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Every now and then technology advances in leaps and bounds in ways that surprise us all. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been seen of as either limited use in our everyday lives, or as some far off sci-fi vision of the future. Yet happening almost stealthily among our midst there is a revolution going on in machine intelligence that’s poised to change our world as we know it. Here we’ll gain a glimpse into a new dawn of AI super-minds, and why it’s being driven by the neuroscience to do with the way our very own brains work.

The Traditional AI Paradigm

The conventional approach to computing has basically remained the same ever since Alan Turing first developed machines to help crack the Enigma Code in World War II. This involves writing a computing script or set of behavioral rules, known as an algorithm, then serially crunching one calculation at a time. Although computing power has increased exponentially, following the infamous Moore’s Law, the methodology behind computing has for the most stayed unchanged. The main difference these days is that computers are vastly faster at crunching data points due to superior hardware. Take a modern smartphone for instance, its processor compresses literally billions of transistors into a tiny chip.

Brawn Over Brains

From an AI perspective this has fueled an increase in what’s known as brute force computation – as long as a programmer writes the right kind of algorithms, computers can tackle large problems just by the sheer speed and amount of calculations they can perform.  Most famously this led to the defeat of long running world chess champion Gary Kasporov by IBM’s Deep Blue.  Though such feats are impressive, there has long been skepticism of how useful this type of machine intelligence is. Dubbed Narrow or Weak AI for a reason, it’s generally only useful for tackling very specific problems that basically don’t translate to the complexity of the real world. This leaves little or no hope for emulating the type of creative intelligence possessed by human consciousness.

Another example is Google’s Deep Mind project which created Alpha Go, the AI that was developed to take on the fiendishly complex game of ‘Go’. In this game brute force techniques don’t work well, whereas humans excel through use of intuition. Although Alpha Go did manage to defeat world champion Lee Sedol, it did so by being fed massive amounts of games from elite Go players, copying and combining their strategies, and then executing moves without errors. Yes it was successful, but on the grander scheme of AI progress, Alpha Go is essentially limited by the knowledge that humans have figured out, with little prospect of going any further.

The New AI Paradigm

Though few people are aware, AI has been going through a revolution in recent years by taking a completely new and innovative approach to computing that actually emulates the way our brains solve problems. Rather than taking a rule based algorithmic approach, a novel method called ‘deep learning’ has taken a giant leap in evolution to create a new form of general AI that literally does not need to be told what to do. Instead it starts out pretty much like a new born baby, and from a blank slate it tackles problems by learning about its world through experiment after experiment. Then at each step it creates its own inherently new behaviors based on what it finds to be the best solution.

This gave genesis to Alpha Go Zero - zero meaning starting from nothing but the simple rules of the game. This seemingly innocuously change in name represents an AI that has redefined what computers are capable of.

Independent Learning

Alpha Go Zero starting playing Go against itself, experimenting with what worked and didn’t work, refining, and then playing again.  In just 3 days, and in stunning fashion, it used what it had learnt to defeat the version of Alpha Go that defeated Lee Sedol. However it didn’t stop there, and went on to beat the most evolved version of Alpha Go (Master), winning 100 games 0. What’s truly impressive, is that it wasn’t built specifically to play Go – it just seemed to like it.

So then it was given chess to play with. In just 4 hours of self-practice it became good enough to conquer the current AI world chess champion.

It did so in ways that dumbfounded human chess experts. This is because it created new strategies no one had ever seen the likes of. This included concatenations of novel tactics like sacrificing a queen to gain a positional advantage, and attacking with its king piece. Experts called it ‘alien chess’, or ‘crazy attacking chess’. Alpha Go Zero’s freshly discovered style of play changed the way humans actually perceive the game itself.

Deep Neural Networks

So how is this kind of creative and self-learning intelligence made and how does it relate to human brains? Well, it’s really about qualitative over quantitative calculations.  The human mind is what’s known as a complex system, from which intelligence and consciousness emerges from the collective interactions of billions of neurons talking to each other. Efforts to understand how it truly works involve Complexity Theory or Systems Theory. This is ultimately about the idea the whole is more than the sum of the parts. For example a single neuron has zero intelligence, so the classical reductionist approach to scientific progress doesn’t really cut it when it comes to how the brain works overall.

Humans, for the most part, are not built with a predefined set of rules how to behave. Instead we experience the world, learn, and then adapt. This is done primarily through the neo cortex, which uses non-linear, non-algorithmic processing to figure out solutions for optimal behaviors. These new discoveries can then even be coded become automatic behaviors, performed without actually thinking - imagine someone popping a balloon next to you.

The new revolution in AI takes an uncannily similar approach, where learning emerges through Deep Neural Networks, operating very much in the same way our neo cortex works. Rather than serially processing information one data point at a time, calculations are performing in parallel and through almost organics interactions. This method uses a lot less computational resources than traditional AIs, yet achieves much broader levels of intelligence. Most importantly, there’s no programming work once created - it’s simply a case of presenting the AI problems to solve.

Strangely, and much like the brain, how deep learning actually happens at a fundamental level, is still a bit of a mystery.

Beyond Board Games

Fascinating though these developments are, the ultimate question is will this new form of AI tackle real world problems? After all there’s not a lot of practical use in computers that just play board games all the time.

The answer is yes. Google’s self-driving cars and speech learning engines are cursory examples of applications that are being developed today, but expect this to be the tip of the ice berg. Corporate giants such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all investing huge resources into developing deep learning AIs as a core feature at the heart of their businesses. There is also the tantalizing prospect of a breakthrough in quantum computing, which holds promise for a gargantuan rise in computing power.

On the flip side, the new momentum in AI is sparking a fresh and serious level of concern that AI might not only replacing us, but is potentially becoming an existential threat to humanity. Even the likes of Elon Musk and the late but great Stephen Hawking have given public warnings on how very real such a threat is.

As we saw with Alpha Go Zero, the results of this next level evolution in machine intelligence will probably surprise us, but one thing is for sure - AI super-minds are coming and they will change life as we know it.

If you’re curiosity has been piqued on the neuroscience of the brain, then why not check out these blogs?

5 Reasons Why Neuroscience is Amazing

Your Brain’s Remarkable Neuroplasticity

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In the previous blog we covered how to manage sessions, in the last of this 3 part blog we’ll delve into how to take NeuroTracker training to the next level. n this more in-depth guide you’ll get tips on when to progress training from basic to advanced, the types of dual-tasks exercises you can integrate into your programs, and how to make sure that they are adapted to your users’ needs.

Consolidation Phase

A key scientific concept behind NeuroTracker is learning consolidation. This essentially means that basic training needs to be completed first so that, as Professor Faubert says, ‘the brain is prepared for learning’. In this training protocol, the user begins by completing an Initial Baseline consisting of three Core sessions. This is followed by a consolidation phase consisting of another twelve sessions. During the consolidation phase, the user is expected to rapidly improve.

Sessions 13-15 should be Core sessions. The first reason is that this provides what is called an Elevated Baseline, that can be compared to Initial Baseline for a scientific measure of a user’s learning rate. The second reason is that this baseline provides a useful reference that allows you to evaluate the impacts of advanced training on NeuroTracker speed thresholds.

Introducing Dual-Task Training

Dual-tasks are a great way to keep rapidly increasing overall learning. They basically involve performing an additional task while actually NeuroTracking.

In terms of what type of tasks can be used, well, the sky is the limit. To give a pretty wild example, NeuroTracker has actually been combined with live jet plane maneuvers. However it takes some trainer expertise and know-how to understand what types of dual-tasks are best to use, as well as when to start using them. Before we go into detail, let’s review some key types of dual-tasks.

Physical Dual-Tasks – these can be based around motor-skills, for example balancing on a bosu ball. Or they can be exercise based, such as using an exercise bike for cardio load, or weight-lifting for strength load. Although they are physical, they still tax the brain and central nervous system, in fact even just standing still requires demands more cognitive resources than sitting does.

Skill Specific Dual-Tasks - these are a refinement of physical dual-tasks, focusing on certain skills used in sports. An example is basketball dribbling while NeuroTracking. The advantage here is that abilities needed in specific performance domains can be trained and tested in combination with the demands of NeuroTracking.

Perceptual-Cognitive Dual-Tasks

NeuroTracker itself is a perceptual-cognitive task, so here we’re adding additional loads to the same performance domain. Any task that presents a mental challenge is valid, even something as simple as counting down from one hundred in steps of three, will add a significant working memory load.

These tasks can also be passive, meaning that the user does not have to consciously do anything different. An example is NeuroTracker ‘Optic Flow’ mode, which brings a huge 3D undulating tunnel into the NeuroTracker environment that simulates backwards and forwards motion. This automatically induces additional visual and balance cognitive processes. Even when Optic Flow is performed on its own, it challenges a user’s visuo-balance system.

Alternatively, perceptual-cognitive tasks can include decision-making demands, for instance elite US special-forces train themselves on identifying shoot/don’t shoot scenes while NeuroTracking. This is known as NeuroTracker Tactical Awareness.

Finally, very advanced training can integrate multiple types of dual-tasks. Here is a photo combining Optic Flow (perceptual-cognitive), with balance pads (physical), and hockey stick handling (skill-specific). It is being coached by osteopathy expert Kyla Demers.

Now we have some idea on the depth and breadth of dual-tasks, let’s see how you can best put them to use.

Getting Started With Dual-Tasks

An important thing to note is that when attempting a dual-task for the first time, NeuroTracker will be a lot more difficult. Accordingly the user’s session score will also drop. However, if the added task is not too difficult, within just a few sessions the user should adapt, and their NeuroTracker score will rise back-up again quite quickly. This means that with training over time, an individual can learn to maintain their full attention while performing a secondary task. It also means that dual-tasks should be steadily progressed from simple to complex. Jump in at the deep-end with a task that’s too difficult, and it will be a case of drowning rather than learning.

The simplest and most practical dual-task to start with is just standing. After this you can use a basic balance skill, such as placing one foot in front of the other, or standing on one foot (alternating between left and right each trial).

Judging Dual-Task Difficulty

A common question for NeuroTracker trainers is ‘how do I know if a dual-task is too difficult?’ The user’s personal experience is the first reference. Usually they will feel instinctively overloaded, and their motivation will wane when NeuroTracker speed drops significantly lower than what they are used to.

For a more objective reference, if a user’s NeuroTracker score falls to less than 50% of their current Core baseline, then it is likely too difficult for efficient learning. A similar but easier task should be used in its place, for example swapping standing on one foot, to standing with one foot in front of the other. Then once this is mastered, let the user attempt the more difficult task again - a significant improvement will likely be seen.

With that being said, if the primary goal is to assess performance readiness or skill weaknesses under cognitive pressure, then any result will be informative. Just remember to avoid making very difficult assessments a significant part of a user’s training program.

Progressing Dual-Task Difficulty

Then next question to answer is when to move from one task to a more difficult one. Too some extent it’s down to your own evaluation skills to decide when to graduate a user to a more difficult dual-task. However here are two common strategies to help guide you.

1. The simplest method is to set a fixed number of sessions for each skill. For example for a basketball player, you might create a program of 4 sessions with standing, then 4 with balance, then 4 with one basketball pass per trial, and then 4 sessions with basketball dribbling. Note that every 5th session should be Core only (simply sitting), as this provides a up-to-date reference from which to evaluate dual-task results.

2. Achieving mastery is a more disciplined and analytical method. This involves reaching within 90% of a user’s current Core baseline (the average of their last 3 Core sessions). This method demonstrates that a user’s attention capacity has expanded to the point that they can effectively perform a skill while under significant cognitive load. Just keep in mind that for very difficult tasks it can require a lot of training to achieve mastery, depending on the user’s learning capacity.

Assessing Performance Readiness

A unique advantage of performing NeuroTracker dual-tasks is that specific real-world skills can be assessed under mental pressure. It’s well known in sports that even the most skilled athlete can fold under pressure or in the heat of action on the field. Once a particular skill is mastered on NeuroTracker, it’s more likely to maintained under real-world demands, or be a sign that automaticity has been achieved.

If you’d like to learn more about the different ways NeuroTracker dual-tasks can be evolved for various performance needs, then check out this blog.

