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During my decade coaching at Manchester United F.C. it always amazed me just how much athletic skill-sets vary from athlete to athlete, especially at world-class level.  An example is Paul Scholes, one of the players I admired most throughout my time at club.  As the strength and conditioning coach, I can tell you his physical attributes gave him little advantage over his competitors. What he did have, however, was incredible mental abilities.  This is why Sir Alex Ferguson called him: ‘One of the greatest football brains Manchester United has ever had’. What’s the secret to this edge between the ears? Well, here are a number of lessons I’ve learned that help me craft superior athletes.

The Mental Advantage is Critical

The latest sports science studies show that when elite players are compared to sub-elite players, the differences in mental performance are huge.  Reading and responding to game flow, predicting opponents and ball trajectories, and responding rapidly under pressure are key areas where elite performers gain a critical edge in competitive play.  These factors are typically under-trained, yet the brain’s neuroplasticity allows rapid performance gains, with long-lasting effects.  The missing piece of the puzzle is utilizing the right techniques, which is where the latest training technologies like NeuroTracker come in.

As the first ever coach to use this, and other cutting-edge training tools, I’ve never looked back.  Here are some key reasons why cognitive training tools like NeuroTracker can make a difference.

You Can’t Win if you Don’t Know What to Do

In order to excel on the field, awareness is fundamental. One of the biggest challenges is maintaining multi-focal attention on several moving targets at the same time. On the field this involves perceiving players moving around the athlete, identifying movement patterns in and out of vision, and predicting motion trajectories. Only out of all this chaos can winning plays be predicted and seized upon.

Rather than coaching athletes for specific plays or situations, ideally we want to sharpen a player’s cognitive abilities in a way that can be applied to any game situation. It’s a similar idea, for instance, to doing squats to improve sprinting and jumping power.  Attention-based training like NeuroTracker, benefits the all-important decision-making area of the brain.  This is because the speed and quality of action-response choices rely heavily on awareness and reading the scene fluidly.

Cognitive Overload is Key

The added factor here is that when a player’s capacity of attention is overwhelmed by information or psychological pressure, or even fatigue, mental focus breaks down. Momentary attentional lapses often result in critical errors during intense moments of big games.  For this reason, attention needs to be trained at very high levels, so that it becomes robust enough to withstand the pressures of competition.

It’s pretty easy to follow action when there is little movement, but when motion speeds up, the demands on the brain increase dramatically.  Most sports demand following dynamic and rapidly moving scenes, with complex movement patterns.  Top athletes need to not only process this, but to do so at an incredible speed.  One reason why I named my elite training center Seed of Speed.

Training Needs to be Right in the Zone

This is why training needs to condition mental focus at each athlete’s processing speed threshold, otherwise it’s going to be tough to keep on top of the action when it matters most.  I use several training tools to help achieve thresholds, but NeuroTracker is a really nice example of how this can be done. It pushes each athlete’s speed processing limits every session.  The training effects show this actually speeds up brain waves, associated with greater alertness and mental focus.  More technologies should apply this conditioning principle, because in the zone is right where elite athletes need to be each and every time they train.

Vision is All About Knowing Where to Look

Vision dominates about 80% of the vast amount of sensory information we take in every second.  Mastering how to use vision is a skill which separates the good from the best in any team-sport.  The classic difference found between elites and amateurs, is that amateurs over scan for detail, darting their focus point around too much.

Why is this a problem?  It causes blurred vision in-between scan points, so if your eyes are constantly moving from point to point, most of the time the scene is blurred - compromising peripheral awareness.  Elite athletes tend to scan much less frequently, focusing only on pertinent details. This helps them to spread their visual attention mentally to draw in as much information as possible.

But most importantly it allows players to focus for longer, gleaning information missed with a quick glance. For instance, reading body language to predict exactly where a ball is about be kicked before the boot hits the leather. I coached Cristiano Ronaldo on a daily basis during his 5 years rise to FIFA footballer of the year, and this video shows just how big an advantage his grey matter gives him.

Train Vision Early

It’s not intuitive, so vision training is important, especially for younger athletes.  A technique known as a ‘visual pivot’ is something which you anchor your focus point to, while actually paying attention to action in the periphery.  With NeuroTracker it involves tracking multiple moving targets. The task forces the athlete to process complex information across a wide field of view while looking towards the center of the scene.

As teenage brains are still very much developing into fully fledged sports minds, techniques like this start to hone their behavior when it’s most important. When a young athlete is absorbing more critical information and being more aware, they are working out their brains more than their rivals. Over years it adds-up in a very real way – knowing where to be at the right time.

Perception is the Key

This matters more than most might think. For example in a game of soccer, a player typically only has contact with the actual ball for around four minutes. The other hour and a half they are essentially just seeing and moving. And this is what makes magical players – great movement. In most competition situations, winning game-plays are already perceived and decided before they actually happen.

In summary, cognitive training technologies can be great tools for improving athletes’ skillsets in modern day sports. However, based on my experience, I’ve found that the tools that condition combined attention, processing speed, and visual awareness, are the most valuable.

About Mick Clegg

Mick has been a personal coach and trainer for 36 years. He had the amazing privilege to work at Manchester United Football Club from 2000 to 2011. He was the Power Development (Strength & Conditioning) Coach and fitness trainer to many of the world's top football players including Cristiano Ronaldo, David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville, to name a few.

Since leaving Manchester United, Mick has continued to coach other top-class athletes including several world champions in different sports. Learn more about Mick’s work by visiting http://www.seedofspeed.com/

You can also check out one of his previous Experts Corner blogs.

The Science Behind Elite Penalty Kicks

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As we’ve covered in previous blogs, dual-tasks are an excellent method for evolving NeuroTracker training. They bring some key advantages for boosting neurophysical fitness, including training mastery of specific skills under pressure, extending learning to very high-performance levels, and increasing training motivation. Here we’ll cover the key concepts and take a look at how they are being put to use in the professional sports world.

Types of Dual-Tasks

There are 3 different ways that tasks can be blended with NeuroTracker training, and as we will explain here, they test very different abilities.

1. Motor-skill tasks – these are the most popular way to train, involving movement, balance and proprioception abilities. The focus is on the accuracy of coordinated movements or holding certain positions, such as sitting on a bosu ball or standing on a balance board.

Even simple activities can be challenging. This is because of the conscious and unconscious attention involved with the complex signaling through the sensory and central nervous systems to the brain. Here is an example of one of our NeuroTracker team members demonstrating the use of balance skills for soccer performance.

2. Physical tasks – whether it’s cardio or strength-based work, the primary goal is engaging in physical exertion. These exercises can be used to train up a user’s ability to maintain concentration and focus under the effects of fatigue.

In-field research has shown that NeuroTracker can enhance this form of cognitive resilience, and also that short bouts of intense physical stimulation can give the brain a measurable performance boost.

3. Perceptual-cognitive tasks – here the aim is to expand the mental dimension of NeuroTracker training by perceiving, understanding and responding to environmental cues coming in through the senses.

A key benefit of this modality is the domain of situational awareness and decision-making. This is why some elite military groups and professional sports teams use a special NeuroTracker mode where virtual scenes are integrated directly into the NeuroTracker. These require awareness under pressure to make a correct decision such as a tactical action, passing play, or a Go No-Go response. However perceptual-cognitive tasks can literally be as simple as counting down in 3’s, or spelling certain words. These still add a significant challenge to training, as they heavily tax working memory.

Using Progressive Overload

Multiples studies show that dual-task training is made most effective by following two simple rules. First, train-up on just NeuroTracker for 15-30 sessions. This isolated conditioning prepares the brain for more efficient learning. Second, start with simple dual-tasks at the beginning, and steadily progress to more complex tasks over time. Tasks to start with early on can be as simple as just standing, or getting into a sports pose – as pro snowboarder Josh Miller demonstrates in this video.

By effectively tapping into neuroplasticity, this progressive overload approach leads to quicker mastery of complex tasks further down the line. In this video you can see how the approach works over time.

Mixing it Up

As mastery is progressed across a range of different dual-tasks, a great way to keep augmenting learning is to combine different tasks at the same time. A simple example is standing on one leg while catching a ball. Keep in mind that this increases training difficulty exponentially, requiring some level of automaticity to be achieved for each sub-skill.

However, this approach can be used over time to reach extremely high-levels of performance training. One such example here is with neurovision specialist Kyla Demers, who combines puck handling, while on a balance board, with Optic Flow.

Taking a different angle, NeuroTracker trials can also be mixed-up with more intense exercises, jumping in and out in a circuit training fashion. In this video renown NeuroTracker expert Mick Clegg is coaching world-class Taekwondo fighter Aaron Cook, showing just how frenetic this training method can be.

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Training Attentional Switching

Depending on the complexity and type of dual-task, it can be necessary to briefly place total focus on the added task. For example, this might be looking down occasionally when puck handling. This form of rapid switching of attention is a useful real-world skill, but with NeuroTracker, it takes some practice to perfect. The key technique is for the user to predict when they will be comfortable tracking all their targets using working memory – in essence being able to imagine how the balls will continue to move on their current trajectories. Then, they briefly shift their attention away from tracking, to focus intently on the added task. A moment later, when attention is switched back to NeuroTracker, the predicted path of the targets is synchronized again with visual processing.

Atlanta Falcons star Matt Ryan was an early pioneer of this method, using it to perfect his ability to maintain his situational awareness while rapidly calling out a play scene.

Extended Uses of Dual-Task Training

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of dual-tasks is how they reveal an inter-dependency between cognitive and physical abilities. In principle, almost all physical actions are performed via the central nervous system, relying on cognitive processes, even if they are performed automatically or unconsciously.

In one particular NeuroTracker study, this inter-dependency was used to identify individuals who were at heightened risks of ACL injury, specifically due to cognitive demands. This is because motion-tracking data revealed that when performing NeuroTracker (to simulate competition demands), some athletes were susceptible to negative changes in motor-skills.

This effect has been noted the other way around too. In the NHL it was found that the effort involved in executing an important pass or shot, drastically reduces situational awareness. Opponents are aware of this lapse in awareness, and use it to time aggressive tackles. Consequently, a high percentage of injuries and concussions occur precisely at this moment. Therefore, an effective injury prevention approach would be to train-up the combined neurophysical capacities to be able to perform complex motor-skills under pressure, while retaining situational awareness. This is why some teams use NeuroTracker as a performance readiness assessment to help time when it's best to get athletes back into competition after prolonged injuries.

Lastly, a yet to be published pilot study has showed transfer from NeuroTracker training, directly to improved visuo-motor balance. In this case it appears that increasing the efficiency of mental processes can lead to improved physical abilities, and do so surprisingly quickly.

The main take away is that NeuroTracker with dual-tasks can be used in many sophisticated ways, with lots of room to evolve overall neurophysical abilities to very high-levels, while also to addressing skill-specific needs. If you want to find out, then also check out this blog.

5 Ways to Take NeuroTracker to the Next Level

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Injuries are the most feared threat to any athlete’s performance. In today’s relentless and high-stakes professional sports they are also becoming remarkably common. In the last season of the English Premier League, close to $300M was spent just on salaries for players either injured or recovering from surgery. For most people, preventing injuries is not something that comes to mind naturally with cognitive training. However, there are several potentially helpful advantages that neurotechnologies like NeuroTracker have to offer. Here we will look at some of the different ways that this cognitive training and assessment tool can help prevent athletes getting injured on the field.

Awareness on the Field

The effects of training with NeuroTracker expand awareness as well as conditions athletes to maintain awareness under pressure, allowing them to identify threats sooner. This is key in avoiding lapses in attention that leave sports men and women vulnerable to impact-based injuries. Along with this comes an increased level of situational awareness – a critical factor in making more accurate decisions in averting risks.

This can even include predicting tactical situations before they happen. For example, one sports science study showed that 3 hours of distributed NeuroTracker training almost halved the amount of decision-making pass errors for soccer players under the pressure of competitive play. The explanation for such a change is a superior level of awareness of how play opportunities will unfold, allowing strategic predictions of teammates’ and opponents’ movement patterns.

Reading Opponents

Involving similar cognitive abilities, but in a more specific way, NeuroTracker research has shown that training also improves Biological Motion Perception – the ability to read body languages cue to predict a person’s actions.

This skill involves reading and interpreting many body cues simultaneously – such as head rotation, angle of footing, or hip orientation. When put together efficiently, sports science research explains that this skill is pivotal in defining the performance advantages that elite athletes have over their lesser counterparts.

As you can imagine, in almost any team sport, predicting a tackle before it happens provides an excellent defense for avoiding potentially harmful collisions, keeping players one step ahead of the game.

Return-to-Play Timing

Sports related concussions (SRC) are a classic example of the ongoing difficulty associated with being realistically fit to return to play or action. It is well established that concussions greatly increase the risk of future concussions or related injuries. Certainly, when it comes to sports, an athlete’s primary defence on the field is in-between their ears. But with recovery from any kind of serious injury or illness, game rust is known to be a serious challenge at the professional level. Perhaps an athlete is physically fit to return to play, however, mentally they can really struggle to keep up when they have been out of competition for months at a time.

