For a professor of psychology, Mike McBeath has been part of a lot of sports.

But before you ask him for his trading cards, he’s not actually playing these sports. McBeath, a professor at Arizona State University, doesn’t want you to get the wrong idea.

His research looks, at first glance, rather odd, but in reality it all has to do with cognition, action and perception. Basically, how fast we react to the things we see. Which brings us to his latest research: the wave.

The professor has studied sporting events both live and in-person and, via the magic of the Internet, he's delved into the mystery of why contentious sports fans come together to make the stadium an ocean of happy people. He joined The Show to talk about it.