Ramping Up Performance with the NeuroTracker Learning System

Missed the earlier blogs in this series? Then catch them here,

Tips for NeuroTracker Trainers – the First Session
Tips for NeuroTracker Trainers – Managing Sessions

Already read them? Then look out for the upcoming NeuroTracker Academy, where you will be able to take online courses on just about everything NeuroTracker.

Neuroscience has become a buzz word in recent times, frequently making the headline for all manner of discoveries. The buzz is justified. Unlike most major fields of science, neuroscience was pretty much just a baby as little as two decades. Not now though, there are literally a whole slew of research breakthroughs happening each year, which makes neuroscience a seriously hot topic. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why this emerging field of discovery is genuinely amazing.

1. The Complexity of the Human Brain

The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. We have around 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons our brain, which is more than all the stars in our galaxy. If each of those neurons were laid end to end, they could be wrapped around the Earth twice over. What’s more, a single neuron can be directly connected with up to 10,000 others. This gives rise to a staggering 100 trillion or more nerve connections. Even though computer intelligence is rising rapidly, it still pales in comparison to complexity of our grey matter.

Though ultimately, it’s what the brain can do, that makes it truly remarkable. It’s the only thing known to be capable of producing the kind of higher consciousness associated with human ingenuity. It’s also an entity which can structurally rewire and adapt according to environmental or physiological stimuli - all on its own.

Without doubt there are huge opportunities to unravel the mind’s deep secrets, which could help answer an almost endless number of mysteries surrounding how it works. At biological level, there are myriads of questions to answer in terms of how clusters of brain cells firing across neural networks to regulate the body’s systems and produce complex behavior. At a philosophical level, it even holds promise for figuring out the nature of existence and life itself. As far as answering big questions goes, neuroscience is the mother of all sciences.‍

2. Massively Growing Field of Science

Tremendous advances in neuroscience have occurred in the past two decades, with the 2010s being coined called ‘the decade of the brain’. Just in 2017 a whole slew of advances were made.  Unlike other industries, there is a progressive culture of worldwide collaborations and even open source approaches like the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Neuroscience is providing a role model for scientific discovery. At the other end of the spectrum are institutes like DARPA, who are investing heavily into neuroscience to develop emergent technologies for use by the military.

In 2016 the global neuroscience market size was valued at USD 28.42 billion, which has been forecast to grow rapidly in the next few years and beyond. This is mirrored by a rapid rise in total neuroscience research, with China becoming a major player pressuring the US into an arms race of the brain. Investment initiatives around the globe such as Obama’s Brain Initiative mean we can expect to see scores of research breakthroughs on the horizon that will outpace any other scientific domain.

3. Cutting-edge Technologies

Even neuroscience technologies that have been around for years are seriously sophisticated. Take MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) for example, this machine uses electromagnetic waves to set the body’s atoms into a state of quantum superposition, then snap them in and out repeatedly to releases energy signatures, revealing a map of what cells are doing in real-time.

Today’s technologies almost seem like science fiction, such as using lasers to perform precision deep-brain surgery, or optogenetics to control specific genetically altered cells. Then venturing into almost Borg-like technologies are direct connections between the brain and machines – known as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). These are already allowing paralyzed patients to perform tasks such as turn thoughts into email or move a hand to hold a loved one.

4. The Potential to Transform Human Health

Though we don’t automatically think of neuroscience when it comes to our well-being, neurotechnologies look set to revolutionize the healthcare industry. These include innovations such as electroceuticals to regulate nerve signals, neuroregeneration to prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, genomic sequencing to provide personalized solutions for neurologic disorders, and even genome editing to prevent cognitive related diseases.

While traditional medicine and surgery has had major success in improving the health of our bodies, neuroscience represents a panacea for curing diseases related to the mind and central nervous system. With life expectancies climbing worldwide, treating health at the level of the brain will becoming increasingly important to global human wellbeing.

5. The Potential to Transform Human Performance

The brain has amazing levels of neuroplasticity. An astounding piece of evidence for this is an operation called a hemispherectomy, which baffles neuroscientists even today. It’s needed in life-threatening conditions such as severe epilepsy, where literally half of a person’s brain has to be cut out. In theory, this should be devastating because each half of the brain manages very different functions, such as controlling one side of the body. However, up until teenage years, when half of the brain is removed, the other half has the capability to rewire itself into a whole new left-right brain!

This neuroplasticity means that training interventions like NeuroTracker hold promise for optimizing brain functions to improve real-world performance. For instance, NeuroTracker training was shown to improve decision-making accuracy in competitive soccer play by 15%. Add to the mix Neurofeedback technologies such as EEGs, and the benefits of such interventions can be amplified to provide highly efficient mental conditioning.

Outside of neuroplasticity, there is also growing interest in amping up the brain’s activity directly, such as with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which temporarily shuts certain brain regions to allow other regions to go into overdrive. Or, as DARPA has been investigating, zapping the brain with electrical currents to improve concentration and focus. Even endurance athletes have been using this technique to increase pain resilience.

All-in-all neuroscience is not just an exciting domain of research, but a whole field of innovations that will likely change the ways we live our lives for the better. If you’d like to get more insights why, check out our related blogs.

7 Major Developments in Neuroscience of 2017

Your Brain’s Remarkable Neuroplasticity

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In the last blog we covered tips for running users through their first session, and in the next blog in this 3 part series, we’ll go into running advanced training. For this 2nd blog however, the focus is on managing sessions on the path to improvement. We’ll go through handy know-how on what to pay attention to, interpreting results, and giving feedback.

Observing Users

Even though NeuroTracker is a form of cognitive training, your user’s psychological state of mind can be observed while performing a session, providing useful insights into their mindset under mental pressure.

Some key things to look out for include the following.

• Patterns of body language through different session phases
• Fidgeting and changing seating or standing position
• Emotional reactions, particularly when any errors are made
• Verbal responses
• Breathing rate, especially if this pauses at high speeds
• Changes in head angle when targets drift
• Any signs of distraction, such as looking away from the screen
• Pauses when selecting or calling out targets

It’s not uncommon for users to display many of these observably, particularly in the early stages of training. Generally, they will reveal how a user finds it challenging to hone their attention and mental focus. More importantly, these patterns tend to improve with on-going NeuroTracker training.  For this reason, they can be valuable indicators or even predictors of your users’ mindset and self-control getting stronger over time.

For instance, it’s common for individuals with ADHD to fidget and swing their legs when sitting on a stool, and many clinicians note that these behaviors noticeably reduce within just a couple of hours of distributed training. For this reason, note taking is recommended so that such traits can be monitored objectively. This will allow you to provide your users with structured feedback that will not only boost their motivation, but also help them be self-observant of the training benefits in their daily life.

Finally, evaluate if these types of behavioral and psychological factors improve whenever back-to-back NeuroTracker sessions are performed. If so, it likely means that NeuroTracker is helping users get into an optimal learning state, that will help them perform better at any other types of training that follow. This is a NeuroTracker strategy that many types of professional trainers use to get the most out of integrated training programs.

Assessing Cognitive State

It’s useful to briefly assess your users’ state of mind and well-being before starting a session. For example, are they fatigued from other training, work or study? Did they sleep well the night before? When did they last eat? Have they taken any medications? How are their stress levels? These are all factors that can influence their NeuroTracker performance precisely because the task elicits their concentration and attention, at whatever their current limits are.

Again, making notes on such factors can provide insights into each individual's mental abilities. For instance, if NeuroTracker scores are consistently low following poor sleep, and high following good sleep, then this reveals how important sleep is to their performance in anything which requires serious mental focus and attention.

Interpreting Results

As we’ve discussed, it’s best to evaluate results relative to the individual’s pre-existing cognitive state, which can vary day to day. Taking this one step further, it’s recommended that when using NeuroTracker results as an assessment, that the average of the last 3 session scores are referenced. This is called a current baseline, which provides a much more reliable measure than a single session score.

This can then be compared to a user initial baseline (their first 3 sessions), which provides a scientific measure of overall training improvement. Then when comparing scores to other users, or general populations, both the baseline scores and the relative improvement rate can be used to determine how well a user is progressing in their program.

Lastly, overall improvement rates, or learning curves, can be used to predict the rate at which users will continue to get better at NeuroTracker. This can be a great motivational tool, because it allows you to set targets for on-going training, allowing a user to compete with their future self!

Giving Feedback

In the previous blog we touched on how critical feedback is after a user’s first ever NeuroTracker session. However, giving feedback never stops being important - it is a key way to motivate your users over time.

A simple but powerful way to give ongoing feedback is to frequently compare session results and current baselines to your users’ initial baselines. This helps emphasize how far the training is taking them overall, rather than over focusing on one session result compared to the previous one. Most users experience gains of 50% or more in their speed thresholds within a few hours of distributed training, so it’s worth frequently reminding them whenever they are able to flex their mental muscle at new levels.

Following on here, it helps if users can see when these benefits transfer to their real-world performance. For this, you need to ask them to self-evaluate and report their findings to you on a regular basis, which will allow you to analyze any changes from the perspective of NeuroTracker results.

Lastly, and for the reasons we mentioned earlier, not every NeuroTracker is a good day. This is normal and can provide useful insights into performance influences in daily life. More importantly, you need to explain to users that they will still get benefits from training even when their scores are lower than normal - it’s simply harder work for their brains that day.

Overall, being observant of your users and taking a bit of extra time to interpret their results and give qualitative feedback will go a long way in helping them get the most out of their training. Look out for our next blog where there will be tips on how to take your training programs to the next level. If you missed the first blog, you can read it here.

Tips for NeuroTracker Trainers – the First Session

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When I delivered emotional literacy in prison, I noticed that the behavior of those in professional football (soccer) and prison are similar. Both environments are highly pressured, silent on feelings and loud in emotions, with a lack of communication being the life of the theme. People within both spaces resort to pulling information from the environment, in their attempt to make sense of what’s going on. Becoming hypersensitive to tones, body language and actions.

Prison

Inmates must tread lightly to learn about –

• The rules set by other inmates
• Who they can trust on their block
• Which version of self they will project in that space to survive.

In prison if you get it wrong, you can find yourself in a position where your life is on the line. A situation which leads to a physical altercation, resulting in an extended sentence, injuries or death.

Professional Football

Players must tread lightly to –

• Not upset their manager
• Assess who they can trust in the game (relationships in the game – parents, staff & agents)
• Learn about which version of self will they project in that space to survive.

In professional football if you get it wrong, you can find yourself in a position where your career is on the line. A situation which leads to clubs giving bad references, being released, (as a senior player) you’re told to train with the youth team and forced to run everyday. Resulting in moves to teams below your expected standard, performance levels drop or leaving the game altogether.

Fight or Flight

In both prison and football, it’s a lack of safety that makes people project a character they feel is needed to survive within that environment and sometimes they will behave inline with the character they project (which is out character). Forcibly resisting those in that space or withdrawing themselves from those and/or the space. This behavior is not ideal but is a method of survival. Vulnerability can have us behaving in unfortunate ways in our quest to achieve this objective.

How to Learn from this

Within football, communication can make the world of difference. Communication gives clarity, reassurance and safety. A Football Manager/Coach is a leader first and a football facilitator second. Understanding leadership will increase your value of human science and empower your role as the performance as leader. If your players feel safe you will get more out of them, on and off the field of play.

Tips –

• Take the time to inform players about any changes e.g. dropping them, changing their position etc.
• Checking in, what’s going on in their personal life?
• Win, lose or draw, the team is a team. This should be the same with player behavior too, if they make mistakes in their life this is when they need you! Be there for them. This does not mean there’s no punishment if the mistake bypasses your boundaries. You can fine or drop a player and still be their pillar of support.

For more on leadership and the psycho-emotional elements of football and gangs, be sure to buy my book Soccology here.

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Whether it’s for coaches, trainers, clinicians, medical practitioners or even just someone introducing NeuroTracker to friend, here are some key tips to help get the most out of every training session. We’ll take a look at how to get new users introduced to their first session, some pointers on feedback.

Understanding Performance Needs

Particularly for performance trainers getting new users going, it’s a good idea to ask a few basic questions such as these.

• What are your short term and long-term goals?
• Are you aware of any specific strengths or weakness?
• How much time would you like to commit to training each week?
• Are there any specific skills or tasks you would like to improve at?