Putting a player back into the heat of the action before they are cognitively ready, significantly increases the risk of them getting re-injured. And in a surprising amount of cases, this ends up putting them right back to square one or worse, with the injury they just recovered from. As sports leagues like the English Premier League are renown for the ever-quickening pace at which competitive matches are evolving, it is becoming increasingly important to be in tip-top form both mentally and physically.

In this light, NeuroTracker training is an active way to build up mental abilities that are most critical to maintaining safety under pressure. It is also an ideal form of training for injured athletes who are unable to train physically, allowing them to keep their mental game-shape razor sharp, regardless of how long they are absent from a team’s line up. An added advantage is that with comparison to normative baselines, an individual’s readiness to perform can be measured, providing a safety net to reduce the risk of engaging in activities that are not yet cognitively equipped to deal with. Many professional teams use this approach to choose optimal timing when to get the pros back into training, and then when to return to the sports stadium.

Boosting Processing Speed

Many impact-based injuries are sustained when there is only a small window of opportunity to react. NeuroTracker training effectively speeds up the mental processes critical to action-response time, with improved measures of processing speed demonstrated in multiple peer reviewed studies.  In fact, qEEG studies show that NeuroTracker training positively increases brainwave speed, boosting the frequency cycles at which neurons fire to relay information throughout the brain.

In effect this is speeding up the rate at which the brain operates, and neuroscientists have evaluated the effects of this increased rate of neuron firing to be similar to taking pharmaceutical drugs like Ritalin. The good news is that there aren’t any of the associated side effects, and the benefits are sustained much longer, even without continued training.

With heightened alertness and mental sharpness, NeuroTracker offers a method for reducing the risk of injuries in high speed action by speeding up the time it takes to be aware of what is happening in the moment, allowing the athlete to react faster.

Cognitive Stamina

Physical fatigue creates injury risks in two ways. Firstly, the muscles and tendons that support joints become weakened and stretched, impairing movement and increasing the susceptibility to tears and even fractured or broken bones. Secondly, and probably more importantly, fatigue taxes the brain by overloading it with internal sensory noise – whenever you are in any kind of pain, it’s basically more difficult to focus on anything.

Sports science research with NeuroTracker has found that this form of training actually builds-up cognitive resilience to physical fatigue. It was found that elite rugby players, already trained-up on NeuroTracker, could maintain almost all of their mental focus even when pushed into a state of exhaustion. In contrast, their equally exhausted but untrained teammates, experienced major drops in their ability to maintain their concentration. This shows that the right kind of training can provide a great buffer against the type of fatigue induced injuries that occur in the later stages of competition.

However mental fatigue itself may also pose a threat when it comes to injury risk. Whether it’s the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup, high-profile tournaments come with an inevitable roller coaster of emotions, anticipations and psychological pressure – all things which can take their toll on mental game-shape.

Studies show that NeuroTracker training boosts standardized measures of sustained attention – a mental resource for maintaining concentration and focus over time.  And similar to a marathon runner building up endurance by running much shorter distances repeatedly over time, just bite-size chunks of regular NeuroTracker training can increase cognitive stamina. In this sense, mental preparation is just as important as doing cardio work to be able to maintain performance levels when fatigued.

Predicting Self-Injury Risk

This may sound surprising, but actually many common sports injuries are self-inflicted due to poor motor mechanics. This can just be bad motor-skill habits that have been learnt over time, just like lifting with your back! However new neuroscience research suggests that demands on our mental focus can also change how accurately and efficiently we move.

As we covered in a previous blog, the demands of NeuroTracker while performing jumping sequences, revealed that certain athletes were at a much higher risk of ACL injury amidst the mental demands of competition.

A follow-up study will see if a cognitive training program will reduce risks for athletes who are particularly susceptible to cognitive related injuries.

Beyond Sports

Injuries are undoubtedly the number one bane of professional sports careers. However, neuroscience is showing that the chances of getting hurt during performance is likely as much to do with brain fitness, as it is to do with physical fitness. As a practical example being used by top athletes today, NeuroTracker offers a robust method of reducing injury risks by increasing the mental abilities that are needed to keep athletes competing day-in, day-out.

Though we’ve focused only on athletes here, the benefits certainly go beyond sports. For example, the biggest single health threat in aging is having a slip, trip or fall. Independent research shows that cognitive training to improve awareness and attention can significantly decrease the occurrences of such injuries, and NeuroTracker is a tool extremely well suited to address this need. Another example is driving safety, with NeuroTracker levels being shown to be predictive of accident risk – with higher scores driving safety across several types of behavior increases.

The main takeaway is that the cognitive dimension of human performance is central to injury prevention, and neuroscience is providing solutions we can all use. If you’d like to read more, then also check out this blog.

The Cognitive Element of Sports Injuries

When you think of the best of the best athletes in the world across different sports, it’s easy to imagine them having very different recipes of success. After all, modern day sports legends like Cristiano Ronaldo, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps and Tom Brady, excel in completely different sporting disciplines. However, new sports science research reveals that there are some surprisingly consistent similarities between athletic super achievers, showing that it’s a lot more than about just sheer talent. Here we’ll reveal 7 of the top traits that help phenomenal sports stars thrive.

1. Supreme Concentration

Truly great athletes have an almost innate ability to get into the zone when they need to. Switching on a mental state of total focus allows them to channel all their ability into competition when it matters most.

This brings superior situational awareness, and perhaps most importantly, it helps them to overcome the odds when on the brink of losing. Supreme concentration is a key factor for getting an edge over rivals. As sports psychologist Dr. Daniel Brown explained, lack of mental focus can be extremely costly.

“People get distracted very easily by things and fail to be in the moment. Life slips through their fingers because they’re too busy on games consoles or social media. To concentrate on being a champion, your mind has to be developed to such an extent that you can really stay very tuned in to what you’re doing.”

2. Commitment to Excellence

Being a perfectionist is often seen to be a flaw, but for elite athletes, an obsession to do whatever it takes to be the best is key ingredient to success. The kind of athletes that achieve sporting success beyond anything that has been achieved before, make it happen through a relentless and lifelong dedication to perfecting their training.

Manchester United’s Mick Clegg coached soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo for 5 years, overseeing his rise from an inexperienced rookie, to FIFA player of the year. In his view, it was Ronaldo’s commitment to excellence which led to his amazing success on the field.

“After every training session out on the pitch, Ronaldo did his own skill development. Running with the ball, running with the ball crossing, running with the ball shooting, and running with the ball passing. The great thing that Ronaldo realized is that to really train successfully, there must be a good percentage of your skill and speed training done with no pressure. He made sure that he first rehearsed each and every new skill on his own.”

3. Desire and Motivation

For those who have reached the top of their game, it was often a long hard road that started out with an enduring passion to make it happen. Somehow, regardless of ups and downs, the lifelong desire never wanes and the motivation to excel becomes almost genetically ingrained.

As NFL football player and coach Vince Lombardi put it, “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.”

4. Goal Setting

Super-elite athletes always have attainment goals beyond what they can currently achieve. Without a tangible vision of what success means, it’s much more difficult to know what needs to be done to get there.

Champions set the bar high and never stop aiming for it. As the infamous Michael Jordan said, “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”

5. Positive Mind-state and Optimism

High-achieving athletes are identified as being optimistic about their own personal growth and untapped potential. This comes with an awareness of areas in which they most need to improve. Sports stars feel an inherent need to work on their deficiencies, but crucially, rather than seeing these as weakness, they are taken as golden opportunities for self-betterment.

Alongside this comes the vision to imagine success against the odds, fueled by a positive instinct of achievability and reward. Soccer god Pelé summed it up eloquently, “The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning.”

6. Confidence and Self-Belief

Some professionals in athletics refer to it as ‘grit’, but what it comes down to is a steely inner strength and an unshakeable faith in numero uno. A surprising bonus on the flipside, is that the greater an athlete’s confidence, the more willing they are to keep trying even when failing.

Michael Jordan was known to be an icon for his belief in learning from failure, because without failure there’s little room for evolving new abilities. According to NFL star Ronnie Lott, “If you can believe it, the mind can achieve it.”

8. High-Quality Relationships and Support

Last but not least, the often-overlooked dimension of sporting excellence is the people behind the scenes. Sports stars build strong relationships with those around them who have their back. This can be the emotional support from friends and family, or the deep comradery from training partners or teammates. As Los Angeles Lakers veteran Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explained, “One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.”

The other more obvious relationship that stands out is a great coach. Eddie Robinson, who was an NFL coach for 56 years, knew just how important great mentorship is, “Leadership, like coaching, is fighting for the hearts and souls of men and getting them to believe in you.”

So there we have it, 7 traits that separate the best from the rest, according to the latest sports science research published in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology. In terms of the most influential of these traits, many experts believe that focus and concentration is the most important characteristic of super-elite athletes. As one of the researchers commented, it’s about “the quality and depth of your concentration”.

If you’d like to learn more about the mental dimension of athletics, then also check out our Expert’s Corner blog by renown sports scientist Dr. Leonard Zaichkowsky.

The Perceptual-Cognitive Domain – a New Paradigm for Sports Performance

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The genesis of a vanguard psychophysics lab in Montreal, the science behind NeuroTracker has flourished like no other neurotechnology. We’re now approaching 10 years since NeuroTracker evolved out of the lab into the real-world. From the science moving on to other breakthroughs, neuroscience research has been on an exploding trajectory, growing at an ever-faster pace into a wide range of human performance domains. In this deep dive blog, we’ll cover a bird’s eye view of both the published, and behind the scenes findings of this training method, as well as why it’s a such a game-changer for human performance.

Sports Performance

With a plethora of professional sports teams using NeuroTracker, there have been some major sport science studies asking the 64-million-dollar question ‘Can cognitive training transfer onto the field?’ Three separate studies have come up positive. Soccer players provided the first compelling evidence, showing that 3 hours of training almost halved the number of passing decision-making errors that players made during competitive play.

The two other studies involved a mix of Olympians, and then a potpourri of elite athletes from completely different sports. Across the board, the training was reported to improve athletic performance. The Olympians were also given a rigorous battery of pre and post optometry assessments, which revealed specific gains in visual capacities, including visual acuity, stereopsis, and spatial contrast sensitivity. In these studies, questionnaire self-assessments by the athletes themselves, almost perfectly matched the objectively assessed performance improvements logged by their coaches.

Dr.Bach, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, emphasized the importance of this evidence for transfer to real-world performance in a Neuronfire podcast.

“…the studies are absolutely rock solid…elite athletes, people who look at fast moving targets for a living, retrain their brain because of neuroplasticity, so that…their cognitive function allows them to see things more quickly.  And that translates into a 15% improvement in passing efficiency. Now in professional sports where a 2% or 3% edge can make the difference, that’s an extraordinary finding.  I’m excited about this. This work basically teaches us…that you can train even the world’s best visual brains to become better, and that translates directly to into performance improvements.”

This is a key reason why US and Canadian Special Forces have adopted NeuroTracker. To give an example of how training the cognitive dimension matters, the US military conducted a study to see if risks associated with Close Quarter Battles could be reduced. These engagements include missions like clearing rooms in unpredictable environments, which even for elite soldiers has extremely high risks. Based on full simulation assessments, NeuroTracker with dual-task training reduced the likelihood of soldiers making critical errors in the midst of high-pressure situations.

Take away – NeuroTracker research is showing that cognitive training is set to take professional sports to a new level, paving the way for other high-performance domains.

Mental Resilience

We all know that when you are exhausted, it’s much more difficult to concentrate. For elite athletes this is a big deal, as it’s often when professionals are in their most fatigued state that competitions are won or lost. To test if mental resilience to such fatigue effects is trainable, international class French rugby players were put to test by sports scientists.

Athletes who had no prior NeuroTracker training were shown to have a dramatic drop in performance from being tested while sitting, to being tested while fatigued on an exercise bike. In contrast, the players who had already been training on NeuroTracker could still perform the task at close to their upper limits, even when they were exhausted. This is relevant because NeuroTracker is a key indicator of situational awareness, which is needed for effective decision-making.

The take-away - even for top athletes, fatigue can seriously impact mental abilities that are critical to performance on the field. Yet, when these abilities are trained-up in a focused way, a form of mental robustness can be achieved quickly.

Rest and Recovery Protocol

The French Federation of Rugby (FFR) discovered that players who were pre-trained on NeuroTracker could have their tracking performance boosted with a short bout of high-intensity exercise. If they first maxed out their cardio ability, then immediately performed NeuroTracker, they would typically score 20% higher than their current speed threshold.

This is concept known as the facilitation effect. In these rugby players, a hit of intense exercise triggered a temporary state of arousal in the brain, getting it into a higher gear. Other NeuroTracker research similarly found that the facilitation effect can be achieved by exposure to the excitement of sports stadium noise, boosting mental focus and learning rate.

However, the interesting part for the FFR, is that they then found no facilitation effect if the athlete was exhausted or physically punished from a match the day before. Overtraining, when not properly recovered, is a major risk factor for injuries in team sports. In fact, knowing when, or when not to train, is a critical yet difficult thing to judge, as it can vary from one athlete to the next. For this reason, the FFR developed a post-match testing protocol using NeuroTracker data to optimize rest and recovery times and reduce injury rates associated with overtraining.

The take away – the brain can be stimulated into overdrive with certain types of arousal states.  NeuroTracker can be used to detect this effect, opening up a new window into neurophysical performance.

