognition under pressure

motor planning

spatial awareness

emotional regulation

tactical adaptation

It’s not 'less intellectual' — it’s simply non‑verbal, rapid, and physical.

A tennis player reading a serve at 120 mph was doing the same cognitive work as a chess player reading a position. It was simply processes compressed into milliseconds.

The brain activity is enormous. High‑level sport is one of the most cognitively demanding human activities. Athletes show a form of intellect that is procedural, perceptual, and strategic, not linguistic.

Military ceremony in the cemetery of Weihai, Shandong, China

"L'automne nous embellit les yeux d'un dégradé de couleurs qui reflète l'âme de la saison." 🍂🟡🍁

Pierre Szymaniak

Wester gate of the leased territory of the Jiaozhou Bay area, modern-day Qingdao, Shandong, China