These types of questions can help you get a handle on your user’s perspective and their goals. This will aid you in figuring out what type of training program will lead to the quickest path to improvement.

Giving Some Perspective

Remember that NeuroTracker will probably seem like a pretty strange and abstract way to train. Rather than just diving into balls bouncing around a 3D screen, properly introducing a new user to some general concepts about NeuroTracker will capture their engagement. So before starting a session, you should always introduce some high-level concepts. These can include things like,

• Why NeuroTracker is a cutting-edge neuroscience tool
• Why the world’s best sports teams use it
• Why 3D is important
• What the key benefits will be for their performance
• What a training program involves
• How vision is so important in sports
• How even small amounts of training over time can have big impacts.

Spending a few minutes covering these points will help your user understand the potential of the training, from their own perspective.

Getting Started

Just before getting the first session going, it’s a good idea to run a few practice trials or a quick demo before a starting proper training. This is important because if they’re not quite understanding what to do, this could influence the baseline result, which is something needed to help customize training around their development trajectory.

A few highlight instructions while going through the demo should make the task crystal clear, and only take a minute or two to run through.

1. Keep your eyes focused on the center dot
2. Spread and maintain your mental attention on the highlighted targets
3. Identify those same targets when they stop moving - if you’re not sure just give your best guess
4. Be ready for speeds to change each trial, the session will adapt to your performance level.

Using the spacebar to pause the session will make it easy to explain these points in small chunks, one step at a time, as well as answer any questions. In no time your user will be well and ready to take on their first session.

Go ahead and set them off. Be sure to talk as little as possible, and try to minimize any other potential distractions around them. The very first session is an important step, and no matter how slow the speeds are, NeuroTracker will quickly starting taxing your user’s attention at threshold levels.

Going Over the Result

From a perspective of on-going feedback, the end of the first session is the probably most critical point of feedback you will ever give to your users. And because they’ve never done anything like it before, for some people it’s a scary moment where they will be worried about what it actually says about them. The frequent questions are: Did I do good? What should I expect or do? It’s important to specify that even though there is normative data, the goal is to compare your own results, nothing more.

The score is a direct representation of the threshold speed at which someone can perform NeuroTracking. If a user feels or knows that their score is low then it’s really important to put things into perspective. There are three key things to take explain here.

• Firstly, 3 sessions are needed to establish an initial NeuroTracker measure, or a baseline. So whether the first session is a high or low score, just take it with a pinch of salt.
• Secondly, the main goal is to see improvement over time, and even an initial baseline will not predict their actual potential to learn. Training over time will bring quick improvements, and with NeuroTracker, the sky is the limit!
• Thirdly, even for users with a very low baseline, there’s no bad news. It this simply means there is a lot more to gain from the benefits of NeuroTracker – imagine what it will be like to have massive gains in mental focus and awareness.

This is a good time to come back to your user’s performance goals, for example with a soccer player, improvements from NeuroTracker training could be translated to being able to more easily spot the best passing options when on the ball. Hopefully things will click with your user and they will be motivated to reap the benefits of the training program you will line up for them.

Look out for next upcoming blog in this 3 part series, where we will move onto managing sessions, setting training programs, and how to give great on-going feedback. For now, if you want to learn more about NeuroTracker speed thresholds, then you can check out the link below or you can reach me for more details here.

Your Guide to NeuroTracker Scores‍

By Jonathan Anderson, CEO of NeuroTracker

It’s common for people to think that cognitive training is, well, just cognitive training. This is actually far from the truth. The brain is the most complex system in the known universe, and accordingly, there are myriads of ways to train it.

The surprise is that cognitive training products on the market today can take wildly different approaches to training up the mental muscle between your ears. To give an idea of this, we will compare NeuroTracker to brain trainers, to show just how different such interventions can be. But first, let’s get some perspective on what brain trainers are.

The Great Brain Trainer Debate

Over the last decade brain training companies like Lumosity, CogMed, Posit Science, NeuroNation and many more, have seen a huge surge in popularity. Over the last few years in particular, they have attracted a lot of attention in the media through an on-going debate over efficacy. The big question is whether or not they actually help their users flex their mental skills in real life – what’s known as far transfer.

This has included a lot of scientific criticism. In a nutshell, the argument is that brain trainers in general help people get better the specific tasks they train on, but that this does not transfer into real-world abilities, or to better mental health. This case was infamously demonstrated with the $2m FTC lawsuit against Lumosity for deceptive advertising.

The argument less well heard in the public mind is that, although there are many brain trainer products without evidence of scientific efficacy, there are a number of leaders in the market who do demonstrate training benefits. For example, studies by Posit Science and CogniFit have been reviewed to uphold the gold standard of scientific research and found some improvements in real-world skills such as driving safety. This is essentially a quality versus quantity perspective.

The Importance of Qualifying Cognitive Training

If there are actually some brain training products that can genuinely improve people’s mental abilities, then qualifying which types of training are effective could be important for seeking benefits today. However, even this idea of qualifying brain trainers from one another is too narrow. This is because brain trainers don’t represent the much broader domain of cognitive training - a key point which has been pretty much missed throughout the whole debate in the media.

This is an important notion because the future of cognitive training is evolving out of a growing tidal wave of neuroscience research, meaning tomorrow’s cognitive interventions could hold the potential for benefitting humankind. To get a clearer idea of why brain trainers are just one approach to cognitive training, let’s take a look at some of the typical characteristics of brain trainers.

Understanding the Characteristics of Brain Trainers

Though it’s difficult to pin down exactly, and there are exceptions, brain trainers tend to have these similar characteristics.

Long interventions - studies generally show that to achieve benefits, training typically requires 30-50 hours of distributed training, or longer. Across these interventions timescales, near transfer effects, such as gains on standardized neuropsychological tests, tend to be modest or negligible.

Near and narrow transfer – with a few notable exceptions, brain trainer studies to date tend to only support transfer to tasks that are structurally very similar to the actual training tasks. For example, transfer is often related to working memory tests that are not actually that different to the brain training tasks themselves. This leaves a gap in research looking at evidence of far transfer to real-world abilities.

Focused populations – brain trainer products and marketing are dominantly aimed at the active aging market. For this reason, there is little known about their scientific efficacy for other populations and accordingly, they are not a realistic option for most people.

High task complexity – using a ‘potpourri’ approach, brain trainer products usually comprise a range of exercises in the form of short games. This can be as many as 50 or more different games, each with their own rules to figure out. This means there is a lot to learn before actual training can be performed properly.

Ambiguous results – brain trainer games tend to have different ways and strategies to perform them, which factor into how well you do at them. This brings in the issue of practice effects – the notion of picking up different techniques do better. For this reason, it’s difficult to distinguish if an improvement in score means a person’s actual cognitive abilities has improved, or whether they have simply worked out a more efficient way of performing the task. This factor combined with so many different games means there’s generally no actual scientific measures that can be drawn from the scores obtained.

These characteristics highlight some limitations of brain trainers, however, there are also many advantages, such as motivation from having a variety of exercises, as well as ease of access that comes with being able to train through a web browser. That said, when considering the whole space of cognitive training, it does reveal that brain trainers have certain characteristics that can differ significantly from other forms of intervention. Here we’ll compare NeuroTracker to provide an example of how distinct these differences can be.

Understanding the Characteristics of NeuroTracker

These are some of the key factors that define why NeuroTracker is a genuinely unique form of cognitive intervention.

Short interventions – using just 6-minute sessions, many studies have shown that NeuroTracker produces clear evidence of benefits with just 1-3 hours of distributed training. The effects have also been shown to be robust, with significant improvement effects on high-level cognitive functions.

Wide and far transfer – gains in executive function, working memory, processing speed, several forms of attention, and other cognitive abilities have been corroborated by multiple peer reviewed studies. Far transfer to real-world abilities has also been demonstrated, notably this includes improving passing decision-making accuracy in competitive soccer play.

Broad populations – from children to the elderly, amateur athletes to professional athletes, students with learning disabilities to university students, numerous studies to date show that NeuroTracker benefits are valid across diverse groups of people. This also includes relevance in a number of medical conditions, such as concussion rehabilitation.

Low task complexity – with just a few simple instructions, an average person can start NeuroTracker training and know exactly what they need to do. This has been shown in studies with young children with conditions such as Autism, ADHD and Intellectual Deficit, who intuitively pick up the task from the get-go. With training over time, the cognitive load of the exercise can be evolved through NeuroTracker’s difficulty settings, or by adding on dual-tasks, but the Core task remains simple.

Scientific results – NeuroTracker presents scores as an objective ‘speed threshold’ measure, deemed to have negligible influences from practice or technique related effects. For this reason, it is a tool not only used by researchers to assess an individual’s cognitive state, but also as a metric to assess the effects of other factors on cognitive status. For instance, one study used NeuroTracker to investigate whether exercise improves cognitive function, and another used its measures to assess concussion recovery.

This infographic highlights some of the characteristics that make NeuroTracker unique.

Recognising Role Models in the Industry

As we’ve seen, cognitive training methods can vary greatly, not just in terms of what they do, but more importantly, in the effects they can transfer. In addition, companies which engage in peer-reviewed frontier research should be recognized for the benefits they can bring to people wanting to enhance their mental abilities – which let’s face it, is virtually everyone on the planet.

A prime example of fulfilling this need is the Digital Therapeutics Alliance, a global non-profit association with the mission of broadening the integration of clinically-validated digital therapeutics into healthcare through education, advocacy, and research. They only accepted evidence-based companies as their members. NeuroTracker has recently been accepted into the alliance, with the goal of researching practical cognitive applications for specific industries.

Another non-profit organization called the ‘Faubert Applied Research Centre’, also works with research partners around the world to develop and validate custom applications of NeuroTracker at a scientific level. Initiatives such as these are dedicated to bringing the potential of cognitive training into the hands of people that can benefit from them.

“We think it’s time that people start to recognize the leaders in the cognitive training industry. After all, you cannot simply lump every cognitive training program together, just like you wouldn’t lump all fitness training programs together. There are, and will be, training tools that stand out from the crowd as definite role models. We believe NeuroTracker’s rich research base allows us to maintain our position as one of these role models.”

Soccer, or football as most countries call it, is a wonderful game. As the world’s most popular sport it’s watched and enjoyed by millions, forming cultural connections across the planet. As a former professional player for West Ham United and a human behavior specialist, I truly believe we need sport to be an embodied expression and understand the whole experience of performance.

Here I see two main challenges for the modern game. Firstly is the psychological dimension. Sports like football might bring fame and fortune, but surprisingly, they also come with a lot of pressures that can actually harm an athlete’s mental well-being. Secondly is the fascinating dimension of mental performance. Great players possess meta-skills which go beyond the physical. Athletes need to hone and harness these in order to achieve mastery of the game.

Here I’ll delve into both of these dimensions.

The Pressures of the Game

We let things happen in football that we wouldn’t let happen anywhere else. For some reason there’s a misunderstanding that we don’t need to look after the mental well-being of players. The truth is the opposite. In sports we need to be more mindful, in terms of the players, coaches, the staff and the managers. There’s more than just the sport.

There is a genuine need to be aware of the psychological perspective, not just for performance, to but love the game, rather than fear the pressures it can bring. Players struggle to view themselves from a human perspective, trapped in a bubble. Football becomes something they do and no longer something they are connected to.

It’s also not easy with the public or even fans. In today’s game players are simply labelled by their salary, rather than who they are in terms of their hearts and minds. Professionals who dedicate their life to their sports career become victims in the media overnight for even the most irrelevant things.

In the UK, players that make it tend to come from inner cities. I grew up with street culture and think that psychology is the reason why this is the case – footballers have to be surprisingly tough to survive the pressures of a successful career.

The Challenges of Club Culture

Coaches have a big influence on players, but there’s an art to coaching which is difficult to master. In the EPL teams have to face the reality that next season might mean a new manager, as well as all the new staff they bring with them. The team can also buy in new talent at any time, and at the drop of a hat, sell a footballer who’s played for the club for years. The commercial side of the game inevitably spreads into the club’s coaching culture. What I’ve learned, is that clubs need to overcome the tendency to create divisions between staff and the athletes they’re mentoring.

To give an idea, there’s a trend with clubs to separate the first team training grounds from the younger players’ grounds. Up and coming players then miss out on the inspiration and education the top players pass down. So that’s an example of under-estimating the power of club culture for bringing through tomorrow’s talent.