Reversing Cognitive Decline

It’s well known that the natural effects of aging can take their toll on mental abilities. This was shown with a study that compared initial baselines of younger and older individuals on NeuroTracker. Otherwise healthy, the elderly participants’ tracking speeds were much lower than the young adults, signifying a form of cognitive decline.

However, it’s also known that the brain’s ability to retain neuroplasticity and neurogenesis can remain spritely until late in life. This was demonstrated when the same older participants undertook a 3-hour training program over several weeks. Somewhat dramatically, their NeuroTracker abilities rose so quickly, that they matched the level of their younger counterparts by the end of the program.

This is significant, because with the simplicity of the NeuroTracker task, there are negligible practice or technique related effects. In effect, improvement is a measure of functional neuroplasticity, with scores representing raw changes in brain state. A physical analogy would be retired people being able to bench press the same as young people after putting in just a few hours of training!

The question then, is does such a change actually transfer to real-world abilities? In this case the answer is yes. Elderly people are known to have significant problems reading human body language at close distances (when it is most difficult). This can impact quality of life in terms of social communication, but more importantly it makes it difficult to predict the actions of others. For example, when walking through a busy shopping mall, it increases the risks of bumping into someone and having a fall.

In a follow-up study, older people of the same age underwent the same training program, but this time their ability to read and predict human movement cues at close distance was assessed, both before and after the NeuroTracker training. The results showed a remarkable recovery in perception, demonstrating clear transfer to a real-world ability. Professor Faubert, the inventor of NeuroTracker, led the study and explained the value of the discovery,

‘’We saw no difference in the plasticity between the elderly and young adults.  Of course, their abilities are much lower to start, but the progression rate was the same.  We’ve shown that that change…actually transfers into something meaningful for them.  When we looked at their ability to read body movement cues, we saw that their ability was improved dramatically.”

Supporting this, a group of Brazilian neuroscientists conducted an in-depth case study of a single elderly person with memory problems. Performing the cognitive training alongside neuropsychological assessments over a 12-month period, the overall findings showed improvements in memory, stress levels, confidence and quality of life.

The take-away – even in healthy aging, the effects of cognitive decline can be significant. However, recovery of lost abilities can also be dramatic, and this can measurably benefit real-life needs.

Learning through Feedback

Neurofeedback is essentially a way to look into what is going on in someone’s brain. Generally speaking, it is best known through EEG, a way to measure electrical activity in the brain. Neurofeedback specialist’s setup an experiment to measure live brainwave activity of people while NeuroTracking, and found distinct differences between being in the zone tracking the targets correctly, and losing them mid-trial.

This led to an innovative pilot study, where each time the signature for losing track of targets was detected, NeuroTracker would re-highlight the targets while still in motion – a kind of ‘hey I’m here!’. This meant there was no need to actually identify the targets at any point, and so training could be more intensive. The result was an even faster learning rate than normal on the task.

That said, just the NeuroTracker answer phase has been shown in a study to be a highly effective learning aid. When people just track and identify, but without finding out if they got the targets correct or not, then scores drop significantly. It turns out that NeuroTracker provides a constant form of functional neurofeedback – an introspective window into how our brains are operating when pushed near their limits. And because it is so frequent, people directly benefit from surprises like ‘Wow, I was really that far off?’ In this sense the research shows that NeuroTracker provides a form of self-awareness training, which people adapt to quickly.

The take-away – even if doing exactly the same NeuroTracker task, feedback amplifies learning through an increase in self-awareness.

Cognitive Assessment

Traditionally speaking, if you wanted to assess how well a person can actually function at a mental level, the standard approach is pen and paper style neuropsychological assessments. As these are very focused on very specific brain functions, there is a recognized need for more robust measures which relate to real-world performance.

For this reason, many independent research groups have been putting NeuroTracker through its paces, to see if it helps reveal how people tick in various situations. In the field of sports, this includes revealing the special traits of world-class athletes, the cognitive effects of hydration for endurance athletes, predicting the competition stats of NBA players, running behavior in team-sports, and profiling up and coming stars in the NFL and NHL Combines.

However, the applications have been far more varied than just sports, including correlating surgery skills and driving safety, to assessing the mental demands for flying a fighter jet and measuring the brain benefits of exercise regimes. Then at a level that applies to pretty much anyone, NeuroTracker scores have been found to correlate with fluid intelligence, standardized cognitive assessments, as well as revealing how attention and stereo perception both develop, and decline, from childhood to old age.

Take away – just tracking balls bouncing around a 3D environment can yield a surprising amount of new knowledge into our how our grey matter really works.

The Power of the Cognitive Dimension

The field of Neuroscience is gaining ever greater momentum, yielding exciting prospects for new understandings our cognitive abilities, and then enhancing them far and wide. As we’ve seen from these research highlights, there is lots to learn in this exciting space. The snowballing research driving NeuroTracker is a great example of just how quickly new knowledge, about how each and every one of us functions between the ears, can benefit us all.

If you’d like to delve a little deeper into NeuroTracker, then you can view NeuroTracker published research here.

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A strong immune can help you stay healthy all year round. Whether it’s performance at work or on the sports field, the effects of illnesses can take their toll for months on end. To keep things simple, here are 9 great nutritional elements you can grab in your local grocery store, to boost your body’s first line of defense.

1. Citrus fruits

Something early man used to synthesize autonomously, vitamin C is synonymous with helping to prevent or fight off a cold. Citrus fruits are usually the go-to supplement for this key vitamin. There is some evidence vitamin C can increase the production of white blood cells - the primary way your body fights infections.

But more than that, they are also packed with supportive vitamins, minerals and enzymes, that help get the nutrients where they need to go. One tip for getting an easy boost of citrus is to squeeze juices into meals.

2. Red bell peppers

Somewhat surprisingly, gram for gram, bell peppers have the most vitamin C content of any fruit or vegetable. For example, red bell peppers contain at least twice as much vitamin C as citrus fruits.

They’re also rich in beta carotene, which has been found to at least make people look healthier due to positive changes in skin color and condition.

3. Broccoli

One of the classic superfoods, this dark green is loaded with vitamins and minerals, while being extremely light on calories. Packed with vitamins A, C, and E, as well as many other antioxidants and fiber, broccoli is one of the health fanatics favorite vegetables.

Eating it raw keeps the maximum nutrition, but steamed is also a good way to keep its vitamins and minerals intact.

4. Garlic

Internationally popular, garlic is found in kitchens all around the globe. Though it’s a great flavor enhancer, the primary benefit is for your health.

Used for many civilizations for centuries to fight infections, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health suggests garlic can also help lower blood pressure and improve the health of your arteries. In terms of immune-boosting properties, it’s significant concentrations of sulfur compounds are known to yield anti-inflammatory effects, as well as immunomodulation.

5. Ginger

Ginger is another classic food that your grandmother might recommend when you’re sick. For good reason too. It can decrease nausea reduce inflammation (think of a sore throat), help with chronic pain, and has some cholesterol-lowering properties.

What’s more, it’s a potent supplement, so it’s easy to add to small amounts to food or drinks, or even into juices, and still reap the rewards.

6. Spinach

As well as having vitamin C, spinach harbors a whole spectrum of antioxidants, and like peppers, it’s a good source of beta carotene.

Sturdy vegetable, light cooking actually helps bring out its vitamin A and other nutrients, so it’s a good addition to winter soups.

7. Yogurt

Not all yogurts are created the same, by any means. Many are lifeless vessels for sugar and artificial colorings. Low calorie, tart tasting versions like Greek yogurts are the one that include live cultures.

These probiotics can supplement the health of your microbiome, which affects how much nutrition you actually absorb from all of your diet. As new forms of life entering your body, they are also thought to stimulate your immune system. Healthy yogurts are also high in vitamin D, which is considered to be the most important single vitamin for all-round health.

8. Turmeric

A potent spice famed in India for its curry boosting flavors, modern science has been finding turmeric to be a powerful health supplement. Traditionally it has been used as an anti-inflammatory for treating conditions such as and rheumatoid arthritis, which are usually at their worst in the winter months.

However recent research shows that with sufficient curcumin levels, the element with gives it intense color, turmeric can help with muscle damage, and potentially even cancer treatment.

9. Poultry

Last but not least, the classic chicken soup is more than just a placebo effect. It’s known to improve the symptoms of colds and is high in vitamin B-6. Among many other things, this vitamin aids in the production of new red blood cells. Chicken stock is also plentiful in nutrients like gelatin and chondroitin, which help with gut health and immunity.

In Korea, chicken soup is famously combined with ginseng in order to maintain health throughout winter.

So there we have it, just a few simple and easy diet tweaks could help you keep in tip-top shape till summer arrives.  Of course, there are lots of other ways to look after your health, so if you want to learn more check out this blog.

7 Blogs to Boost Your Wellness

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Across pro sports, neurovision training is fast-becoming the latest way to get an edge over the competition. A blend of optometry, sports vision training, and brain training, the neurovision approach is a sophisticated new way to enhance athletic performance. As such, specialists from a variety of fields are sprouting up dedicated performance centers all over North America and Europe. This is a fresh bid to raise the game of professional sports. Let’s take a look at why.

Neurovision Concepts

In the same way that an athlete improves sports performance by training the body for strength and endurance, visual skills can be improved and enhanced through a wide range of conditioning techniques.  These are some examples of specific visual functions that vision specialists typically train.

Peripheral Awareness – allows perception of what’s going on at either side of you without turning your head

Dynamic Visual Acuity – enables sustained and clear focus on objects when they are moving quickly

Depth Perception – provides spatial judgments, such as how far away an object or person is

Hand-Eye Coordination – involves the coordinated processing of visual input and motor-skills involved in hand movement

Color Vision – the ability to detect different colors and hues to interpret subtle features in the environment

Contrast Sensitivity – the ability to distinguish between fine increments of light versus dark

Performance training of these skillsets is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach, as the vision skills for optimum athletic performance will vary, depending on the demands of each sport. For example, tennis players need excellent hand-eye coordination, teams sports place large demands on peripheral awareness, and contrast sensitivity is key for skiers, who must perceive their path via snow shadows.

Rather than the traditional approach of simply testing, corrective and training eye functions, the neurovision approach tries to bring the whole perception to action loop together.

Because of this, neurovision coaches use a variety of tools and techniques to test for specific weaknesses and improve performance. These may actually be quite basic – in fact, many of the above can be trained at home.  That said, most vision training specialists largely rely on a battery of hi-tech technologies. These facilitate conditioning of a wide range of specific visual skillsets to advanced levels.

A Growing Movement

In particular, many optometrists are evolving their practices to incorporate neurovision training to serve the increasing demand from professional athletes and teams. An increasing amount of media attention is covering the sports vision movement in elite sports, for example, there has been a lot of press on Stephen Curry’s recipe for success.  Dr. Charles Shidlofsky, a neuro-optometrist who has worked with many pro sports teams for decades, commented on this trend.

“I always knew we could enhance the visual system in a way that could help athletes become better performers. I started studying sports vision performance in baseball 28 years ago when this was a relatively new concept. One of the most interesting things we’re seeing in the last year or so is pro sports teams becoming much more interested in this type of technology to measure and see improvements over time.”

What are the Benefits?

Vision is the primary sense used by athletes and may account for 80% to 90% of the sensory processing demands during sports activity. Many sports science studies show that visual function is directly related to athletic performance.  Enhanced situational awareness, focus flexibility, reading of human movement cues, and tracking of dynamic scenes are some of the abilities that vision specialists aim to bring to competition performance.

Dr. Paul Rollet, a developmental optometrist who specializes in neuro-visual rehabilitation stated,

“It may surprise you to learn that batting percentage, free throw percentage, goals against average and many other measures of athletic performance can all be improved by drawing one’s attention to the basic visual skills that are utilized in the performance of a given sport.”

Connor McDavid, named the best player in the NHL going into the 2017-2018 season by Hockey News, is the captain for the Edmonton Oilers, a team that has invested years of sports vision training into his career. His agent, Jeff Jackson, believes his boosted visual skills gives him a critical edge on the ice.

“Connor sees things happening in front of him and behind him and only needs a glimpse to know what is going to happen two seconds later. Offensively, he sees things developing before anybody else. It is like he has a freaking GPS. He senses what is going on around him.”

How the Pros See

Specifically, research has found that experts across a range of sports not only search more accurately but use fewer searches of the most informative points on display, combined with longer fixations. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘quite eye’ technique. Contrastingly, novices are less informed, even though they scan more points.

Effective visual search techniques utilize experiential knowledge to enable the player to decide information priorities in order to selectively update detail in real-time. The crucial point here is that when fixating on a point for longer, the eyes are still, and the peripheral field of view can now be processed. In this sense, top athletes can narrow in on detail, hold their gaze, and simultaneously pay attention to what’s happening in the periphery. This is a sublime perceptual-cognitive skill that gives them an almost sixth sense of awareness.

Boosting Peripheral Vision Abilities

Visual pivot training teaches the technique for effective vision behavior. However, it does not train up the mental muscle for actually processing visual information.   Sports can deliver overwhelming payloads of information through an athlete’s peripheral field of vision.  The good news is that the brain’s visual capacities can be trained to improve the amount of information which can be processed.   The goal is to increase the brain’s bandwidth for vision so that more information in a sports scene can be perceived and understood at any given moment.

