Sports Fans Brains Are Different
Bottom Line: It’s safe to say that the Florida Panthers’ back-to-back championships have created new generations of hockey fans in South Florida. The Panthers are the first professional South Florida sports franchise to win a title since the Miami Heat in 2013, they also created a neat bit of history in the process. Fun fact. South Florida is the only metro with teams who’ve won back-to-back championships in three different major professional sports.
- 1972-73 for the Miami Dolphins
- 2012-13 for the Miami Heat
- 2024-25 for the Florida Panthers
But that’s not the impetus behind this story. Whether you’re a die-hard sports fan or ambivalent about sports, have you ever wondered why that is? A recent study published in Scientific Reports might have the answer. Sports fans brains are different, or perhaps more accurately stated – what happens in the brain of a sports fan when watching a game is different. Without getting into a bunch of scientific speak what researchers found, while studying hockey fans specifically, was that passionate sports fans process the majority of what they were watching in the prefrontal cortex of their brain. That’s the portion of the brain where we assign meaning to things. Casual sports fans showed different patterns of brain activity that weren’t as connected to a sense of purpose or meaning in what they were watching. In other words, they might find it entertaining (at least at times), but don’t have the same level of emotional attachment.
This also helps explain why many people never become sports fans, but more broadly likely explains what’s going on in our heads when we’re particularly passionate about any particular thing.