Coaches are obviously important to players, but actually parents are also incredibly important during those crucial development years through their teens. Unfortunately they tend to put much trust in the club, and don’t realize that professional teams are primarily a business. They don’t always have the best interests in mind for their players.

Getting it Right

Sir Alex Ferguson exemplified sports leadership. This was a man who could really involve players who were also natural leaders, and leverage their abilities to inspire the rest of the team. Really special players can build rapport at a social level and bring out the true spirit of what the game should be all about.

Even if world-class stars like Cristiano Ronaldo didn’t fit with Sir Alex Ferguson’s style, he was flexible enough to switch his behavior to cater to the needs of his team, through generational changes. He would also listen and connect with players, who themselves have a lot of experience and knowledge, which they can share to help their coaches become better at what they need to do.

Probably the most important thing about Sir Alex Ferguson was that he could get players to believe in the philosophy of the club culture and embody it. After a game, the players would speak about the club like a person or a family. This is how you foster really great player relationships.

From my own experience working with pro footballers as a consultant, as well as in-depth conversations with a plethora of football stars, I’ve found that everything has to stem from respecting players.  This is particularly important with youth players - once they can trust you, they can be guided by you. Ultimately a great team needs to bond.

The Unspoken Dimension of Performance

The EPL is known to be the best football league in the world for entertainment. When you break it down, there’s a small group of elite players in the Premier League that set themselves from the rest. The rest are physically just as capable, but they don’t have the mental edge that takes them to the highest level. It’s what’s going on in their mind that’s ultimately fundamental.

First all a player has to process a massive amount of visual information, and every half second they have to construct these images in their head, then delete the ones which are not important. Then they have to evaluate things like the speed of movement of the players, the ball trajectory coming to them, which foot they’re going to use to control the ball, which side of the foot, and how many touches they will use. And all this has to be experienced at match tempo.

Now after that half second, the scene has changed so they have to run through that process again. In the EPL the game is getting faster and faster, and because of this players in today’s game are a lot better technically, than they use to be. They simply have to be able to compete at this mental level.

What I don’t get, is why we don’t talk about this whole dimension of performance, or even just getting the players to understand the value of what goes on in their minds. Now all coaches know that decision-making is crucial. That said, I can tell you first hand, that as a professional the only advice I would get was a coach on the side lines of a match shouting ‘Decision-making!’ The missing gap is actually teaching and learning these skills found between the ears.

Unconscious Competence

When you watch sublime football, what you see is a virtual telepathy between players. They know exactly how someone moves and can predict what they are planning to do before it happens. Part of this is about being mindful of teammates. But more than this, there’s needs to be automaticity and a state of flow.

This is what I call ‘unconscious competence’ - where players are able to rely on their physical skills, situational awareness and decision-making, without having to overthink anything. There simply isn’t enough time.

Some great players acquire unconscious competence through their natural abilities, dedication to self-development, and hard work. For the rest it seems a mystery, but in fact it’s not. There are ways to develop this ingredient of success and these need to be taught by coaches. For a start there are some great mental training technologies teams can adopt right now.

For example I recently posted a blog with a side-by-side video of EPL star Pierre Aubameyang and myself both using NeuroTracker. When I first tried it, the value for sports was instantly clear to me. This is a tool anyone can use to quickly improve their processing speed and decision-making accuracy. I even interviewed the inventor Professor Faubert to feature this NeuroTracker’s methodology and science in my book Soccology.

Coaches themselves need to first buy into the cognitive learning side of football, and start seeing the real value of how conditioning players at a mental level can actually transform them. But also, athletes can take the initiative to pursue their own cognitive development path.

I recently published Soccology with the goal of providing support for athletes, coaches and even parents, to help understand the whole experience of sports performance from the perspective of football.

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All athletes know that training their physical abilities is essential to performing well on the field. What’s not as well known is how important mental training is. If elite athletes took on a new method of conditioning their minds, would it change their beliefs about their actual performance? This is precisely what a team of researchers set out to investigate.

The Cognitive Overload of Sports

Several studies in sport science reveal the importance of highly developed attentional resources, especially in dynamic team sports such as basketball, soccer and ice hockey. Dynamic sports are particularly demanding because of the chaotic and fast changes in the sports environment during high intensity play. These include the movement and tracking of teammates, opponents, and the ball or puck, all among rapidly changing visual fields as an athlete runs and turns.

The Dimension of Decision-Making

On top of this, athletes are confronted with multiple and often complex choices which require planning outcomes on short timescales. For example choosing who to pass to, the likelihood of that pass being intercepted by an opponent, and also that player’s passing options.

Decisions win or lose games, which is why elite athletes show superior mental abilities in areas such as executive functions. It also explains why measures of executive functions, for example, have been found to predict goal scoring rates in professional soccer, season after season.

Testing Perceptual-Cognitive Training

Knowing both the mental challenges of sports play, and the importance of high-level cognitive functions in performance success, a group of sports scientists and psychologists set out to investigate the potential of NeuroTracker. This involved a team of researchers who collaborated from a combination of sports, health and technology science universities in Norway.

Using a diversity of sports men and women, they selected 54 elite athletes from boxing, wrestling, women’s handball, women’s soccer, orienteering, biathlon, alpine skiing, sled hockey, badminton and table tennis, to engage in a NeuroTracker training program.

Remote Performance Training

The volunteer athletes were asked to complete at least four NeuroTracker sessions per week over a five week period. For this they were each setup with a NeuroTracker Personal account, to allow them to train from home through a web browser on personal computers, with 3D glasses. To avoid potential biases, they were not given any instructions on the training, but their training was monitored by the researchers through NeuroTracker Remote.

The aim of the study was to find out if the training intervention could subjectively improve outcomes in terms of their own self-assessments of their performance. For this reason they were given the Athlete Satisfaction Questionnaire, a standardised sports science assessment which covers 15 dimensions of performance using a 7 point Likert scale. The assessment was completed before and after the NeuroTracker training program.

What Was Found

Almost all the elite athletes completed at least the minimum of four NeuroTracker sessions per week, with some athletes choosing to train up to fifteen times per week. The researchers concluded the participants show a high rate of compliance, and were motivated to perform the training independently.

On average the athletes experienced an improvement in NeuroTracker speed thresholds of 39% by the end of the five weeks. As such the study concluded there was a significant training effect from NeuroTracker.

The results of the Athlete Satisfaction Questionnaires also showed significant improvement in terms of how the athletes believed their own performance had progressed, with the majority of the athletes seeing gains.

What it Means

Firstly the study demonstrated that perceptual-cognitive training can be highly practical to implement and that athletes are motivated to take on this extra dimension of training. Secondly, athletes from a variety of sports seem to believe in the personal benefits of the training.

One factor here, is that with subjective self-assessments comes the notorious issue of the placebo effect, where people can misperceive benefits that aren’t actually there. For this reason, this research was an exploratory study, which only indicates the potential for mental training to transfer to elite sports performance.

However it does agree with findings from other sports science studies showing NeuroTracker training transferring to improved sports performance, including an objectively measured 15% increase in passing-decision making accuracy of soccer players in competitive play. In addition, leaders in sports science like Len Zaichkowsky espouse the high value of perceptual-cognitive training in modern sports, with the notion that elite performance is 80% mental.

If you’re interested in learning more about how and why sports leaders use NeuroTracker, check out this blog.

5 Different Ways Experts Use NeuroTracker

The Norwegian study can be found here.

The effects of Perceptual-Cognitive training on Subjective Performance in Elite Athletes

This weekend 5 pro gamers netted a jackpot of over 11 million dollars – the biggest prize ever awarded in the history of eSports. They form the team known as ‘OG’, who, with some of the most stunning comebacks in eSports, fought their way through teams from around the world to become champions of a MOBA game called DOTA 2. The tournament, known simply as ‘The International’, had a collective prize pool surpassing 25 million dollars. The game is so popular, that even on the first day of the 5-day tournament, around 6 million people watched the action live. This begs the question, what makes the brains of gamers so special?

The New Lab Rats

As we covered in a previous blog, the rise of eSports is so dramatic that the concept of cybersports is now being taken as seriously as professional sports like football and basketball. More interestingly, Neuroscience is discovering that eSports gamers possess some superhuman mental abilities which could help unlock secrets of human performance, as well as understand how video gaming can actually change the brain. This is important because there are around 2.2 billion gamers on the planet. Here, we’ll glean some neuroscience insights into what makes a serious gamer tick.

Boosted Attention

It is known that playing video games can have some positive effects on attention, visual and motor skills. Research also suggests that gaming over time can change the brain regions responsible for attention and visuospatial skills, and make them more efficient.

Based on evidence that expert players of action video games have increased attentional and sensorimotor functions, a study published in Nature Scientific Reports used brain scans to see how expert gamers’ minds are wired.

The researchers examined the relationship between gaming experience and the plasticity of functional networks related to specific attentional and sensorimotor systems. They found that experts had enhanced connectivity and increased grey matter volume in these subregions, and that greater gaming experience correlated with much stronger connections along key neural pathways.

Other research out of the University of Utah, suggests that this kind of hyperconnectivity between attentional brain networks could essentially help gamers to think more efficiently.

The Need for Speed

It’s been found that physically, cyber athletes are not the fittest people around by any means. However, they do have mental sharpness and psychological traits comparable to elite athletes, and visual reactions close to the speeds of fighter jet pilots.

Speed, it seems, may hold the answer as to why pro gamers often retire in their early twenties. An analytical study of Starcraft 2 competitors crunched masses of data on decision-making and motor reaction times, looking into the age at which response times start to slow down. Somewhat shockingly, the data showed that the body's cognitive-motor speed begins to decline at just 24 years old.

Like many of the big competitive eSports games, Starcraft 2 depends massively on razor-sharp mental and physical reflexes. In a National Geographic documentary, it was found that one of the world’s best Starcraft 2 players maxed out at almost four times the active response rate as normal people, as measured on a standardized cognitive reaction test.

With this in mind, it could be that when players start to lose their super fast processing speeds, it may actually outweigh the benefits of greater experience. If so, this helps explain why many pro gamers wrap up their careers at an age when ordinary people are usually getting started.

Getting into the Zone

At the truly elite level, computed tomography (CT) scans show that pro gamers’ brains work differently than amateur gamers. Specifically, the frontal lobe and limbic sections become active, which are in charge of memory, analytic reasoning, and basic instinct. These stay passive in normal gamers.

This shows that a pro gamer’s brain needs to be not only fast but also intelligent. Even though top real-time strategy (RTS) players often reach 300 action responses per minute, it’s how their minds guide each of those actions that really counts.

ESPN ran a special show on a world-class Starcraft 2 player from Korea known as Polt. His brain wave activity while playing complex battles revealed how he not only moved to new tasks quickly but also shifted his focus on extremely short timescales. This allows him to maintain attention over a ton of action going on at the same time.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was that his mental state resembled that of top athletes in a flow state. This means he could get into the zone to quiet down his conscious thought to remain calm under pressure, and not get distracted. This video clip gives an overview.

Nature Versus Nurture

Neuroscience is discovering that elite gamers have some truly remarkable stuff going on between their ears. What’s not known is the degree to which the abilities are innate or acquired (nature versus nurture). On the one hand, there are billions of gamers, and it’s not uncommon for even casual gamers to play 30 hours or more per week. Yet only a handful can achieve the performance levels of eSports stars. On the other hand, lots of studies show that non-gamers can get some cognitive benefits, with even moderate amounts of action video gaming.

What is clear though is that the type of game is a key factor. For example, if you want to improve memory, then 3D video games have been shown to have a clear edge over 2D games. It has also been seen with NeuroTracker that 3D is a key factor for getting the brain’s visual centers to work harder and that how well people can process dynamic stereo information varies from person to person.

Testing Transfer

Some upcoming research the NeuroTracker team is looking forward to is a head-to-head study comparing the effects of NeuroTracker training to action video gaming. This will examine pre-post neuropsychological tests and qEEG scans of changes in brain wave activity.

The aim of the study is to reveal any differences in the training effects of each approach. In particular, this will evaluate how effectively any training benefits can transfer to improved cognitive functions. This could be of interest to professional gamers, as it might be the case that doing things other than gaming, might actually provide greater benefits to their mental muscle.