In the case of NeuroTracker’s 3D multiple object tracking, a visual pivot is used to help athletes spread their visual attention to track many things happening at the same time – without moving their eyes. This, with progressive overloading the brain’s visual capacities, quickly builds up the mental skills needed for situational awareness.

Taking it to the Field

To use baseball as an example, here are some of the ways neurovision training could help players on the field.

Pitch Recognition – Batters have about 250 milliseconds to identify the type of pitch being thrown, predict its path into the strike zone and direct the bat to that location. The more efficient batters are in processing this rapid stream of visual information, the more quality at- bats they will have. Multiple object tracking and perceptual-cognitive training could increase baseball players’ ability to identify key visual cues in the pitcher’s wind up and release. This could permit them to accurately predict where and when the pitch will cross the plate and determine whether to swing or not.

Effective Playmaking – Once the ball is in play runners and fielders have to rapidly assess the situation, anticipate what’s next, evaluate their options and execute, often in a split second. When the game is tight the pressure on these athletes can be enormous. Multiple object tracking and perceptual-cognitive training could enhance athletic performance by improving cognitive function, which in turn is a crucial element in making rapid decisions under pressure.

Mental Endurance – Baseball interposes long periods of inactivity with brief episodes of intense action. But the periods of inactivity are only physical. Mentally, the players on the field and at the plate must remain cognitively sharp and in the moment. Multiple object tracking and perceptual-cognitive training could increase cognitive stamina, much like strength and conditioning training increases physical stamina. Multiple object tracking and perceptual-cognitive training could also help improve attention and focus, so players can maintain situational awareness and retain their competitive edge throughout the entire game.

Beyond Elite Athletes

As most athletes know, good situational awareness is critical for making game-winning decisions under pressure. With the example of NeuroTracker, the training gains continue to grow over time, with some NeuroTracker veterans boosting their visual processing capacities by over 400%, after completing hundreds of training sessions. This combination of efficient visual strategy and boosted visual capacities, any athlete has the potential to acquire a sixth sense level of situational awareness like top pros have.

Though most pro sports teams engage in some form of vision training, practitioners don’t just cater to elite athletes. Dr. Shidlofsky highlighted how training can benefit performance at all levels:

“Every athlete can benefit from enhanced visual processing and attention. In our traditional practice we’re taking people with below-normal neuro-visual skills to normal level, but with athletes, we’re actually taking those with normal skills to elite level vision skills, and then on to next-level performance for superior awareness and reaction times.”

The applications aren’t limited to just performance enhancement either, in fact, neurovision therapy is becoming a primary modality for rehabilitation and brain injury therapy. Vision-based assessments also show promise as a method for predicting injury risks.

The bottom-line is that pretty much anyone can benefit from neurovision training. In fact it’s now used by F1 drivers, but of course any driver could make use of better situational awareness to keep them safe on the road. In this sense professional sports is paving the way for everyone to have the opportunities to improve their performance using the latest technologies.

Want to learn more about vision? Then check out our related blog here.

How Good is Your Stereo Vision?

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Used to enhance human performance for elite athletes, military special forces, SWAT teams, Formula 1 teams, and jet pilots, NeuroTracker was described by the New York Times as ‘the most successful brain training in sports’. Maybe you’ve heard about it, but know little about what it actually is, or does. In this NeuroTracker 101 blog we'll cover the gist of what this neurotechnology is all about.

How NeuroTracker works

The NeuroTracker task can be summed up in three words – target, track, and identify.

Target is about focusing on your highlighted balls, and then keeping them clearly in your mind after they change to same as all the other balls.

Track is the main challenge of remembering and following your targets as they move around among all the distractors for 8 seconds.

Identify is simply clicking on your targets when they stop.

Then feedback shows whether or not you successfully identified all your targets. Doing this 20 times completes one NeuroTracker session, which takes around 6 minutes.

This means NeuroTracker is really simple to understand right from the get go. That said, it’s always challenging on each and every session. Firstly, this is because the speed of tracking adapts quickly, to push you at your optimal level in each and every session. Secondly, the number of targets and how long you track them for, will change over a training program, in sync with improving abilities.

To get an idea of the task, you can watch a short 2D demo here.

What Does NeuroTracker Do?

Training on NeuroTracker will build up your high-level cognitive functions, for better mental focus, attention and awareness. This is because it uses a recipe of neuroscience training techniques, that in combination, provide an optimized workout for your brain.

The 3D component is especially important. Firstly, it’s how we often perform in real-world circumstances where situational awareness is important. Everyday activities like driving a car, playing sports, or even walking through a busy shopping mall, all involve processing depth cues in stereo 3D.

Secondly, in the digital age, where much of our time is spent looking at 2D screens like TVs, phones or computer displays, few people get much 3D stimulation. This is a problem when it comes to the brain’s neuroplasticity, which has a use it or lose it approach. NeuroTracker is a way to quickly and intensively stimulate our 3D processing neurons.

Thirdly, because processing 3D requires a lot of neural firepower, it elicits high-level cognitive functions that integrate broader mental abilities like attention, situational awareness and decision-making. This makes it an important ingredient in NeuroTracker’s ability to transfer training benefits to a broad range of performance benefits.

What are the Benefits?

NeuroTracker is essentially a visual training exercise. However, understanding what you see can involve a lot more than simply the light that enters your eyes. For example, even though reading text is a simple visual process, what you interpret from it can be very complex. The NeuroTracker task has been designed in a way that stimulates mental resources both inside and outside of the visual centers of the brain. In this way the training goes beyond vision.

These effects have been shown in studies measuring people’s brainwaves who have been trained on NeuroTracker. The training provided sustained improvements in activity in the frontal regions of the brain, which deal with abilities like decision-making, awareness, problem solving and planning.

Likewise, a range of peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated that around 3 hours of NeuroTracker training transfers to measurable gains in high-level mental abilities, including executive functions, working memory, attention and processing speed. These are abilities that matter most in all areas of human performance, allowing us to concentrate and focus on what we need to, when we need to.

The real test of these benefits has been shown with demonstration of what is known as ‘far transfer’, where performing an abstract form of training, enhances specific real-world abilities. For example a study training soccer players, showed that after just 3 hours of NeuroTracker training, the athletes experienced a major reduction in passing errors during competitive play. From an error rate of 47%, they made just 28% errors – close to half the mistakes they would normally make under pressure.

Out of 1,600 peer reviewed studies, NeuroTracker provided the only evidence of far transfer to sport performance.

Who Can Benefit from NeuroTracker?

Some of the key advantages of this method are the simplicity and accessibility of the task, along with rapid benefits from bite-size training sessions. A plethora of peer-reviewed studies have consistently shown significant gains in high-level cognitive functions with just 20 minutes of training per week. The really good news is that the research reveals that diverse groups of people get similar benefits – from elite athletes and military personal, to elderly people and children with learning difficulties.

This is why the technology is used in over 800 performance and wellness centers worldwide, as well as by companies to improve employee work performance and wellness, and also by financial traders, to enhance their abilities to make better investment decisions.

So hopefully you now a good idea of what this unique form of cognitive training is all about. That said, we’ve only covered the fundamentals in this blog. If you’d like to learn about more advanced uses of NeuroTracker, then check out this Expert’s Corner blog by a veteran practitioner.

Tips for NeuroTracker Trainers – Advanced Programs‍

The idea of doing physical exercise to reap the benefits of becoming fitter and healthy is taken as given. However, few people realize that training our grey matter can be just as important. When it comes to cognitive training, a growing body of research is showing that benefits can be reaped with even small amounts of mental exercise. And with new cognitive technologies and applications becoming available for everyone, there’s never been a better time to start working out your body’s most important organ. Using some examples with NeuroTracker, here we’ll see how flexing some mental muscle can improve 5 different aspects of our everyday lives.

1. Brain Health

Neuroplasticity is a remarkable feature of your brain. In a nutshell, your neurons are built to be able to rapidly adapt to the demands placed on them. By growing new neural networks and speeding up important connections, a mental training program can measurably and sustainably enhance brain activity. It can also trigger the growth of new neurons, even into old age. Research with NeuroTracker has demonstrated that just 3 hours of distributed training sustainably boosts brainwaves in ways that show increased neuroplasticity, alongside clear gains in cognitive abilities.

So, what’s the relevance to brain health? Neuroscience research across many different medical conditions is building up a picture which shows neuroplasticity at the center of cognitive health. Reductions in neuroplasticity are either a causative factor of neurogenerative diseases, or a solution for preventing or mitigating the effects of diseases like dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and mild cognitive impairment.

2. Safer Driving

Though most people take it for granted, the skills required for safe driving are actually very demanding. Firstly, it involves motor-skills to control the car. Secondly, it requires situational awareness to monitor the changing environment and pay attention to the dashboard. And thirdly, driving involves making immediate and potentially life-threatening decisions in emergency situations. For these reasons it has been found that when most drivers are involved in accidents their mental capacities become overwhelmed, causing peripheral vision to collapse, which in turn impairs situational awareness and decision-making.

Three driving studies with NeuroTracker have showed that people with lower scores, and hence lower cognitive abilities, have a significantly increased chance of being in an accident and crashing. The lesson learned, is that sharpening up your mental skills with occasional, but regular training, could have life changing consequences on the road.

3. Sports Performance

Aside from playing sports for the related health benefits, or even just for the fun of it, people who compete also want to win. These days it’s not enough to be just fitter or faster - true game shape involves honing abilities that reside between the ears. This is why there is a revolution going on in professional sports – top players train their brain to gain the advantage over their opponents.

As we’ve seen in NeuroTracker research, even a small amount of perceptual-cognitive training transfers to better decisions on the field. In fact, a soccer study showed that after just 3 hours of 3D multiple object tracking training, soccer players’ experienced a dramatic reduction in passing errors, from an error rate of 47%, down to just 28%. This is a reason why top pro-athletes like Steph Curry, Matt Ryan and Tom Brady are all fans of cognitive training.

Matt Ryan sharpening up his quarter-back skills on NeuroTracker

4. Career Performance

As well as providing wealth, jobs are what take up most of our waking life. For most people, how well we do in our careers is the number one influence on our self-esteem. As we’ve covered previously, the digital revolution is rapidly changing the nature of the workplace into a space where information processing is king.  For these reasons, it makes more sense than ever to invest a little time and effort into developing career performance.

The advantage of training programs like NeuroTracker, is that they enhance high-level cognitive functions. These play a central part in determining how well we can perform in practically any job role. A good example is the US Airforce, who now uses the technology to speed up the training of new recruits, with the aim of making them better pilots throughout their aviation careers. Another example is NeuroStreet, a company which trains-up financial traders to process trading information more efficiently and accurately, increasing their earnings.  Whatever the career, cognitive training can make a tangible difference to daily performance.

5. Mental Wellbeing

A healthier brain is one thing, but most of us would choose a happier brain given the choice. As well as being used by companies to improve the wellbeing of employees at work, on-going research is seeing if NeuroTracker training can alleviate the symptoms and conditions of depression. Problems with wellbeing most commonly stem from stress, anxiety or burnout. These are all connected with reduced neuroplasticity and deficits in high-level cognitive abilities, such as executive functions, working memory, attention and processing speed.

By recovering and building-up these high-level functions, the brain is able to be more robust to stress related influences. It’s expected that such training effects will also reduce the actual symptoms associated with conditions like depression - a sharper brain is a more resilient brain!

Here we’ve covered just 5 of many reasons why cognitive training can have benefits in diverse aspects of our everyday lives. The take-a-way is that spending just a little time each week on some focused neuron firing, will pay dividends for your wellness, and may even help you achieve your goals. If you’d like to learn more, then also check out these blogs.

The Secrets of Healthy Aging

7 Pro Athletes Give Their 2 Cents on NeuroTracker

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The history of sports has seen a gradual transformation in the way athletes train-up their sporting prowess. The days of simply practicing a sport by playing it are long gone. Instead, sports science has carved a new path for athletic development, both in terms of physiological capacities, and cognitive abilitiaes. eSports has been taking a similar approach, but at light speed. And as we will see here, it shows no sign of stopping. Which is why eSports is set to redefine what it actually means to train.

Hyper-Commitment

Ever wondered which careers involve the most training? Most people would think of professional sports, as many types of athletes workout around 5-6 hours per day, 6 days a week. As you’ve probably guessed from this topic, the definitive answer is eSports. Professional cyber athletes typically train 8 hours per day, with top Korean players known to train up to 12-15 hours per day. Though this sounds an insane amount of time, this hyper-commitment to training is being driven by an equally insane level of competition.

Take the FIFA eWorld Cup for example, each year over 20 million players go head-to-head on the virtual pitch, with just a single player being crowned the ultimate champion. By some estimates, as many as one billion gaming fans are vying to become competitive players at some level or another. Prize money and major sponsorship deals are also encouraging eSports athletes to excel.

An Exploding Industry

One of the attractions to pro-gaming is that it can actually be a lucrative career option. Each year more than $100m is dished out in prize money to competitive gamers. Games like Dota 2 are serving out in excess of $20m dollars in a single tournament, and the prize pools are growing year by year. Already set to debut as a real sport in the next Asian Games, the Olympics Games look to be next to put eSports on the global stage.