If you found this blog interesting, check out our other eSports blogs.

What It Takes to Be a Professional eSports Athlete

The Unstoppable Rise of eSports

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From industry based skill-specific training to developing technical abilities in military or medical roles, getting individuals to perform to the correct standard whenever and wherever needed is a major challenge.

To this end, important jobs often require complex and costly training programs such as advanced simulations and VR environments.  Although much time and resources are invested into these programs, there is generally a one shoe fits all approach. Consequently, the effectiveness of preparing people for real-world performance varies greatly from one individual to another. There is a very real need to ensure training programs match individual needs, and also to focus costly programs onto those who are most likely to respond well to training. Lastly, the actual ability to train should be enhanced so that progression through programs can be accelerated, and the benefits enhanced.

A New Frontier in Training Enhancement

These challenges bring the need for qualitative and objective assessments that can determine not just if an individual is ready to train, but also how well they can adapt to training. The latest neuroscience developments in cognitive assessment can provide this. What’s more, the same tools can also improve any person’s ability to benefit from training. NeuroTracker is working with industry leaders who have huge training needs and costs. We have been implementing NeuroTracker as an augmented training tool which can provide real solutions in ways that are not only impactful, but also practical, customizable, and very economical.

NeuroTracker Profiling of Training Readiness and Potential

Using NeuroTracker’s unique 3D multiple object tracking assessment, measures of high-level cognitive functions can be achieved within 6-18 minutes of testing. These have been established in the scientific literature to correlate strongly with broad human performance and learning capabilities. An initial NeuroTracker baseline also provides indicators of high-level brain functions such as executive function, working memory, several forms of attention, and mental processing speed. Furthermore, with a second level of assessment over 30 to 60 minutes of distributed training, cognitive adaptability can be assessed – measuring how effectively an individual can actually learn new tasks. In fact, because NeuroTracker is void of practice related effects, a strong improvement curve is associated with high neuroplasticity - a general ability for the brain to rewire its neural functions to respond to new learning challenges.

With minimal time investment and a test which takes less than one of instruction to engage in, companies are accessing powerful insights into the minds of their employees. This allows them to better identify those who are most ready to engage in and respond well to training programs.

Assessment of Real-World Performance Readiness

Although there are many training programs are sophisticated and generally effective, they are commonly focused on isolated abilities, rather than combined abilities that are typically faced in real-world scenarios. Consequently, they rarely predict how well those trained will deal with the pressures and unpredictably of real-world circumstances. For this reason, NeuroTracker is also integrated directly into training programs to provide a multi-tasking component and add cognitive load to simulate real-world demands at a mental level.

When performing training tasks and NeuroTracking simultaneously, drops in NeuroTracker performance accurately reveal weaknesses an individual’s ability to perform the training program under pressure. This indicates that the individual is not ready to apply their trained skills when faced with added cognitive load, revealing a lack of robustness in their trained ability, and a risk for under-performing in real-world situations. Individuals identified as at risk can then be retrained until they reach a reliable level of readiness, thus avoiding costs associated with performance problems and critical errors in real-world situations.

Accelerating Training through Enhanced Learning

All learning related training relies on the brain’s neuroplasticity, whereby neural reorganization allows an individual to physically adapt to new challenges. Furthermore, the ability to respond to challenging training programs relies on the high-level cognitive functions which NeuroTracker training has been shown to improve, both robustly and rapidly. Deemed in the literature as a gold standard cognitive enhancer, multiple peer-reviewed studies demonstrate that NeuroTracker interventions of just 1-3 hours of distributed training provide an unprecedented rate of transfer. Additionally, qEEG brain scans reveal wide increases in brain wave speeds associated with heightened states of neuroplasticity. These sustained neurophysiological changes in brain activity have been seen to produce similar effects to pharmaceutical interventions such as a Ritalin.

A short NeuroTracker intervention during the early stages of training programs is being used to effectively enhance the rate at which individuals learn and adapt, as well as heighten their ceiling for skills proficiency. This saves both time and money, tangibly improving outcomes for any demanding training programs.

Boosting Organizational Competitiveness

As we approach 2020, companies in almost all domains are experiencing the demands of performing in new and more sophisticated environments. With the rise of information technology job roles are changing rapidly, becoming more complex and necessitating greater accountability per individual. Training needs to evolve to meet these challenges. Neuroscience innovation is providing real solutions for optimizing new and existing programs on several levels. Organizations which adopt these first are likely to secure a competitive advantage in their markets, allowing them to forge the way as industry leaders in a world where enhanced cognition is pivotal.

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In the previous blog, I discussed how cognitive performance can be sensitively impacted by motor-skill loads. This is relevant even for elite athletes and with such a small difference as standing, compared to sitting, while NeuroTracking. A consequent finding was that a systematic and incremental training methodology can be used to overcome this effect – allowing complex motor-skills to be mastered while under high-cognitive load.

Cognitive Load Effects on Movement

With these concepts in mind, I became interested in turning the earlier approach on its head. Instead of seeing how motor-skill tasks impacted NeuroTracker performance, I wanted to test how NeuroTracker performance impacted motor-skills. A first look at this was through unpublished research with NHL players, where we used sophisticated motion tracking analysis to measure puck handling (stick dribbling) performance while NeuroTracking.

Players who were untrained on NeuroTracker, but had an initial baseline, were told to maintain NeuroTracking at close to their sitting baseline. We saw that the differences between puck handling alone, versus combined with NeuroTracking, were stark. Motion tracking patterns of the stick revealed that puck handling skill dropped considerably, and interestingly, the players seemed unaware of these effects.

This led on to a pilot study (published recently), where I, with graduate students, and a colleague of mine David Labbe (an expert in biomechanics), aimed to investigate the potential role of these cognitive load effects on self-sustained injuries.

Tackling ACLs

We focused on ACL injuries (anterior cruciate ligament), as these are known to be one of the most common sports injuries (up to 200,000 per year in the US), and usually occur without contact with others. There is also evidence of a relationship between lower levels on measures of cognitive ability, and increased risk of ACL injury.

In this particular study we tested college athletes in soccer, volleyball, and football. They were each asked to perform 16 separate trials of two single-leg jumps (one forward hop, then one sideways jump to the opposite leg). Movement mechanics of each jump were measured precisely via force plates, and through motion capture of the legs and pelvis (using 36 markers).

NeuroTracking was assigned randomly to half of the trials, with jumps performed during the tracking phase. We chose NeuroTracker as a controlled simulation of sports-related cognitive load. This is because we know that this task is relevant to athletic performance.

In all of the athletes, hip and knee kinematics changed significantly when NeuroTracking, compared to just jumping alone. Specifically, the largest effect found was a change in knee abduction angle, resulting in increased strain on the ACL - a factor most associated with ACL injury occurrences. This change in movement occurred with 60% of the participants, suggesting that some people may more susceptible than others and that this may be may be a valid method to pick them out. Though only a pilot study, the findings provide an indication that cognitive load can directly affect motor-skill performance in ways that increase susceptibility to physical injuries.

In this research, the athletes were untrained on NeuroTracker, so a follow-up study is planned to see if a NeuroTracker training program can reverse these types of injury risk factors using similar motion-tracking assessments, pre- and post- training intervention. If this does indeed prove to be the case, it will offer the potential for athletes to use cognitive training in order to protect themselves. This is especially relevant with NeuroTracker as it is it is highly accessible, and because data with thousands of athletes show that large improvements are attained within two to three hours of distributed training.

An effective cognitive intervention for injury prevention would generally improve health prospects for individuals taking part in sports. At the elite level, where injuries of top players are extremely costly, it would also provide a competitive edge.  This is certainly one area where professional teams know the truth in the old adage ‘prevention is better than cure’.

You can read other blogs by Professor Faubert here.

Professor Faubert Introduces the Concepts of NeuroTracker

Professor Faubert on Cognitive Enhancement

Professor Faubert on the Science Behind NeuroTracker

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eSports is growing in popularity and scale at an unprecedented rate. Now even entire stadiums are being built just to host eSports tournaments.  Cyber athletes even rival professional athletes for earnings, spectatorship, and the accompanying worship of their talents. But how do gamers make the transition from amateurs to professionals? Let’s take a look at what it takes to be the best.

What’s It All About?

Simply the short name for electronic sports, eSports have all the competitiveness of traditional sports, but from the comfort of a chair. They come with most of the challenges too, such as grueling training regimes and fierce competition needed to make it to the limelight. For example, this year’s eFIFA will pit 32 individual players against each other in the knockout tournament, and each of those players had to overcome 20 million competitors to make it to the eFIFA final!  

For these reasons, eSports has mostly shed its past difficulties in not being recognized on the level of pro sports, with the serious possibility of making it into the Olympic Games. These days, turning professional has become as realistic an option as it is for sports.

Many high-profile tournaments for games like League of Legends, DOTA, Starcraft 2, and along with first-person shooters like Overwatch, have become incredibly popular to watch. In some cases, pulling in up to 80 million live viewers. With mass spectatorship comes serious sponsorship and big prize pools. As an impressive example, the upcoming DOTA 2 International has a current prize pool of $24m and counting, all contributed by fans of the game.

This success is spurring many young and upcoming gamers to dream of becoming professionals as a long-term career. But as we will see, becoming the next big star in eSports needs a hell of a lot of dedication, talent, and then some.

The Recipe for Success

As it might not be what you’d expect, let’s run through the ingredients that make up an elite eSports athlete.

Commitment

To casual gamers, the idea of playing their favorite as much as they like might seem pretty cushy. Not the case. For most part, it’s not about fun, but rather blood, sweat and tears. Determination to undergo exhausting training, day in day out, year after year, is a crucial requirement. For example, recent rumors suggested that some Overwatch League players train 10-16 hours a day in preparation for competition. Martin "Rekkles" Larsson, who plays for UK-based organization Fnatic agreed more generally, saying,

“Players are required to put in many, many hours in order to reach - and stay at - the top level.”

It's not unusual for players to put in 16 hours of practice in a single day.”  

Overwatch star Isaac Charles (AKA ‘Boombox’) emphasized how under-recognized this level of commitment is,

“The thing about being a pro gamer is that it shocks people how much time we put into being the best. We train as hard as other sporting athletes.”

Experience

Tied to training is also experience. Cyber athletes are typically quite young in comparison to sports celebrities. However, they’ve usually been fanatically engaged in hard core gaming since they were toddlers.

In sports, there is the popular notion of the ‘10,000 hour rule’ – the practice required to achieve expertise. In eSports, this number could easily be double. This significant experience over time seems to be a prerequisite to a successful career. That said, it also comes with the risk of burnout, which is a real threat by the time pro players make it into their twenties.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is probably the most under-recognized trait of pro gamers. Performing in front of huge crowds with the threat of hundreds of thousands of dollars being lost with a single wrong click or button press - the heat is truly on. For anyone that has watched a big tournament, the pressure is unmistakably immense. Losses can come so rapidly that the psychological impacts can be devastating.

Embedded in this aspect of pressure is self-control, or inhibitory control. Being able to take carefully calculated risks, while doing a million things at once, AND resisting overly impulsive actions, is a key trait of super star eSports performers. An unnervingly cool head is a must.

Talent

A more obvious facet is talent or natural skill. With massive global participation, especially from China’s vast and fervent population, being successful means being better than millions and millions of other budding gamers. After all, one of the attractions of eSports is its almost complete lack of barriers to access. Without the natural potential to achieve super human levels of skills, all the training in the world won’t make a champion.

Teamwork

Lastly, and not for every eSports game, teamwork is a big one. It’s simply not enough to be great. Each player has to make their team great, or they will inevitably get torn apart in the fray. This is why top teams in games like DOTA 2 and League of Legends, have risen through the ranks by literally living years in the same training house or camp with their teammates. eSports teammates likely spend more time with each other than in any other profession.

Then even for players who are dedicated to solo games, they still have to learn to train with others on a daily basis. In this sport, no man is an island.

The Evolution of Competition

As we’ve just seen, it takes a lot to make to the big time.

Now however, staying competitive looks like it’s going to require going the extra mile. Major eSports stars are managed by large pro gaming organizations like Team Liquid and Fnatic. These companies are quickly realizing that nurturing the perfect cyber athlete requires a sports science mindset. Their goal is to evolve a solid competitive advantage, in the same kind of way top sports teams do.