It’s not just gamers who are getting in on the eSports action either – the industry is seeing a massive rise in spectators. In 2017, the eSports industry made $1.5bn in revenue, with forecasts predicting global revenue to hit $2.3bn by 2022.

Believe it or not, the entertainment side of eSports has a larger viewership than HBO, Netflix and ESPN combined, and is predicted to surpass the NBA and the NFL in popularity.

Professionalized Gaming Teams

The dramatic rise in the popularity and economic value of eSports has attracted the genesis of eSports 'Teams'. This might not sound too exciting, but these are actually major commercial companies dedicated to fostering talent across a multitude of video games.

A single team will typically enter cyber athletes into 200 or more competitions per year. With so many athletes under their wings and the finance to change the nature of the playing field, these companies are totally focused on pushing the boundaries of training. This video gives an insight into how quickly they are transforming the domain of eSports.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyF6ZwtLonM[/embed]

Jason Lake, CEO of the eSports Team ‘compLexity gaming’, defines the historical shift as 3 stage evolution of training.

eSports 1.0 – training solo at home, only meeting teammates at competitions

eSports 2.0 – training and living together in a house with teammates and a coach

eSports 3.0 – training in a dedicated facility with teammates, technologies and coaching staff

The Sports Science Paradigm

In these dedicated centers, the new goal is to train the whole performance system, getting both physically and mentally fit. One factor is simply health, as pro-gamers typically burnout in their early 20’s. Cashing in on this are nutrition brands that are solely dedicated to the eSports market, dubbed as ‘functional food for gamers’.

Another aspect is the use of cutting-edge technologies that traditional athletes use. As well as physiological science, this shift also fits with the growing trend to enhance the mental performance of pro-athletes.

Matching the pace of growth in eSports, this is new performance paradigm is radically changing how gamers can better themselves at a fundamental level. Soon, eSports training centers might well look more like NASA facilities than video gaming dens.

The AI Paradigm

An even more recent and rapid trend is the totally new concept of being trained by software guided by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Learn2Play, a Cyprus-based start-up, is one such group of many springing up around the world. Learn2Play helps competitive gamers develop their skills using AI and machine learning, through online training schools for games with that pull in the biggest tournaments.Even though they are essentially a brand-new company, they've already recruited 1.5 million gamers looking to sharpen their skill-sets.

The key advantage of being able to train remotely, accessing is a potentially vast global market of budding gamers. So even though this revolution of internet-based training is still in its infancy, it is primed for expansion at a staggering exponential rate. Israel, with it's tech focused industries, is even looking to develop a whole new economy around this model.

Super-AI Coaches

Perhaps the most powerful element in the AI paradigm is the truly phenomenal rate at which general AI is being evolved by megalithic companies like Google. As we covered in a separate blog, Google’s Deep Mind project recently moved on from dominating board games like Chess and Go, to whitewashing some of the world’s best players at the complex real-time strategy game Starcraft II.

Rather than feeling humiliated at the hands of the AI defeat, instead, the eSports stars were fascinated at the opportunity to better themselves by playing against superior opponents. The AI also presented the chance to learn new strategies, never before seen in the game.

Beyond Gaming

At a sheer performance level of training, eSports is evolving fast…really, really fast. With just a little forward thinking, it’s easy to envisage this industry redefining how people’s skills and talents are developed in practically any industry… from fighter pilots to surgeons. As we’ve covered before, cyber athletes likely represent the human pinnacle of mental agility, and being intimately fused with technology, they are now spearheading a revolution in performance training.

Watch this space…

The Athletic Dimension of eSports

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The power of mind over matter can lead to some truly remarkable outcomes. Recently we covered epic feats of athletic endurance, but here we’ll look at 3 feats of mental endurance. Each is totally different, and could only be achieved through a bizarre level of dogged determination, self-control and cognitive skill.

11 days of Sleep Deprivation

Under the supervision of Stanford University researchers, high school student Randy Gardner went a continuous 264 hours without sleep. Since it was set in 1965, this record has stood the test of time. The feat of going 11 straight days wide awake was done without the use of any stimulants, such as caffeine.

Attempts at breaking the sleep deprivation records are now officially unrecognized and deemed unethical, due to the severe risks involve. Among other side-effects, there is actually a real risk of dying from the brain simply packing up. Though Randy maintained some abilities, allowing him to play games like pinball to keep him going, by day 3 there were already signs of his motor-skills and speech deteriorating. By day 5 he started to experience hallucinations and paranoia.

Towards the end this young student really started to paid the price, both mentally and physically. His condition on day 11 was recorded as,

“Expressionless appearance, speech slurred and without intonation; had to be encouraged to talk to get him to respond at all. His attention span was very short and his mental abilities were diminished.’’

In this state, he was unable to perform even simple cognitive tests, basically forgetting what he was supposed to be doing just moments into an assessment. It’s not clear why Randy was so motivated to endure sleeplessness for so long, but what is clear, is that neither he or the researchers understood the severe risks involved.

22 Minutes Underwater Without Breathing

Maybe you’ve tried to see how long you can hold your breath underwater. If so, you probably realized that most people struggle to reach even 60 seconds before having to burst up for air. As far as standard benchmarks go for typical human survival limits, the estimate is 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, and 3 minutes without oxygen.

In comes Stig Severinsen, the Danish diver with a mission to defy the laws of survival. No ordinary diver, Stig holds a PhD in medicine, is a yoga expert, and has committed to mastering the art of breathing as a lifelong career. After settings numerous free diving records, in 2012 Stig did the seemingly impossible – he went a full 22 full minutes underwater without any assistance.

Relying on a form of underwater meditation, he entered into a purely calm and serene still of being. In this state he performed what he somewhat ironically calls Breatheology – the skill of perfect conscious breathing. This art is a stunning example of how the mind can be trained to control physical systems which are normally regulated unconsciously. Which is why Stig teaches the approach as a way to enhance wellness.

Through his achievement the fearless Dane earned the title of "The Ultimate Superhuman" on the Discovery Channel program Superhuman Showdown, which led to a documentary about his respiratory prowess: ‘‘Stig Severinsen: The Man Who Doesn’t Breathe’’.

Nil by Mouth for 15 Days

Last but certainly not least, we have the unfathomable phenomena of the man called Prahlad Jani. Prahlad is a self-proclaimed breatharian monk who believes that the goddess Amba sustains him. This 82-year-old living embodiment of Indian mysticism, has perhaps the most humanly unnatural belief imaginable – that he hasn’t need to eat or drink since 1940!

Ordinarily this would be dismissed as pure quackery, however his claims were put to a rigorous test, when in 2010 he was kept under strict medical observation at Sterling Hospital in Ahmedabad, India. He was constantly monitored and tested by a team of 35 researchers from the Indian Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences.

Though already thin to begin with, he was certified as not eating or drinking anything, or receiving intravenous fluids, for 15 straight days. Corroborating this, he also didn’t urinate or pass stools at any point during the stay. If this wasn’t simply weird enough, rather than his organs failing from dehydration, as would be expected after several days without water, his vital signs remained perfectly normal throughout. This wasn’t the first time either, in 2003 he underwent to a similar study lasting 10 days.

It was hoped that studying Prahlad’s resilience to extreme fasting, could help to reveal new scientific discoveries to aid human survival during famine or life-threatening emergencies. Unfortunately though, this monk remains a genuine medical enigma, with the secrets to his supreme abstinence likely embedded deep inside a unique and mysterious mind.

In case you missed, it also check out,

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There has been a lot of research in recent years showing that exercise improves brain health. But just how much exercise is required to get a benefit? Past research has shown that vigorous and regular exercise is clearly associated with boosts in your grey matter. However, the good news is that when it comes to memory, the latest indications are that just small, but regular, amounts of exercise can have positive effects.

Just 10 Minutes Goes a Long Way

A peer-reviewed study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), came to the conclusion that, ‘‘Brief, very light exercise rapidly enhances hippocampal memory function.’’  The findings showed that just ten minutes of very light-intensity exercise appears to increase functional connectivity between the hippocampus, resulting in measurable gains in memory performance. The evidence discovered by a team of twelve neuroscientists, was backed-up with functional MRI scans.

This adds to other research by Harvard Medical School revealing that engaging in a brisk one-hour walk twice weekly, results in an increase the volume of various brain regions. Indirectly, exercise improves mood and sleep, and reduces stress and anxiety. Problems in these areas frequently cause or contribute to cognitive impairment.

No Breaking of Sweat Required

The intensity of exercise in the PNAS study was 30% of VO2 Max, which can be achieved with moderate activities like tai chi, yoga, or even house work which involves physical effort. Combined with a previous study, the research suggests that, surprisingly, mild exercise is likely more beneficial for memory than intense exercise.

This is good news for older people, who are more likely to suffer from memory problems, yet can typically engage in regular but short amounts of light exercise. Light exercise also avoids risks of muscle or joint injuries that can happen with vigorous workouts.

Broader Benefits

In the PNAS study, ten-minutes on an exercise bike had a direct and positive impact on brain scans, increasing the strength of memory-based neuron signals, leading to better performance on a memory task. While it might not seem like much, there is a growing body of evidence that staying physically stagnant, mainly from sitting for too long on a day-to-day basis, actually shortens a person’s lifespan.

As this is not specific to activity in old age, it suggests that short and regular light exercise may be the key to improving overall health for people who work long office hours, or those who are drawn to couch-potato lifestyles.

The Physiological Perks of Exercising

The key benefits of exercise come directly from its ability to reduce insulin resistance, reduce inflammation, and stimulate the release of growth factors—chemicals in the brain that affect the health of brain cells, the growth of new blood vessels in the brain, and even the abundance and survival of new brain cells.

In nutshell, if you find yourself being sedentary for hours on end, it’s a great idea to take short breaks to loosen your limbs. And when it comes to work, a brief change in mindset is known to boost creativity and problem-solving skills – a win-win!

Want to learn more on brain health? Then also check out these blogs.

7 Blogs to Boost Your Wellness

The Secrets of Healthy Aging

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As we’ve reported before, neuroscience has been making strides at tremendous pace in recent years. Here are 5 TED talks that highlight some important steps for the future of your brain health.

You can grow new brain cells. Here’s how

Can we, as adults, grow new neurons? We covered this concept, known as neurogenesis, in a recent blog. In this talk, Neuroscientist Sandrine Thuret says that we can, and she offers research and practical advice on how we can help our brains better perform neurogenesis - improving mood, increasing memory formation and preventing the decline associated with aging along the way.

TED page here

The brain may be able to repair itself – with help

Through treating everything from strokes to car accident traumas, neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch knows the brain's inability to repair itself all too well. But now, she suggests, she and her colleagues may have found the key to neural repair: Doublecortin-positive cells. Similar to stem cells, they are extremely adaptable and, when extracted from a brain, cultured and then re-injected in a lesioned area of the same brain, they can help repair and rebuild it. "With a little help," Bloch says, "the brain may be able to help itself."

TED page here

Growing evidence of brain plasticity

Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich looks at one of the secrets of the brain's incredible power: its ability to actively re-wire itself. He's researching ways to harness the brain's plasticity to enhance our skills and recover lost function.

TED page here

If you’re interested learning more about how to actually boost your brain’s adaptability, then also check out this blog.

7 Ways to Harness Your Neuroplasticity

One more reason to get a good night’s sleep

The brain uses a quarter of the body's entire energy supply, yet only accounts for about two percent of the body's mass. So how does this unique organ receive and, perhaps more importantly, rid itself of vital nutrients? New research suggests it has to do with sleep.

TED page here

If you’d like some key tips on getting better quality shut eye, then also read this blog.

Simple Life Hacks for Great Sleep

A map of the brain

How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up. With these news insights, it could be possible for researchers to start unlocking some of the human brain’s deepest secrets.

TED page here

Well we hope enjoyed at least some of these talks, and if you did, you can get more insights on the science of the brain in this blog.

5 Neuroscience Breakthroughs of 2018

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Not all careers are created equally when it comes to the cognitive dimension. Success in some professions requires stepping up to super-human levels of mental performance. Let’s take a look at three examples that stand-out.

1. Jet Fighter Pilot

Flying a jet is extremely demanding.  Not only does a high degree of skill need to be matched with an enormous amount of information processing from the aircraft’s dashboard and sensory environment, but these have to be managed under high physical stresses. All the while a pilot has to be acutely awareness of everything going on around him or her.

Upping the ante is the fact that jet pilots travel at supersonic speeds. This means that combat situations or weather conditions can change dramatically in a matter of seconds. In such a case, chaotic change can be life threatening, if a pilot is not ready to handle at a mental level.

This brings the critical need to be able to process high loads of information extremely rapidly, and then have the decision-making speed to physically react to a situation on super-short time scales.

The Low-Down

Fighter pilots need to have brains which with exceptional processing speeds, paired with the ability to execute critical decisions with perfect accuracy under extreme physical forces.

2. Professional Team-Sport Athlete

Team-sports like the NFL, NHL, NBA and EPL all have one thing in common - bucket loads of complex sports action. To read the game amid fast, dynamic and often chaotic play, these athletes have to have superb situational awareness skills.

In particular, they have to be able to process information about multiple players moving all around their peripheral field of view, or in-and-out of sight. They have to perceive all this action while also moving and dodging. Sometimes this has to be done while making complex, mathematically-based predictions of ball or puck trajectories, in order to be in the right place at the right time.

On top of this are the demands of maintaining awareness and mental focus under physical exertion, coupled with the need to execute precise motor-skills even when fatigued. Then there is the emotional pressure ingrained in sports, including the psychological pressures from the opposing team’s players or fans.

Lastly, team-sports athletes rely on predicting the actions of both their teammates and opponents. This involves a form of complex mental processing called biological motion perception, where many key body cues are interpreted simultaneously to be able to predict intentions or physical actions.

The Low-Down

Put it altogether and team-sports athletes become the stars of all-round cognitive performance. They need excellent situational awareness, decision-making abilities, physical skill, athleticism, emotional self-control, and fatigue resilience.

3. Formula 1 Driver

Like a fighter pilot, F1 drivers are subjected to some pretty insane physiological demands. This includes excessive g-force effects round bends and during accelerations and deccelerations, sometimes overwhelming levels of heat within the car, and huge amounts of engine noise. However, the greatest challenge for F1 drivers, is that they have to be able to withstand these effects constantly, for up to two hours.

The net effects on their cardiovascular system are actually similar to running a 2-hour marathon. This means intense mental and physical stamina is a perquisite requirement, otherwise fatigue would severely impair driving performance.

When it comes the cognitive dimension, F1 drivers need to apply exquisite levels of physical skills dependent on high-speed sensory processing. This is especially important when near other cars, as the slightest wrong decision or movement inaccuracy, could end their race instantly. This is also why they need lightning quick reactions, with the need to think fast on their feet in any collision threatening encounters.

The Low-Down

F1 drivers represent the far end of the human performance spectrum when it comes to being able maintain an exceptionally high level of mental acuity, while under extreme physical duress.

Using NeuroTracker to Get an Edge

It’s no coincidence that people in each of these careers are using NeuroTracker to help push the limits of their human performance, so to finish, here are a few examples.

If you enjoyed this blog, then also check out,

5 Key Mental Skills of Elite Athletes

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Teachers and parents alike are worried about a rising problem in the classroom – inattention. In our increasingly digital world, education is at risk of being drowned out by a constant stream of electronic information in children’s interconnected lives.

Similar to a concept we covered in a recent blog on employee wellness, technology appears to be both part of the problem and part of the solution. So here we will look at how this seemingly contradictive idea is playing a central role in changing 21st century education.

Technology Infused Lifestyles

Most children in high-school education have never known a world without internet. With the dramatic reduction in the costs of powerful mobile computing devices, alongside ubiquitous connectivity, children are being led down a path where algorithms keep them clicking, scrolling and swiping, from dusk till dawn.

According to the latest research, 95% of teens have access to smartphones. While this brings many advantages, studies show that most teens actually fret that they spend too much time on their phones, yet they feel anxious or upset whenever they are cut off from their devices. Clearly, the information age is presenting young people with developmental challenges that adults never faced.

Attention - the First Causality on the Digital Battlefield

Though the notion of actual technology addiction is still very much a matter of debate, it’s impact on attention in real-world performance is becoming a greater and greater concern. In fact, some research suggests that levels of attention in youths is actually shortening, year on year.

Dr Jim Taylor, author of Raising Generation Tech, explained why the influence of technology can have pivotal consequences over a child’s intellectual development.

“There is a growing body of evidence…that technology, social media, immediate access to the internet and smartphones are hurting kids’ ability to focus. We are fundamentally changing the way kids think and the way their brains develop.”

The key worry is that students are becoming so accustomed to constant stimuli from smartphone apps and digital media, that their attentional bandwidth is saturated when it comes to learning in the classroom. And without attention, learning is an inevitable casualty.

The Importance of Attention in Learning

Neurodevelopmental scientist Domenico Tullo, of the Perceptual-Neuroscience Laboratory at McGill University, explained that attention is a critical intellectual capacity in the classroom. It is essential for students to be able selectively focus and on relevant information, shut out distractions, concentrate on multiple things at once, and to sustain these thought processes for extended periods of time.

Dr. Taylor also believes that without the ability to pay attention to something, students can’t effectively process information. This means that new knowledge does not properly consolidate into memory, which has the consequences of children not be able to interpret, analyze, evaluate information – the bedrock of learning processes.

In this light, attention in the classroom isn’t just a value in itself, but works as the gateway to higher forms of learning, leading to deeper comprehension and independent forms of thinking.

The Challenge for Teachers

A common challenge that teachers are now facing, is very short student attention spans. Teachers typically report that, when talking to the class, they can’t maintain the focus of their students more than 30 seconds at a time.  As a result, many teachers are simply hacking lessons into smaller chunks, which risks losing the opportunity to develop deeper comprehension skills.

Another primary issue, is that children find it more and more exhausting to read complex or long text without regular breaks. It’s thought that a key factor in this problem is the migration from text-based media, to image-heavy digital apps like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.

In a similar vein, the power of search engines like Google, present an under-recognized issue of poor memory development. This is because curiosity, combined with effort to try and work out answers or problems, is a crucial aspect of memory formation. The almost instant capability to pull answers seemingly out of thin air, is bypassing our flexing of these key mental muscles – a process called cognitive off-loading.

Lastly, change is happening too fast to keep up. Teachers were basically never trained to deal with education in a digital world – most gained their professional qualifications amidst thick textbooks and chalkboards. Creating new teacher training programs would likely take years, and with the relentless pace that technology is evolving, they may even become obsolete by the time teachers can put them into practice.

Drawing the Line on Technology

With traditional teaching methods ill-equipped to thrive in the digital world, educators are forming their own strategies to adapt to the challenges. In a bid to defend education against the perils of technology, many have adopted the stricter approach of banning mobile devices in schools, which in some case studies have resulted in improved grades.

Of course this doesn’t help with children being glued to digital devices outside of school, which is why schemes like Apple’s Screen Time – that limit digital media access to only certain times of the day - are being seen as a tag-team tactic between teachers and parents.

Some teachers even begin their classes with mindfulness exercises, in an effort to refocus attention lost outside the classroom. Another strategy is to have students stick to taking notes and writing essays by hand. Versus writing on computers, research shows that pen and paper is more effective when it comes to information retention.

Other initiatives include resisting investing in tech over teachers, and trying to maximize students’ face-to-face interaction with their teachers, which is still considered the most important component in the classroom.

Embracing Technology

In direct contrast to this approach of defending education against technology, there is a rising movement to embrace digital platforms to drive student engagement. At a simpler level, this includes teachers recording small lectures on YouTube to be watched by students from home, then expanded on in the classroom.

More tech-savvy approaches involve specialized learning platforms like Flipgrid, which allows students to share videos of their own recorded presentations. Or, reading platforms like Lexia, which use gamification to motivate kids to reach each next new chapter.

A key advantage to this style of education, is that access to technology plays a big part in closing the gap for students in low-income families. It also fits with the idea that when students graduate to real-world jobs, they will be better equipped for the transition to jobs in the information economy, which very likely, will also be digitally based.

How Should Education Evolve for Digital-Native Students?

Amid all the challenges and solutions, a new concept called Blended Learning is coming to the foreground. Essentially this involves controlling the negative aspects of technology, while leveraging the advantages of it. However, in terms of working out what an effective recipe will look like, there is undoubtedly still a long way to go.

Educational strategist and recent winner of BAIE Trailblazer Award, Dwayne Matthews stated ‘‘That no matter what, we need to empower students to succeed in a world constantly trying to distract them.’’

He believes that because information loads are growing exponentially, consuming more and more attention, students need to actively train their selective attention and sustained attention to gain an educational performance advantage. This will become ever more critical as we move further into the 21st century.

If you’re interested in reading more on the challenges and advantages of technologies, then check out these related blogs.

How Can We Enhance Learning Outcomes?

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Employee wellness is a relatively new term that companies are fast adopting. This is because work is placing ever greater challenges on our mental and physical health. Yet new solutions are emerging to tackle them head-on. Let’s take a look at how wellness at work is set to go through revolutionary transformations.

The Age of Economic Revolutions

Fast approaching 2020, we are now truly living in the digital age. Already, major economies worldwide have seen a dramatic transition from human-based manufacturing to robotics-based production. Consequently, much human labor has moved into the service sectors, but these jobs too have been increasingly swallowed-up by machine or software-based solutions (think about how you interact with your bank!). With the evolution of AI and machine learning technologies, thought leaders predict that even high-flying roles like CEOs and executive management will also soon be under threat.

An Information Driven World

For the majority of people, the digital age has meant that most work is primarily driven through computers and electronic communications, in our increasingly globalized world. This has come hand-in-hand with rising demands to manage more and more information - a commodity which has been growing exponentially over recent decades, and shows no signs of stopping.

All this extra information is creating new levels of cognitive loads in our lives at work. As a result, there is increasing pressure in the workplace, leading to more frequent cases of employee anxiety, burnout, and depression. In fact, 75% of employees are now reporting work as a source of stress. This is directly impacting health and motivation, increasing the likelihood of a person being absent, taking leave, or quitting their job.

Wellbeing – a New Form of Corporate Care

Fortunately, these challenges are being recognized by forward thinking companies. And it turns out that some of the most effective solutions are actually centered around digital wellbeing applications. Phrases like ‘total wellbeing’ and ‘holistic wellness’ are becoming buzz words, with the focus on monitoring health and mental state, then providing appropriate wellness interventions.

The Power of Connectivity

With the power of phone apps and internet connectivity, the lifestyle areas which leading companies have integrated into both the work and home lives of their employees include,

• Nutrition
• Weight management
• Mental well-being
• Activity-based challenges
• Financial well-being
• Healthy habits
• Fitness tracking

With today’s computational arsenal of modern smartphones and smartwatches, everything from heart rate variability to brainwave activity can be monitored like a sports science experiment. Easy to use, and surprisingly affordable, these holistic tech-based solutions are somewhat ironically becoming our first line of defense against the work-related stresses of the digital age.

The Cognitive Dimension of Wellness

Of course, the team at NeuroTracker also believes this type of neurotechnology has a potentially powerful role to play. For one thing, NeuroTracking can robustly increase an employee’s attentional bandwidth, boosting abilities needed for managing multiple streams of information. As the old adage goes, prevent is better than cure! Additionally, research shows that NeuroTracker can serve as a way to detect the effects of stress, burnout, or general challenges to mental health, as well as potentially alleviate the associated symptoms. One reason why US Law Enforcement has started integrating cognitive training into the workplace.

But no matter what the solutions are, we can expect our working world to grow into a digital arms race, with technology juxtaposed - for and against - our continued wellbeing interests.

If you’re interested in reading more on wellbeing, then check out our recent healthy aging blog.

The Secrets of Healthy Aging

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The United States Air Force (USAF) has a major problem to solve – a lack of pilots. Due to the extreme skills needed to fly a fighter jet and the massive costs associated with traditional training, each year there is a major shortage of qualified pilots who can meet the required standards.

For this reason the USAF gave genesis to a new initiative called ‘Pilot Training Next’ (PTN), with the aim of dramatically improving the way new pilots are trained-up. As part of this project, late last year they launched a project called the “Revolutionizing Pilot Training Open Challenge!”

150 Solutions

This allowed commercial companies with emerging technologies to offer solutions to their problem. A massive 150 proposals from leading companies around the world were entered into the competition, with the chance of the top 5 being awarded contracts to work with PTN, as well as receive funding to develop their applications to the needs of the program.

NeuroTracker made it into the top 5, being the only cognitive-based technology integrated into the program. New recruits started the PTN second phase program in January, which lasts six months, and aims to gradate pilots in one third of the time of traditional training.

Commenting on the relevance of training the mental dimension of pilot performance, former Air Force Instructor, Bob O’Malley said, “Employing tools like NeuroTracker will improve pilot cognitive skills allowing the Air Force to produce pilots faster and better”

Redefining Training

PTN is not only about training this year’s pilot more rapidly, it is attempting redefine the way military personnel should be trained. To do this it is integrating a variety of technologies, including virtual and augmented reality, advanced biometrics, artificial intelligence, and data analytics.

With an advanced team of experts and researchers, it is expected that new applications of NeuroTracker will be evolved, as well as deeper analytics on the cognitive profiling of high-level human performance.

You can read a recent press release on the project here. Also look out for an upcoming Expert’s Corner blog on how this program could redefine the way high-skilled career roles are trained.

If you’d like to learn about the ways in which NeuroTracker has been used to assess pilot performance, then check out this blog.

Revealing the Minds of Jet Pilots

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Modern neuroscience is discovering new ways to keep our bodies and minds fit into old age. Here we’ll take a look at why cognitive decline is anything but inevitable, and how mental wellness can be maintained in surprisingly easy ways.

The Effects of Aging

As we grow older, the natural process of aging typically brings cognitive decline as well as physiological changes. The most well-known aspect of mental decline is memory loss. However, high-level cognitive functions are also commonly affected, including aspects of executive functions, working memory, and attention. Even small changes in these areas of mental performance can affect our ability to work, and overall quality of life.