Just as cognitive training is becoming the next revolution in traditional sports, eSports organizations are starting to adopt the latest sports science techniques and technologies within futuristic training labs. Conditioning and assessment in these involves everything from neurovision training and physiotherapy, to Neurofeedback and Biofeedback. They could easily be mistaken for the type of setup you’d expect to find in the world’s biggest sports clubs.

For this reason, there is growing interest in NeuroTracker to hone the minds of cyber athletes in a top-down fashion. The aim is to improve these athletes’ lightning quick thinking and decision-making skills. Research shows that NeuroTracker training heightens executive functions, working memory, processing speed, attention and self-control – all high-level cognitive skills essential to eSports performance.

Overall eSports is certainly an exciting and rapidly evolving domain of human performance. It could well forge the way towards a new frontier in the development of meta-human mental abilities.

If you found this interesting, take a look at our previous eSports blog.

The Unstoppable Rise of eSports

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The latest NeuroTracker study has revealed that your ability to track multiple targets in 3D is probably akin to your level of fluid intelligence. The findings provide a fresh perspective on the relevance of this type of cognitive training to human performance.

What is Fluid Intelligence?

We’re all familiar with the notion of IQ. What we are less familiar with is that IQ is broken into two separate domains of intelligence: crystallized and fluid.   Crystallized is basically about our ability to store and remember knowledge (think of Jeopardy champions), whereas fluid intelligence is more about our capacity to process, analyze and evaluate information in the moment. In a nutshell, it’s about memory versus thinking.

Knowledge is pretty much straight-forward to assess, and so people’s abilities on this side tend to be fairly well understood. On the other hand, fluid intelligence is somewhat more ephemeral, as it depends very much on the type of information and circumstances in terms of judging how well someone can think about them. Imagine trying to compare a quarter back playing in the NFL to a surgeon at the operating table. This is why IQ tests try to test very abstract and generic thinking processes like logic puzzles.

What was Found

70 young adults were assessed on NeuroTracker and the Weschler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence 2 test. Significant correlations were found between the two sets of results. This is, if NeuroTracker scores were higher than average, fluid intelligence was also higher, and vice versa.

The participants were tested on 1, 2, 3 and 4 target tracking on NeuroTracker, and the data showed that correlation withthe level of fluid intelligence was highest at 4 targets. This suggest that the abilities involved with distributing mental focus, across several streams of attention simultaneously, is a key factor in thinking skills.

Why is NeuroTracker Related?

Fluid intelligence is known to be important in most domains of human intellectual performance. Tracking balls bounce around a screen is a pretty abstract task, ipso facto, this is something most people would not normally associate with thinking skills. However, as we covered in a recent blog on the fundamentals of NeuroTracker, there are a special set of characteristics packaged into this training methodology that pack a cognitive punch when combined.

The Broader Relevance

For this reason NeuroTracker has top-down effects on cognitive function, even being shown to directly engage the command centers of the brain involved with complex decision-making. NeuroTracker inventor and researcher of the study, Professor Faubert, chose to investigate this relationship between a visual processing task and fluid intelligence because of the many studies showing that NeuroTracker engages a slew of important brain functions. In addition, scores on NeuroTracker have been shown to differentiate experts from amateurs in sports, as well as different populations and cognitive conditions.

The Role in Learning

Renowned educational strategist Dwayne Matthews believes that fluid intelligence is a critical and overlooked ingredient in the classroom, explaining that,

“Unfortunately, the traditional approach for fostering young minds in the classroom still tends to revolve around increasing crystallized intelligence (knowledge-based abilities), as opposed to fluid intelligence (thinking, reasoning and problem-solving abilities). Focusing on crystallized intelligence, rather than fluid intelligence, could be because it’s simpler for institutions to do so.

This approach, however, could lead to a disparity between who is able or unable to succeed in the classroom. For instance, students with low fluid intelligence tend to struggle with developing crystallized intelligence. As a result, these students get left behind; they are not given the chance to develop skills that actually may help them learn.”

Accordingly Matthews supports cognitive interventions like NeuroTracker, as these methods can boost core learning capacities, with the goal of improving long term educational and career outcomes. For this reason he is currently launching international trials with leading education institutes in order to track the impact of cognitive training on academic performance.

Supporting this, peer reviewed research has shown that even short NeuroTracker interventions with college students boost a wide range of high-level cognitive functions, as measured on industry standardized neuropsychological tests. This also correlated with positive increases in brainwave activity measured via qEEG assessments, across their brains.

Perhaps more promising is the pioneering research from the Perceptual Neuroscience Laboratory for Autism and Development. This controlled study showed that a 3 hour NeuroTracker intervention significantly enhanced the attention capacities of children with learning difficulties.

The evidence that fluid intelligence and NeuroTracker are closely related goes some way to explaining why this form of cognitive intervention can be so effective, and why such top-down effects occur with training.

You can read the summary of the study by downloading our free ‘NeuroTracker Science Overview’ here (study no. 33).

To find out more about NeuroTracker and educational learning, check out these blogs.

How Can We Enhance Learning Outcomes?

Boosting Student Attention

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

For the Playmaker’s Advantage I wanted to write a book to get across what I think is the most important message in sports right now – that the perceptual-cognitive system needs to be recognised as a pivotal way to train sports performance.  Partly this is because cognitive neuroscience over recent decades has started to blossom. But undeniably, technology advancements have also had a major effect, making effective training technologies accessible to coaches and athletes.  NeuroTracker is a pertinent example here, along with tools I use for training occlusion and pitch recognition in in baseball and softball.  These techniques force athletes to make more accurate decisions by efficiently perceiving what’s actually happening out there.

The Cognitive Performance Spectrum

There are a lot of skills that can be conditioned in this domain. Firstly, to able to perceive and draw in more sensory information, for greater situational awareness.  Secondly to improve processing speed to be able to act and react more rapidly.  Thirdly, to improve decision-making accuracy and response control, for keener ‘game sense’. And fourthly, to be able to execute actions more precisely, efficiently, and avoid critical errors.

Collectively these are skills which are all put under enormous pressure in the demands of competition. So every athlete out there, no matter what their level, can benefit by improving them.

The Next Performance Paradigm

Just as strength and conditioning took many years to become accepted as a core part of most athletic programs - even though its usefulness had been understood by sports scientists much earlier – cognitive training is now coming to the foreground. I and my co-author Dan Peterson use the term ‘Playmaker’ to symbolize the type of athletes who can perform and execute well under pressure at superior levels. Though many people think athletes like Sydney Crosby, Lionel Messi, Joey Votto, Tom Brady, and Stephen Curry are simply gifted, it’s not necessarily the case. Years of conditioning, along with the right kinds of thinking and experiences, can build up these elite processing and decision-making skills.

When we think of the total athlete’s abilities in terms of physical, technical, tactical, and cognitive skill we know athlete performance can be improved through cognitive training. To illustrate, sports writer David Epstein uncovered the role of cognitive systems in endurance, whereby there are brain mechanisms that can actually unlock physical reserves beyond what the physical body can normally do.

Taking a Structured Approach

The trick is not waiting for these abilities to happen almost incidentally, but instead to take a systematic approach to training Playmaker skills with the latest techniques. Most professional coaches know the importance here, but are not usually aware of the best and latest methods for training the thinking system.

From my experience working with many professional teams across different sports, there is a sense of frustration for coaches, because they really want to be able to get their athletes to think faster and act more precisely. So when they can learn to deliver these skills through deliberate practice, they really start to get it. Then accordingly, they mature as coaches. They also start to see the extra value

From my own experience as Director of Sports Science at the Vancouver Canucks, we found that there was almost a one to one correspondence with scores on NeuroTracker and decision-making accuracy on the ice. This really surprised the coaches and scouts. You can imagine just how valuable measures like this can be for identifying upcoming talents.  What’s more it can help you understand how to individualize training programs in order to sculpt them to the specific needs of each athlete.

Educating Professional Sports

My mission is to preach to such coaches to always be looking for ways to train the perceptual-decision making systems of athletes. Going hand in hand with this, the data that comes with this training also delivers valuable profiling data on the cognitive dimension of performance, which is usually hidden.

Dan Peterson and I are planning to provide workshops around North America and the globe where coaches and athletes can find out tangible ways to train up critical perceptual-cognitive skills.

If you are interested in finding out more about the perceptual-cognitive approach to cognitive training, then check out mine and Dan Peterson’s website ‘80% Mental’, geared to helping teams develop their Athlete Cognition.

http://www.80percentmental.com/

My book ‘The Playmaker’s Advantage’ can also be found here.

http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Playmakers-Advantage/Leonard-Zaichkowsky/9781501181863

You can also read a review of the book by the NeuroTracker team.

The Playmaker’s Advantage

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Before we begin this post, we would like to take this opportunity to remember and pay respect to all those who gave their lives for the protection of their country. Lest We Forget.

NeuroTracker Tactical Awareness speeds up the learning of tactical decision-making by training military personnel, firefighters and even the police to distinguish tactical cues enabling them to adapt their attention to focus on a complex and hostile, environment. A good example of how it could work for you is to watch the movie G.I. Joe Retaliation where a tactical decision could mean the difference between life and death.

The Scenario:

Interested in finding out more about how does NeuroTracker’s Tactical Awareness mode work? Basically, it involves trailing 4 out of 8 targets while simultaneously assimilating data for sensible tactical decisions based on an image behind those targets. This tool educates operators to confidently switch between situational awareness (NeuroTracker’s complex environment) and tactical awareness (relevant decision-making signals). By boosting the ability to follow and anticipate moment-to-moment cues, a soldier will gain a thorough understanding of a situation, allowing them to effectively apply their learned tactical expertise within the cognitive memory.

Educating and having the ability to channel attention, switching from one scenario to a different one within the same environment depends greatly on how rapidly you are capable of processing large amounts of information within your brain to lead to a speedy execution of the tactical decision.

Studies have shown that the NeuroTracker Tactical Awareness mode pushes the human brain to certain limits whereby it senses relevant tactical cues while maintaining total awareness of a complex and hostile situation. When a soldier undergoes the 3D multiple object tracking process, NeuroTracker training creates certain neural pathways increasing the cognitive capacity to acknowledge the disordered motion, maintain attention and recognize basic tactical cues, resulting in a more effective use of expertise and destroying the target if necessary.

What are the Benefits to the Military?

As a soldier under the program, the training can be applied to recognize challenges like identifying the target in a chaotic situation and reaching the optimal tactical path to deal with a potential threat. With NeuroTracker’s dynamic cognitive training, combined with customizable tactical scenarios, soldiers can speedily adapt to new situations.

NeuroTracker’s Awareness mode can be tailored to a person’s specific requirements or goals. This is ideal for new entrants into the military to get a feel for the kind of environment they could be working in. The possibilities within this program are endless because they can be as broad and disparate as playbook learning, opportunity recognition, assimilating information in a hostile situation, to tackling opponents and goal scoring opportunity recognition within team sports. Quite obviously your imagination is your limit and scenarios and boundaries really are infinite.

Furthermore, the NeuroTracker Tactical Awareness mode pushes you beyond the limits of your normal imagination by not limiting learning to specific contexts. Rather, the training process is improving and consolidating the fundamental neural processes involved with recognizing and anticipating signals and making tactical decisions, which leads to a speedy and automatic execution of proper military tactics.

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A new study shows that the summer heat doesn’t just make you feel uncomfortable, it can also impair your cognitive functions. The results showed that even performing simple math can become more difficult.

Affecting How We Perform

Previous studies had found that worker productivity is highest at about 72 degrees, but above 80 degrees productivity starts to decline. A recent study also found that workers in typical office buildings, compared to green-certified buildings, experience a dip in cognitive functions. This effect is likely something we’re not so aware of, because of the gradual temperature throughout the day - akin to the idea of boiling a frog.

When it comes to very hot days, even being able to graduate from school can be threatened. A study by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program found that sweltering days is results in generally poorer exam performance.

Making the Most of a Heat Wave

Carried out in the brutal summer of 2016, which broke two centuries of US heat wave records, researchers of this new study conducted a unique test by putting students in hot and cool dorms during a Boston heat wave.