Some aspects of mental performance start to change earlier than others, for example some evidence suggests that somewhat surprisingly, mental processing speed starts to decline from as young as 24 years old. Healthy aging refers to these types of changes when there are no medical conditions involved. However, as most people are aware, growing into old age also increases the risks of developing degenerative brain diseases, some of the most common of which, are Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease. These can seriously affect all areas of quality of life.

The Central Role of Neuroplasticity

The brain’s ability to be plastic provides some powerful defenses to the effects of aging. Remarkably research has found that older people who retain high-levels of neuroplasticity can naturally resist the effects of cognitive decline, even when they have serious, late stage cognitive diseases. This is an important concept known as ‘cognitive reserve’. In principle this means that when certain brain regions become damaged, other regions adapt to take on higher loads, effectively compensating for functional losses.

In fact, modern neuroscience theories suggest that neuroplasticity could be the central protective mechanism against most forms of cognitive decline or diseases. In addition, neurogenesis – the growth of new brain cells, has been found to occur into old age. This means that our brains still have the potential to recover from age-related deficits.

Retaining Neuroplasticity

It is now well established that neuroplasticity can be stimulated and increased by neural activity. Just as we can workout our bodies to keep them in tip-top shape, our brains are all also responsive to mental forms of exercise. This has led to the phrase ‘use it, or lose’, because a lack of mental activity has the reverse effect.

Everyday activities that involve some level of mental challenge are effective ways to encourage our brains to stay both sharp and healthy. This includes remaining socially active, learning new skills or hobbies, and regularly taking on new or novel experiences.  In combination with healthy lifestyles choices like a balanced nutritional diet and exercising, while avoiding sins such as smoking or over-consumption of alcohol, this can result in staying mentally fit, well into old age.

Cognitive Training

With developments in neuroscience in recent years, there are also direct strategies for maintaining cognitive health. Preeminent neuroscientist Professor Faubert, conducted research at the Faubert Lab, which discovered that healthy older people retain a high-level of responsiveness to cognitive training with NeuroTracker. Although the study found that older people have much lower cognitive functioning when compared to young adults, he found that with just 3 hours of distributed training on this 3D multiple object tracking task, they could actually match their younger counterparts.

He also realized that the actual capacity for their brains to adapt and learn at a fundamental level, was equal to healthy young adults. Improvement on NeuroTracker has been established in many research studies to transfer to significantly improved high-level cognitive functions. As such, this research demonstrates that training strategies like NeuroTracker, can offer very effective ways to retain mental agility into the golden years.

Transfer to Real-World Skills

Expanding on this, Professor Faubert conducted another study to investigate if the effects of NeuroTracker training could transfer specifically to a skill called Biological Motion Perception (BMP). In layman’s terms, BMP refers to our capacity to read multiple human movement cues at the same time, to accurately interpret and predict the actions of other people. For example, this is needed to read body language. The results showed a dramatic increase in ability to read body movement at close distances (when it is most difficult), a skill which greatly declines with aging.

More research is on-going to see if such cognitive training programs can improve aspects of quality life and day-to-day skills, such as safe driving, or preventing serious risks such as falling. Overall though, the role of cognitive training shows great promise for boosting neuroplasticity to avoid cognitive regression, and in ways that are safe, affordable, and practical.

If you are interested in learning more about the importance of neuroplasticity, then also checkout these related blogs.

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Great feats athletic endurance can not only inspire us, but sometimes leave us bamboozled as to how they are even possible. We have 5 such epic endurance quests here, all of which are demonstrate prowess in completely different domains of physical performance. Enjoy!

1. The Great California Run

Ultradistance runners seem to be a different breed of human, but some take the biscuit when it comes to insane levels of endurance.

Dean Karnazes is an American ultramarathon runner, and author of Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner. Widely considered to be one of the greatest endurance runners of all time, he won the utterly brutal Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135 miles (217 km) race across Death Valley in 120 °F (49 °C) temperatures.

In 2005 Dean took on his ultimate lifetime challenge - a 350-mile continuous run through Northern California without stopping. Remarkably the run took 80 hours and 44 minutes to complete, requiring three days without sleep. During the single run he wore out 7 pairs of running shoes!‍

2. Conquering the Atlantic

It wasn’t so long ago in the history books that swimming the English Channel amazed people. To take swimming to nth degree, in comes Benoit Lecomte, the French swimmer who dared to attempt swimming a distance that medieval explorers would have found daunting to sail.

Swimming 8 hours per day, the enigmatic Frenchman crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 73 days in 1998. With a small boat alongside to protect from shark attacks, he covered 3,716 miles of ocean, from from Hyannis, Massachusetts to Quiberon, Brittany, France.

Over two decades later, he is now undertaking an assault on the mother of all oceans – the Pacific. If he is successful, the world-record swimming attempt will take him all the way from Tokyo to San Francisco.

3. The Year of Endless Peddling

Most feats of human endurance have taken place in modern times. One particularly notable exception is the legendary cycling Englishman Tommy Godwin. In 1939 this fanatical cyclist set the world cycling record for most miles covered in a year, a stunning record that still stands the test of time. Bizarrely he managed this on a bike primitive to todays, which had only four gears.

To achieve this he had to complete 75,065 miles in the time it takes to move from one birthday to the next. Incredibly this involved averaging over 200 miles per day on the saddle. Godwin also set a record for the fastest completion of 100,000 miles. A man beyond his time, he has been crowned in the Golden Book of Cycling as the greatest long-distance rider in the world, with his indefatigable record heralded by many as one of the greatest athletic achievements ever.

4. The Hardest Free Climb in History

In mid-January, 2014, American climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson made history by summiting Yosemite's El Capitan - a sheer 3,000-foot high climb known as the Dawn Wall. The free climb, made only using their hands and feet, has been called the hardest ever done.

The daring pair completed the feat of strength and stamina between December 28 and January 14, 2015. The Dawn Wall is one of the most difficult big-wall climbs in the world, and with free climbing there are literally no safety nets, so the psychological pressure is immense.

The Dawn Wall, is a documentary following Jorgeson and Caldwell on their free climb of El Capitan, which was released on September 19, 2018.‍

5. The 5 Hour Freeze

Wim Hof is a medical enigma knick-named the ‘Ice Man’, and for good reason too. For unknown reasons he is able to withstand extremely low temperatures for long periods. His record for being completely immersed in ice stands at 1 hour, 52 minutes, and 42 seconds, which would kill most mortals within 10s of minutes.

Hof combined his deep freeze abilities with physical endurance, summiting Mount Kilimanjaro within two days, and almost Mount Everest…wearing only shorts! But perhaps his most impressive feat was completing a marathon above the arctic circle in Finland, in temperatures close to −20 °C (−4 °F). Again dressed in nothing but shorts, Hof finished in 5 hours and 25 minutes.

Sports scientists and biologists alike have discovered he has a unique ability to move blood to his vital organs at will, something akin to Buddhist monks drying cold, wet towels on their back. Still, exactly how and why Hof is able to manipulate his body temperature in extreme cold is still a mystery.

If you enjoyed this topic, then look out for our upcoming blog on extreme mental endurance, or check out this blog.

6 Legends Who Forged Athletics History

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In the latest battle in man versus machine, a new world first has been achieved - AI has beaten top eSports players at their own game. Called Starcraft II, this popular real-time strategy game demands fast-paced decision-making, resource management, and fluid tactical savvy over rock-paper-scissors style combat. Let’s take a look at why this is such a big deal, and how it was achieved.

Emulating Human Intelligence

As we covered in a recent blog, new machine intelligence approaches have been fueling massive leaps in Artificial Intelligence (AI) over just the last few years. The main proving ground to date has the arena of strategy board games like chess and Go.  For this new domain, Google employed a project called Deep Mind, a system which uses artificial neural networks, which are partly modeled on how a human brain processes complex information.

This new form of adaptive AI can both learn from experts, and learn independently by playing simulations of itself. Though it doesn’t require supercomputers, it does need lots of practice, which is vastly accelerated with today’s modern processor technologies.  However, the results with chess and Go have been stunning, with Deep Mind AI creating new levels of strategic play far superior to the best human players in the world.

The Challenge of Real-Time Strategy Games

Board games have relatively simple rules while having complexity through many potential iterations of play outcomes. Computer games like Starcraft II are much more complex because they have very large amounts of play options, and very early on in each game. They can also involve endless amounts of units, which are far less constricted by the rules of play that pawns and Go pieces are limited to. Lastly, there are many different types of units with multiple abilities, which can be combined in myriads of ways.

These factors present formidable challenges for AI, because they border into the realms of creativity – traditionally a human trait. However, one of the unique facets of Deep Mind is its ability to learn experimentally by trial and error…to the Nth degree.

The Showdown

With a new specialized AI called AlphaStar, the Google team behind Deep Mind felt confident enough to unleash their Starcraft II based AI against top pro eSports players of the game.

Taking on two opponents in a testing grounds environment, the results were shocking. In 10 straight wins it beat both players 5-0. This wasn’t actually one AI that beat them - it was 5 different evolutions of the AI, each with their own very distinct play styles.

A Meta-Human Edge

The defeats were quite a remarkable accomplishment, given the complexity of the game and the level of performance that eSports stars attain. These players are famed for being able to perform hundreds of actions per minute, with lightning fast reactions. Strangely enough, AlphaStar’s prowess wasn’t actually in this presumably machine-suited domain. In fact, it had slower reactions and less actions per minute, but it was superior in efficiency in terms of the actual actions it executed.

Where it excelled most was in the smartness and creativity of play, and it was the sheer diversity of never before seen play strategies, that bamboozled the eSports stars.

How Deep Mind Did It

On human timescales AlphaStar’s ability seemed to come out of nowhere. On machine timescales it took quite a while. The first AI version was crafted on studying massive amounts of games of pro players. This got it to the level of a lower league professional player, but still a long way to go to match the top professionals.

The next phase was the real AI magic. This allowed AlphaStar to take the emulated knowledge, experiment with it, and learn from itself. In one week of play practice in the ‘AlphaStar League’, it simulated approximately 200 years of gameplay against various iterations of itself.

Out of its self-learning algorithms emerged 5 very different playstyles with superior winning outcomes. The Deep Mind team dubbed these, somewhat ominously, as ‘agents’.

Shock and Awe

It was these AI’s that were faced-off with the pro players. In the second match, an eSports star named PLO, was somewhat dumbfounded over the fact that the AI’s strategy in the second match was completely different to the first.

This led commentators frequently referred to the AI as ‘scary’ or ‘terrifying’. At some moments play would look exactly like a top pro player, but then suddenly it could morph into brand new strategies – coordinating multiple flanking attacks and gaining total map control.

Threat or Opportunity?

Rather than being miffed at being hopelessly outgunned by these early Deep Mind forays into eSports, the defeated pro players were intrigued about the new strategies and insights into how the meta-game could evolve.

Rather than AI vs Human, for eSports these agents could be also used to train against the toughest opponents, to push their skill development. Furthermore, with specialized development, they could be used to discover effective counter strategies against top tier opponents with predictable play styles.

As we’ve written about previously, major eSports teams are now taking on the latest sports science technologies like NeuroTracker, to hone their skills. With big money going into player development, it could be that the eSports stars of tomorrow, are trained up by AI with neural networks customized to their learning needs.

If you’re interesting in the unfolding power of AI, then also check out this blog.

AI Super-minds are Coming

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Professional sports teams are engaged in a profiling arms race to discover elite talent before their competitors. And for good reason too – high caliber athletes are pretty much worth their weight in gold these days. In sport of soccer, even transfer fees for players can reach in excess of $200m, with Barcelona F.C. paying $260m for Neymar last year. With those kinds of numbers, a hell of a lot of money can be made if talent can be spotted before it matures. For instance, during Cristiano Ronaldo’s rise to FIFA player of the year, Manchester United made a cool transfer profit of almost $130m.

For this reason professional sports teams in big leagues like the NFL, NHL and NBA are focusing on ever-younger age groups to find diamonds in the rough. Now it’s common to scout 8 to 9 year-old players with a view to being offered permanent places in their academies. Like in the movie Moneyball, where sabermetrics are used to discover hidden talents, sports team are always looking for new and more powerful scouting methods.  But how do you predict the next sports star like Matt Ryan years in advance? Let’s take a look at some of the news ways clubs are seeking out athletic potential.

The Latest Profiling Methods

The traditional approach to spotting talent is full-time scouts who travel where ever needed to find players with promise. But this is now being augmented by all sorts of sports science-based assessments and the latest technologies. Computer vision, machine learning and other forms of AI algorithms are being used to analyze player performance statistics, game videos, and sensor data to identify talent that coaches and scouts might miss. Even motion tracking technology is used to measure factors such as acceleration and deceleration metrics during shuttle sprints.

In the NBA a technology called SportVU uses sophisticated statistical analysis of data collected from huge cameras that hang from the rafters in basketball arenas. These collect information at a rate of 25 times per second, following every movement of each player on the court, as well as the ball. The numbers are crunched on everything from how far each player has traveled during a game, to how many opportunities at a rebound they had.

Scouting Talent En Masse

The NFL and NHL combines are a hotbed for the latest tests to glean insights into potential for sporting excellence. This includes detailed medical assessments and batteries of physiological tests.  However, in the past teams at the combines have also profiled athletes using NeuroTracker, in order to discover elite potential at the cognitive level.