The weather made it perfect conditions for the investigation, which placed half of the young people in buildings with central AC, where the indoor air temperature averaged 71 degrees. The other half had to sweat it out in dorms on the 6th floor of an old building, and with no AC. In these dorms temperatures averaged 80 degrees.

In total 44 students just under and over 20 years old spent 12 days in the Boston dorms. Each morning the students had to take a series of mental tests on their smartphones. This included the classic inhibition Stroop Test, which involves quickly identifying the colors of words, rather than the words which actually spell out colors. It’s known to be a test of working memory and processing speed. Other tasks incorporated the solving of math problems.

Testing Young People

Most other research on heat and wellbeing had been done with the elderly, sick, or very young, as they are much more vulnerable to excessive heat. Headed by Jose Guillermo Cedeño-Laurent, research fellow at Harvard Chan School, this test of endurance represented the first field study on how a heat wave can influence young and healthy individuals.

What Was Found

Memory functions and cognitive speed of processing was worse for the clammy students than that of their chilled counterparts. As Dr. Cedeño-Laurent put it,

"We found that the students who were in the non-air-conditioned buildings actually had slower reaction times: 13 percent lower performance on basic arithmetic tests, and nearly a 10 percent reduction in the number of correct responses per minute."

The Implications

In ordinary daily life, 10-13% decline in mental functions may not sound like a lot.  But when it comes to performing on demand, it can have a significant impact.  For example in handling a car in potential accident scenarios, processing speed can be a huge factor in decision-making and stopping time – which is why alcohol consumption is such a risk.

Another factor is the idea of cumulative cognitive function deficits across large percentages of the population. As Dr. Cedeno-Laurent commented,

“By making the findings relatable to any of us, it makes the issue of climate change personal. We on purpose elected this population because it’s normally considered to be resilient to heat exposure, but we found the effects on them...that these are effects that could be seen widely on the general population. The brain is the centre of control for every process in our life.”

In terms of how well a whole country is faring during prolonged heat waves, high temperatures could have significant implications on educational, economic, and productivity outcomes.

From a sports perspective over-heating could also be a significant performance factor. Although physically, athletes may be well conditioned to push through, mentally it could be a different story.  Taking into account that football games in the US can take place in hot and humid conditions, as well as the amount of gear they wear during repeated bouts of anaerobic stress, game sense could well take a dive.

Although this would affect both teams, training strategies like NeuroTracker that could build up cognitive resilience to such effects, may provide a pivotal competitive advantage.

The study was published in the journal PLOS Medicine

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Just published by Kevin George, Soccology is a book for absolutely everyone who’s interested in soccer. It’s especially an eye opener for people looking to learn more about the whole ecosystem and culture surrounding the sport.

As part of his vast research for the book, Kevin came across NeuroTracker at an EPL club and was instantly fascinated with how it could help elite players. Straight away he sought an interview with Professor Jocelyn Faubert to learn about the concepts behind the technology. He then included a chapter called the ‘Mind, Body and Eyes’ in the book where he covered how methods like NeuroTracker can help develop what he calls ‘The Mother Board of a Footballer’.

In his own words, Kevin described NeuroTracker as “3D object tracking used to develop brain functions critical for learning, to help with processing information when performing and to make better decisions.”  Intrigued by Kevin’s deep insights into the game, Professor Faubert received a pre-published copy of Soccology, and had this to say about it:

“As a man who knows the game intimately, Kevin George takes a real and very unique look into the what drives the careers of footballers, with countless examples of how many of the great players achieved their success. In particular, he brings fresh insights as to why decision-making in football is seen as the ‘god of skills’, why its importance is respected yet not developed systematically, and he reveals the latest ways to nurture game intelligence.”

Kevin also gave an interview with NeuroTracker, explaining his quest to reveal the psycho-emotional side of the story of the world’s most popular sport. A man with unlimited passion and a non-stop mind, Kevin’s goal was to be able to reach people he doesn’t meet through his consultancy and speeches.

In particular, he sought to uncover the myriads of factors influencing a player's performance on the pitch, and what really goes on in the hearts and minds of professional footballers, their managers, and coaches. Helping spell out the concepts, the pages are flourished with countless quotes from professional players and coaches that he’s talked to in person. He’s certainly a man with his finger firmly on the pulse of the modern game.

What makes the book a refreshing read is the way Kevin provocatively dismantles the expert footballer’s heart and brain. He then delivers unique knowledge on the humanistic side of the game. This is important territory that’s rarely ever discussed, and certainly not in such a candid way.

Whether it’s the animalistic side of street culture’s role in producing rare talents, or the politics of how the commercial soccer system doesn’t always have the player’s best interests in mind, Kevin explains his way through deep paradigms like he’s having a chat with you in person.

Most importantly, he expounds on just how misunderstood pro players are in the media and public’s perception. Rather than simply being labeled as an exuberant salary, they are real people who have to overcome immense of pressures and constant challenges to keep their place in a team.

With the World Cup just over, Soccology is a great way to learn a whole new perspective on the world of soccer, especially for anyone aspiring to make it as a professional player.

About Kevin George

Former West Ham and Charlton footballer turned human behavior specialist, Kevin George based ‘Soccology’ on his internationally acclaimed course of the same name. He specializes in understanding the role of childhood, feelings, environment , and lifestyle on a player's mindset and how to use a player-centered approach to get optimum results. The book is considered a must-read for all lovers of the game.

Look out for an upcoming Expert’s Corner Blog by the man himself.

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If you have heard of NeuroTracker, but don’t know much about it other than balls bouncing around a screen, then this blog is a chance to get a grasp of the fundamentals of this unique cognitive training method.

NeuroTracker Characteristics

The NeuroTracker methodology evolved out of many years of neuroscience research at the Faubert Lab (University of Montreal). There were two principle aims for its development.

The first was to devise a way to simulate the mental demands of ‘dynamic scenes’ – such as those found when playing sports, driving a car, or even walking through a busy shopping mall. These scenes involve complex, fast-moving, and sometimes chaotic visual stimulation that draw significant cognitive resources.

The second was to simulate these demands in a way that isolated only the fundamental properties of dynamic scenes. In order to measure performance, this is essential. It is also necessary to be able to modify cognitive loads in precise ways.

Solving these two aims involved synthesizing the following characteristics into a single task.

1. Multiple object tracking
2. Why? To engage multiple streams of attention at the same time and to generate scene complexity.
3. Stereoscopic 3D
4. Why? To realistically engage higher-order visual functions in the brain, allowing stimulation at higher levels than achievable with non-stereo 2D.
5. Wide field of view
6. Why? To place demands on peripheral vision systems, stimulating larger visual networks in the brain.
7. Speed thresholds
8. Why? To optimize difficulty closely to each individual’s level, and to measure task performance with scientific precision.

One other thing is that NeuroTracker also uses a sports science technique known as a ‘visual pivot’. It’s essentially a dot in the middle of the screen - a point of reference as a visual anchor for the eyes. This helps with tracking targets simultaneously so that attention can be spread widely to make use of peripheral vision (something that is not so intuitive).

Overall, this combination of characteristics delivers a powerful tool for the training of high-level cognitive abilities using a neutral and abstract task. These abilities are enhanced in a top-down fashion, positively influencing broad skills such as concentration and decision-making.

Adaptive Training

Each NeuroTracker session contains 20 ‘trials’ – these are essentially a sequence of mini-tests. Every time you achieve a correct or incorrect trial, the software adjust tracking speed to your ability. This is an adaptive staircase algorithm, that makes each session uniquely difficult for each person.

What does this mean? When a user correctly identifies all the targets on a trial, the speed of the balls in the subsequent trial will increase, when a user does not correctly identify all the targets, the speed of the balls will decrease in the subsequent trial. NeuroTracker continuously identifies the ideal speed at which the user can track the targets at. It quickly narrows in on each user’s optimal zone, so the fluctuations of speed between the trials become smaller as the session goes on. In effect, it is never too easy and never too hard - a recipe for improvement.

If you’d like to try a demo in 2D, you can try NeuroTracker for free here. Don’t worry, it will go easy on you!

Or you can watch this short video where Professor Faubert introduces the basics concepts of NeuroTracker.

Speed Thresholds

The score given at the end of each session is the speed at which a user is able to track all targets correctly around 50% of the time (their ‘speed threshold’). This is a unique NeuroTracker metric that can be used to assess a person's cognitive capacity on day one, and across improvements through training over time.

This scientific measure represents an individual’s high-level cognitive capacities, and has been used in lots of research to assess the cognitive state of different populations, or the influences of certain activities. For example, one study tested jet pilots on NeuroTracker while in live flight so they could measure the mental demands of complex flight maneuvers.

Revealing the Minds of Jet Pilots

Learning Effects

Every individual is different, and with NeuroTracker every individual has their own expertise level and learning curve. Therefore, each person’s NeuroTracker scores may differ from others.

For example, a study published in Nature Scientific Reports by Professor Faubert (the inventor of NeuroTracker), showed that professional athletes, varsity athletes, and non-athletes university students perform and improve at NeuroTracker at different levels. In particular, the study demonstrated that elite athletes have superior learning capacities for this type of cognitive task. However, pretty much everybody who trains sees major improvements with training over time, so experience with NeuroTracker is a key factor measuring where an individual is at cognitively. Another study by Professor Faubert showed that even though healthy older people initially tend to have much lower speed thresholds than a young person, but with just a few hours distributed NeuroTracker they can match them.

How the Brain Reveals Human Potential

A number of NeuroTracker studies with athletes and other populations show that people training on NeuroTracker typically improve their speed thresholds by 50% or more within 3 hours of distributed. Taking into account that the task involves negligible technique or practice related effects, these gains represent large improvements in actual brain functions.

Therefore, the key thing for anyone is not how they start off, but how much they improve, especially as there are studies which show that NeuroTracker training transfers to gain in real world performance.

Advanced Training

Core training is just the beginning. When it comes to evolving both assessment and performance, there are lots of ways to transform NeuroTracker training.

Once users show continuous improvement, similar to the curve we reviewed earlier, you can advance the training depending on your training objectives.

We recommend that NeuroTracker training advances after 15 to 30 sessions, after what we call the ‘consolidation phase’ – in Professor Faubert’s words ‘this prepares the brain for learning’. Once this is completed, activities such as performing dual-tasks while NeuroTracking, such as practicing balance skills or dribbling a basketball can be efficiently learned. However, the difficulty of these tasks needs to be progressed from simple to complex over time.

If you’d like to get an overview of where advanced training can go, you can read this earlier blog.

5 Ways to Take NeuroTracker to the Next Level

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When people think of concussions in sports, they visualize a football player flying headlong into a tackle and the crack of helmet-on-helmet contact.  And while a direct hit to the head is certainly a possible cause of concussions, it is by no means the only culprit.

Let’s start by laying out what is going on in your head during a concussion.  The brain is soft and surrounded by clear cerebrospinal fluid.  This fluid, amongst other things, serves as a buffer between your brain and your skull.  Normally, it absorbs the shock of a blow to the head and keeps the brain from being buffeted against the skull.  During a concussion, however, your head receives a shock, such that your brain hits the hard skull bone and begins to swell from the impact.

1. Direct Head Trauma

This one seems obvious:  it’s what most people think of when they hear the word concussion.  A direct hit to the head, especially one that snaps your head backwards is very likely to cause a concussion.

2. Whiplash

There is a direct link between neck strain injuries like whiplash and concussions.  Whether this is from a car accident or a huge hit in football, many cases of whiplash or a similar neck injury coincide with a concussion.

3. Falling

Anytime you take a jarring fall, you are put at risk of a concussion.  Similar to whiplash, it may not be a direct hit to your head, but an overall jolt to your body that can cause a concussion.  Falling is one of the most prevalent causes of concussions that are not sports-related.

4. Explosions

Common mainly in people serving in the military, concussions caused by explosions are actually quite unique.  Rather than a physical trauma causing the brain to hit against the skull, these concussions are caused by the nearly instantaneous changes in air pressure that occur during an explosion.  And according to a recent study published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, concussions caused by explosions could contribute to PTSD.

5. Spinning Your Head

Rotational force can actually be more damaging to your brain that direct force.  So whipping your head around too quickly, especially when stopped suddenly, is a good way to give yourself a concussion.  If you feel suddenly foggy and lightheaded after such a spin, it may be the early signs of a concussion.