As well as being used for recruitment, data from these baselines are being tracked against career progress from youth to adult age. In a few years’, and for the first time ever, it should provide insights into just how much advantage can be gained from a mental edge.

Similarly, US Soccer have collaborated with NeuroTracker and the Faubert Lab to assess thousands of young professional players. At annual assessments, hundreds of athletes are baselined per day, and the results are cross referenced with all other tests and demographic data.

In a large research project spanning years, data mining techniques are being utilized to discover what matters most during talent development. Early findings have indicated strong correlations between US Soccer scouts’ measure of potential talent, and NeuroTracker scores.

Predicting NBA Performance

In a unique study with players in the NBA team Orlando Magic, NeuroTracker baselines were compared with on-court performance statistics over the course of a season. NeuroTracker scores turned to be a great predictor of which players performed better on the court, particularly for measures like assist ratios and turnovers. They also correlated with different levels of play for different court positions.

When it comes to competition, it’s traditionally difficult to predict when professional athletes have good days or bad days.  This research showed that cognitive profiling could be a surprisingly powerful tool for deciding who makes the team each game, to improve a team’s performance over a season.

Discovering Talent in the Brain

In a landmark study published in Nature Scientific Reports, hundreds of pro and collegiate team-sport athletes underwent 15 NeuroTracker sessions. The goal was to see if athletic success was a key determinant of mental performance.

The investigation showed that elite athletes in top NHL, EPL and Rugby teams, have superior cognitive capacities for perceiving complex and dynamic scenes.  However, more importantly, it discovered for the first time that they also have much greater neuroplasticity, learning at far faster rates than amateurs.

The collegiate athletes also had brains better geared to adapting to the mental demands of NeuroTracker than non-athlete university students. These findings provide strong evidence that high-level cognitive abilities are a critical factor in determining an athlete’s career potential – separating the best from the rest.

The Hidden Secrets of Injury Risk

Talent is incredibly important in sports, however it becomes meaningless in the face of serious injuries, which can wreck careers.  For example, across one year in the EPL, injuries cost clubs over $200m in wages alone. In some revealing research by renown neuroscientist Professor Faubert of the University of Montreal, NeuroTracker was put to the test at predicting ACL injury risk.

Athletes from different sports performed a jump sequence, with detailed motion tracking recording their specific leg and hip kinematics. When the athletes performed the same jumps while doing NeuroTracker, subtle movement changes occurred in more than half of the participants. These revealed an increased susceptibility to ACL strain, which are common self-inflicted injuries caused by sub-optimal motor-skills.

This study used NeuroTracker to simulate the cognitive loads of sports performance. In this way it provided a kind of injury radar, differentiating those who can maintain movement skills under pressure, and those that can’t. Though specific to ACL injury, the same principle could apply to any sports injuries related to motor-skills influenced by cognitive loads.

Profiling Between the Ears

As we have seen, neuroscience is now merging with sports science at an accelerating rate. It already looks to provide invaluable insights into the inherent abilities of sports stars, with much more to come. The good news is that technologies like NeuroTracker are affordable and practical to use for teams, coaches and athletes alike. We can expect to see cognitive assessments leading the way when it comes to predicting sports stars of the future.

If you’re interested into reading more on some of the NeuroTracker studies mentioned here, then also check out this blog.

3 Ways NeuroTracker Assesses Sports Performance

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Though a breath typically happens within a couple of seconds, research has found that brain activity changes depending on the type of breathing you do. Neuroscientists at Northwestern Medicine revealed that breathing rhythm can be used to improve human brain activity to enhance judgment and memory recall.

Breathing Affects State of Mind

In prior research, epilepsy patients were focused on due to having electrodes implanted into their brains, in preparation for surgical treatment. This provided unique insights into subjects’ mental states via live electro-physiological data.

The data reflected some acute changes in brain functions during each split second of breathing. The activity occurs in brain areas where emotions, memory, and smells are processed.

What Was Studied

This led the scientists to test how thought patterns may change during breathing when subjects were given an emotion recognition task. The task involved looking at brief images of people’s faces that were either fearful or surprised, and reacting as quickly as possible to identify which was which.

The fearful images were intended to activate the amygdala, an area of the brain which processes emotions, particularly if they are fear related – such as in a fight or flight situation.

What Was Found

When fearful faces were shown during inhalation, they were recognized much more quickly, compared to when breathing out or seeing faces expressing surprise. More specifically, these improved reactions were more pronounced when breathing through the nose, rather than the mouth. In short, inward nasal breaths boosted reactions to fearful stimuli.

Another version of the experiment also showed enhanced memory function under the same conditions, with nasal inhalation again having the strongest effects. Together these point to rapid fluctuations in the functioning of the amygdala (emotional) and hippocampus (memory) regions of the brain. Lead author of the study, Christina Zelano, summarized the results.

“One of the major findings in this study is that there is a dramatic difference in brain activity in the amygdala and hippocampus during inhalation compared with exhalation. When you breathe in, we discovered you are stimulating neurons in the olfactory cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus, all across the limbic system.”

Rapid Breathing May Provide an Edge

When breathing rhythm speeds up, inhalation requires more effort and so it lasts longer in proportion to exhaling. This means in a panicked or excited state, memory and emotional processing receives more of a boost, which could provide an evolved advantage in dangerous situations.

In sports when there is a lot of pressure and cognitive skills are often pushed, it may also help athletes perform in the zone, even shortening reaction times. Some sports psychologists and coaches stress the importance of breathing to optimize performance, which this research may support.

Relevance in Meditation

The effects could also help explain the focus on taking long breaths during meditation and yoga, which is a fundamental principle at the core of their practice. As Zelano explained, “When you inhale, you are in a sense synchronizing brain oscillations across the limbic network”.

The simple takeaway is that conscious control of taking longer inward breaths through the nose, then breathing out quickly, may optimize mental performance.

If you found this topic intriguing, then check out our blog on yoga.

7 Evidence-Based Benefits of Yoga

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If you’ve aware of the ‘microbiome’, then you may have heard biologists and neuroscientists saying that it’s a big deal for our health. In fact, more and more research is showing that the trillions of bacteria in your gut affects you in myriads of ways.

These bacteria are known to regulate the immune system, process nutrients, deal with infection and manufacture neurochemicals that influence brain function. It’s now believed your microbiome could even be guiding your behavior and mental status. So let’s take a look at how the evolving science on the gut, might just change the way you look after your cognitive health.

Mind Body Connection

Not many years ago it would have been considered pseudoscience to suggest that the tiny creatures dwelling in our intestines could influence our minds. However, in the past few years, research is discovering strong evidence that the gut’s microorganisms influence mental health and cognition as a two-way system. Christopher Lowry, PhD, an associate professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder, explained,

"We refer to this as the microbiome-gut-brain axis, and that axis is bidirectional. The microbiome and gut are communicating with the brain, and conversely the brain is communicating with the gut and the microbiome."

In terms of the mechanisms, it has been found that gut bacteria can generate metabolites that circulate through blood into the brain. These can influence neural function and inflammation (a key factor in many brain diseases) via immune-signaling molecules and cells, transported up from the body.

For this reason neuroscientists are dubbing the gut as a ‘second brain’. Collectively weighing around the same amount as your brain, the two are intricately networked through the enteric nervous system – a neural superhighway that directly exchanges neurotransmitters. The catch is that these influences are complex and vary from person to person, so there is still a lot to learn.

The Relationship with Neuropsychiatric Disorders

Human studies have demonstrated that people with gastrointestinal disorders, such as IBS, have much greater chances of having psychological problems such as bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder.

One study at Chongqing Medical University in China found that patients with major depressive disorder had gut bacteria that were significantly different from healthy people. In an interesting twist to show a causal relationship, the researchers actually took fecal matter from the depressed patients and transplanted them into mice (fecal-microbial transplant). Remarkably the mice showed more depression and anxiety than mice that receiving transplants from healthy people.

A New Avenue of Therapy

As more gets revealed on the true power of the the gut-brain connection, scientists are now looking to actually treat psychiatric and behavioral disorders with dietary changes or ‘psychobiotic supplements’. The goal is to improve the balance in our microbiome composition in ways that improve our health at a more holistic level.

In initial studies with aging rats, treating the gut with probiotic transplants over three weeks reduced inflammation in the brain, and boosted memory functions. Other scientists are conducting research to find specific psychobiotics that could improve mental health in humans in specific ways. So far these have been showing promise, but there is still a long way to go before they could become off-the-shelf products.

That said, a much simpler approach is to introduce dietary changes to compensate for imbalanced microbiomes caused by modern diets. Surprisingly there are indications that such imbalances can be passed down from one generation to the next. As probiotic diet changes are relatively simple and safe to do, it could be something that clinicians will start to encourage as soon as there is sufficient evidence.

Top-Down Effects

A really interesting alternative prospect, is to leverage the bidirectionality of the gut-brain axis, by using psychological therapy to improve gut health. A study using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), showed preliminary evidence of reducing irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Adding credence to this approach, analysis of the participants’ microbiome effectively predicted who would respond best to the therapy.

Perhaps most compelling is that in responsive patients, the CBT intervention measurably changed the composition of their microbiota. Jeffrey Lackner, PsyD, at the University of Buffalo, who ran the study summarized,

"That suggests a top-down effect. If you change autonomic nervous system activity by decreasing anxiety and increasing coping skills, the signals get from the brain down to the microbes in the gut. It’s not just the microbes talking to the brain. The brain has a big part in this conversation as well."

So, although the science is still evolving, there is a lot of potential to improve human health by looking after the microbiota that look after us.

If you found this topic interesting, then check out our previous blog.

Do You Have a Second Brain?

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There are more and more claims surfacing that we are addicted to technology. Whether it be an addiction to the internet, social media or video games, the rise in concern has mostly been focused on the combination of smartphones and teenagers. Indeed, over recent years technology has weaved its way into the fabric of our everyday lives at an unprecedented rate. Though most of us would now struggle to imagine life without smartphones, is there a real threat of addiction? Here we’ll take a look at the cases for and against.

What Is Technology Addiction?

There are genuinely psychologists proposing that internet or technology addiction is a real problem which can be diagnosed. In China there are even treatment clinics dedicated to aggressive rehabilitation. In medical terms, technology addiction is obsessive tech-related behavior that’s practiced in spite of the associated negative consequences. The bottom line is that it is an addiction when it does the individual more harm than good, and stopping causes withdrawal symptoms.

How can Technology be Addictive?

As has been long known with video games, recreational use of technology can stimulate the reward centers of the brain. Though parallels are sometimes drawn with drug use, comparison with gambling addiction is more realistic. When pleasure hormones such as dopamine and endorphins are released there is the potential for addiction, and this is more likely in teenagers going through significant hormonal changes.

The Problems with Digital Addiction

One reason that teens are vulnerable is that parents never experienced today’s massively interconnected technologies when they were growing up. As a result, it’s believed that there is a general lack of awareness of the risks of posed to teenagers, with technology use rising both dramatically and stealthily.

For instance, several studies now show that teens typically have complicated relationships with their smartphones. 95% of teens having access to them, and somewhat surprisingly, 54% of American teens actually fret that they spend too much time on their phones. 56% report feeling anxious or upset whenever they are cut off from their devices.

Due to the brain’s neuroplasticity, heavy technology use can cause long term changes in neural pathways, affecting attention, emotional processing, and decision-making. Accordingly, some research suggests that levels of attention in youths is actually shortening, year on year.

Other factors include worries over the following.

• Mental health - through lack of face to face interactions
• Physical health - due to decreased exercise
• Sleep problems - from using technology late at night
• Educational performance – through reduced commitment to homework
• Health problems - due to adopting an increasingly sedentary lifestyle

Is it Really Addiction?

While the comparison to addictions like substance abuse is suggested by some professionals, other experts point out critical differences. Dr. Matthew Cruger, a neuropsychologist specialist in youth learning and development, contends that the concept of tolerance is a central factor in youth technology use.

“Addiction doesn’t really capture the behavior we’re seeing. With addiction you have a chemical that changes the way we respond, that leads us to be reliant on it for our level of functioning. That’s not what ‘s happening here. We don’t develop higher levels of tolerance. We don’t need more and more screen time in order to be able to function.”

Going further, proponents of the lack of harm of technology claim that, technically, things such as internet or phone addiction don’t exist as medical conditions. The main concern is video gaming disorder, when unhealthy patterns of game-playing occur with clear effects on health. However, Dr. Anderson notes that such extreme behavior is quite rare.

Finding a Balance

‘Screen time’ has become a bit of parenting buzz word over the past year. First and foremost it’s about awareness of technology use.  Secondly, it’s about controlling behavior, mainly so that teens engage in other developmental and recreational activities such as sports, socializing in-person with friends, completing homework, and even just getting enough sleep. Rather than going cold turkey, this approach focuses on general well-being, with technology playing a balanced role.

This may be key, because rather than technology use being pathologized as a dangerous addiction, it may actually represent a broader change in culture. Though more subtle, parallels could be drawn with the widespread adoption of television in 20th-century societies. In this sense, understanding how to use technology optimally means taking into account new norms in adolescent behavior.

If you’re curious to know what ‘nomophobia’ means, then check out our related blog.

Are You a Smartphone Addict?

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