6. Lesser Injuries

Sustaining several mild brain injuries that don’t qualify as a concussion can, over time, build up into the equivalent of a concussion.  In fact, in some cases these sub-concussive level injuries result in more damage because they are never diagnosed and treated.

7. Previous Concussions

Your chances of concussion increase exponentially after every concussion.  So after one concussion, you are 2-4 times more likely to get your second.  After the second concussion, you are 4-6 times as likely to get a third.  From there, you are 6-9 times more likely to get a fourth.  And so on.  That is partly due to the fact that people who suffer multiple concussions are usually involved in activities in which concussions are more prevalent. But it also has to do with the chemistry in your brain.  The chemistry is changed during a concussion, and that change can leave you vulnerable to having a second concussion.

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The 2018 Wimbledon final saw two giants of tennis trying to make comebacks in their career to reclaim their titles. Novak Djokovic triumphed, and Serena Williams lost, yet she still inspired the crowd.

Djokovic’s First Grand Slam Title in Two Years

Djokovic beat the South African Kevin Anderson to win his fourth Wimbledon championship. Seeded 12th, he won in 3 straight sets to claim his 13th Slam, his first since the 2016 French Open. The Serb quickly took control of the match and was able to break Anderson’s serve repeatedly in the first two sets. The third set went to a tie-breaker, but Djokovic promptly regained his dominating form to clinch the victory.

Overcoming Doubt

Immediately after claiming the title Djokovic celebrated wildly in front of his coaching team and wife, with his 3-year-old son joining the crowd during the award ceremony. Although he had won the Wimbledon title in 2011, 2014 and 2015, this tournament was an unexpected victory. In his own words,

"I had many moments of doubt, I didn't know if I could come back to this level to compete.  There is no better place to make a comeback, it's a sacred place for the world of tennis, it's very special."

With this win, he is now back in the top ten men’s world rankings and chasing the grand slam records of tennis legends Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Pete Sampras, just needing one more to equal Sampras.

Kerber Beats Inspiring Serena

Germany's Angelique Kerber won the Wimbledon single women’s final on Saturday, preventing Williams' quest to win a 24th Grand Slam title and eighth Wimbledon championship. The 36-year-old Kerber went in as 11th seed and beat the favorite 6-3 6-3 to take her third grand slam after winning the Australian Open and US Open in 2016.

Despite Serena’s world ranking of 181 due to missing much of the season after giving birth, she was still odds-on for the title because of her championship mindset, physical prowess, and because she flourishes on the fast surface of grass.

Controlling the Game

Kerber, who is usually a defensive player, switched up her tactics with an aggressive attacking style of play to strain Williams' mobility around the court. It was a rewarding strategy which led to Serena dashing to the net frequently and making 12 errors there. The German former world number one also managed to keep breaking the formidable Williams serve.

On winning, Kerber dropped to the grass to revel in the glory. The first German woman to win Wimbledon since Steffi Graf in 1996, she claimed: "It is a dream come true". The victory was all the more poignant because she was beaten by Williams in the 2016 Wimbledon final, who came over to her side of the net with a congratulating warm embrace.

Super Mom?

Williams was just a single victory away matching the women’s tennis record of 24 Grand Slams. She has been trying to get her career back after giving birth to her daughter, Olympia, in September. The birth was followed by complications and surgery. Alexis Ohanian, Williams' husband, said that she was just getting started in her comeback, noting that,

"Days after our baby girl was born, I kissed my wife goodbye before surgery and neither of us knew if she would be coming back. We just wanted her to survive—10 months later, she's in the Wimbledon final".

In an interview after the game, Williams stated she was playing for all mothers that want to go back to careers while raising children.

"I had such a long struggle to come back and it was really difficult and honestly I feel like if I can do it, they can do it. I'm just that person that's saying 'you can be whatever you want to be if you want to go back to work.' "

Due to the massive challenges she has overcome, a flurry of social media reacted to her inspiring words, with many pundits hailing her as a 'Super Mom'. Unsurprisingly, Serena and her husband now have their sights set on future titles while raising their daughter.

If you want to learn how cognitive training technology can help tennis skills, then check this blog.

Winning the Game of Minds – NeuroTracker and Tennis

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Croatia are the lowest ranked team to ever make it to the 21st World Cup final. They will face France on Sunday, a team that’s so loaded with talent they’ve rarely had to exit second gear. While Croatia have expended more physical and emotional energy than anyone in the tournament, they will be more psyched than anyone could imagine to be able to play in the final.

The Showdown

The final line-up was determined on Wednesday, when Croatia outlasted England in extra time at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. On review, Croatia believed England underestimated them, to their downfall. This is something unlikely to happen with France, who have demonstrated some superlative defensive play. France was a favorite before the tournament and will remain so Sunday, but not by much, as they still have to show their class on the attack.  The latest odds have been touted to be 60/40 in France’s favor. This is kind of remarkable, seeing as the market value of the Croatian team is a tiny fraction of France’s, who are collectively worth $1.2 billion.

How Will it Play Out?

With its talent depth and smooth path to the final, France will surely be the fresher team. That said, the resilient Croatian team will be on an unbelievable high, and bolstered by the emphatic support of their nation behind them. Tactics decided by the managers will certainly be a big factor in how the match plays out.

Soccer commentators expect a key part of the game will come down to the force and flair of their midfields and flanks, where stars in France’s line-up have been able to control the flow of their games so far. However, both teams have displayed unpredictable styles of play.

‘Les Bleus’

‘The blues’ came to Russia facing a lot to prove after losing the Euro 2016 final on home soil. Nothing less than a place in the final would’ve been acceptable to the nation’s fans. They came through, but not in the conquering flair that their line-up would have suggested. Strangely enough this hasn’t been surprising in the broader 2018 World Story, considering that no other favorites even made it to the semi-finals.

Coach Didier Deschamps has been taking a consistently conservative approach, with France slowly taking control of their games, and only scoring the goals it needed to progress. Several key goals so far have come from center backs, showing an unorthodox strategy which may make it difficult for Croatia to predict. They certainly have the flexibility to morph their play as needed.

Whether France’s tactical play will become more assertive for the final is anyone’s guess. As this is unknown territory for Croatia. Intuiting their psychological status during the game, and adapting accordingly, may be France’s best approach.

The potential starting line-up for France will be (4-3-3): Lloris; Pavard, Varane, Umtiti, Hernandez; Pogba, Kante; Mbappe, Griezmann, Matuidi; Giroud

‘The Vatreni’

‘The blazers’ were close to missing out on Russia altogether, as former coach Ante Čačić was fired just a couple days before their last scheduled qualifier. Part of the drama of watching Croatia so far is that they seem to get in trouble constantly, then almost magically transmute chaos into success.

The talent in their key players seems to have emerged from the indefatigable desire to win. The versatile and relentless Modrić has been a huge part of Real Madrid’s three consecutive European titles, experience which can provide a core for teammates to be inspired by. At times they have simply looked fantastic during the group stage, yet surprisingly the knockout rounds saw them struggle against outsider teams, taking them to extra time in all three games. It’s seems they thrive on a David and Goliath type showdown.

With total overtime they’ve now played the equivalent of full match more than France. Yet they stand on the brink of rewriting the possibilities of World Cup history – if they can win just one more match. Having failed to qualify or get out of the group stage for the last two decades, their performance has been the definition of unprecedented. No other up and coming team has ever won the World Cup before, but for Croatia, this is their chance.

The potential starting line-up for Croatia will be (4-3-3): Subasic; Vrsajlko, Lovren, Vida, Strinic; Modric, Brozovic, Rakitic; Perisic, Mandzukic, Rebic

If you missed the build up to the final, then check out this blog.

World Cup Fever

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The 2018 World Cup has had more than its fair shares of glorious upsets and violent delights. Defending world champions Germany crashed out of the World Cup after a shock 2-0 loss to South Korea, courtesy of two stoppage-time goals. Such an outcome barely seemed possible at the start of this month, when it selected a squad so loaded with talent that a cache of genuine world-class stars were omitted.

Shock After Shock

Brazil, the giants of World Cup football, were toppled by the tiny country of Belgium, who played a masterfully strategic game. Close rivals Spain and Portugal, who were also contending favorites, and clashed with each other in an epic first-round match, got knocked out by Russia and Uruguay respectively.

To add to the drama, underdogs Croatia also beat host country Russia, to snatch their spot in the semi-finals. The most goals ever scored by one player in a World Cup match is an impressive five, by Oleg Salenko of Russia, so the country will be devastated by their recent exit.

In the aftermath of the time the quarterfinals, legends of the modern game like Messi, Ronaldo, and Neymar have all bit the dust.

From 32 to 4

Out of 32 starting teams, just 4 now remain in contention for the exalted FIFA World Cup trophy. For the very first time since 1958, Italy was not part of the FIFA World Cup. Some teams did not make it to the World Cup regardless of their soccer skills. Zimbabwe was expelled by FIFA from qualifying in the World Cup Russia 2018 because they did not pay their coach. Then Indonesia was expelled by FIFA for participating in the qualifiers because of its government’s interference in the game.

Deciding the Final

The semi-final matches will be over by today, with France defeating Belgium 1-0 yesterday, and England playing Croatia today.  Apart from France, these teams would have been all outsider bets at the bookies at the beginning of the World Cup.

That said, France is by no means clear favorites, as all as England and Croatia have risen to the occasion, applying some superlative soccer to overcome their opposition. It’s going to take passion, belief and skill for each team to rise to the occasion and win the final.

Like England in 1966, France also won the World Cup on their home soil back in 1998, which may give both teams a motivational edge. Somewhat remarkably, all the semifinal teams are European. In today’s very international game, this means that some fans will be watching players they usually support at the club level, but playing for the other side!

The Game of Games

3.2 billion people (almost half of the world’s population) tuned in to watch the 2014 World Cup, making soccer, or ‘football’ as most nations call it, the planet’s most popular sport.  Like the Olympics, it only comes round once every four years, making it an exceptional sporting event.

The World Cup has been played 20 times, Brazil holds the most titles with five. Italy and Germany are close behind with four each. Though, all of these teams have lost their chance to reclaim the title this year.  We will have to watch and see who writes the annals of football history in 2018.

It’s not unusual to see the final games of the World Cup to be decided on nail-biting penalties- if you want to learn what this is all about then check out this blog.

The Science Behind Elite Penalty Kicks

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Tennis isn’t just a game of skill and physical toughness; it is a game of minds like no other sport in the world. Here’s a great example of who the adversity players face on the big stage and their capacity to remain focused and endure the mental pressures of the game can dramatically turn around the results of a match in an instant. During the 2011 US Open semi-finals, Novak Djokovic, down 3-5 in the fifth set, saved two match points against Roger Federer with an incredible forehand winner, to stage a fantastic come back, book his ticket to the finals and win his fourth Grand Slam.

Awareness and focus in the game of tennis are key to anticipate where your opponent will hit the ball and when to attack the net, for example. Improving positioning through cognitive training can help a player get to the ball and dictate both the play and the pace of the game. Digging deep to overcome physical exhaustion when playing in the final of the Australian Open for 5 hours and 53 minutes and playing the longest singles final in the history of the Open Era is not just about being in prime physical shape, it is about mental strength and skill to make crucial decisions on the court. The Australian Open final between Novak Djokovic and Rafa Nadal showcased the capacity of two great rivals to remain at the top of their mental game.

How Training Your Brain Can Help You Serve for Success

Cognitive training technology trains the brain to become adaptable in complex situations. By improving, a tennis player can focus on court positioning and how to anticipate an opponent’s shot. Roger Federer is a master at throwing his opponents off-guard by using a multitude of trick shots like his famous Sneak Attack By Roger Federer, dubbed the SABRE, which consists of running in to hit a return on a serve. The complexity of Federer’s shot can be countered in a simulated environment that triggers the brain to focus on completing difficult tasks, as is the case with NeuroTracker.

Tennis has always incorporated innovative training methodologies to increase the pace and quality of the game. When facing a serve at 130mph from 75 feet away, sharp visual perception skills can help you predict the path of the yellow tennis ball. NeuroTracker can help in the perceptual reaction and cognitive reaction aspects of the game, in other words, in the positioning to return a fast serve back into play.

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