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The competition in professional sports is fierce.  Coaches and athletes know that the key to athletic success is training that transfers to better performance.  In the previous blog, we saw how NeuroTracker can assess athletic abilities. In this follow-up blog, we’ll look at three studies showing how NeuroTracker training can enhance the all-important cognitive dimensions of performance.

1. Boosting Brain Functions

Sports science studies have shown time and again that high-level cognitive abilities are central ingredients for elite athletic performance.  For example, sports stars typically have higher than normal levels of executive functions, working memory and attention. This study looked to see if such abilities could be trained with NeuroTracker and if this would be revealed as physiological changes in the brain.

What Was Studied

University students performed a training program of 30 NeuroTracker sessions, along with a battery of standardized neuropsychological assessments before and after training. The students also had their brain activity scrutinized via qEEG assessments, pre and post training.

What Was Found

After NeuroTracker training, the students’ scores increased across a wide range of neuropsychological tests, whereas a control group showed no change.  The tests revealed significant improvements in executive function, working memory, processing speed, and several types of attention.

The qEEG measures showed heightened brainwave frequencies throughout many regions of the brain.  These sustained changes were associated with a higher state of alertness and mental focus, as well as increased neuroplasticity.

What It Means

The gains in brainwave activity represented improvements in peak performance capacities. These changes also occurred in frontal lobe regions. This showed that vision training can transfer to the ‘command center’ of the brain, which is responsible for complex processes like decision-making.  This also explained why high-level cognitive abilities like executive function had improved on the test scores.  Although the study only showed ‘near transfer’, it demonstrates that a wide range of mental skills, known to be critical for sports performance, could be improved rapidly and robustly with NeuroTracker training.

Study: Enhancing Cognitive Function Using Perceptual-Cognitive Training

2. Enhancing Decision-Making on the Field

When it comes to team sports, coaches and pro players consistently point to decision-making as a crucial factor for top performance.  However, because sports like football and soccer have incredibly complex and often chaotic patterns of play, training specific decision-making skills is extremely challenging.  This is one reason why NFL pros spend as much as 40 hours per week watching video replays.  But what if fundamental decision-making abilities could be improved in ways that would apply to any situation?  This ambitious study attempted to show just that.

What Was Studied

Collegiate soccer players were trained on 30 sessions of NeuroTracker over 5 weeks.  Each player’s passing decision-making performance was analyzed by coaches via video replays across a series of competitive matches.  An active group and a control group were included in the study, and the coaches were blind as to which soccer players were in which groups.  Subjective evaluations were also carried out by the players on their own decision-making performance.

What Was Found

The control groups show almost no changes, whereas the NeuroTracker (3D-MOT) trained group experienced a 15% improvement in passing decision-making accuracy.  Interestingly, the players’ self-evaluations closely matched the objective coach assessments.

What It Means

For the first time, this study demonstrated that perceptual-cognitive training could transfer to tangible performance gains on the field.  In a meta-review of 1692 sports science studies, it was deemed to provide the only evidence of far transfer in elite athletes.  In a Neuronfire interview with Professor Faubert, eminent neuroscientist Dr. David Bach underlined the gravity of this research:

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

Study: 3D-Multiple Object Tracking training task improves passing decision-making accuracy in soccer players

3. Improving Olympic Athlete Performance

As we covered in a previous blog, sports vision training is becoming the next big way to achieve a performance edge over the competition.  Vision trainers typically use a range of sophisticated visual assessments that can track changes across low to high-level visual functions.  Sports vision scientists at the CAR Olympic training center in Barcelona decided to see if NeuroTracker training could improve visual functions and mental performance with athletes in three different Olympic sports.

What Was Studied

Olympians in tennis, taekwondo and water polo were trained on a 26 session NeuroTracker program.  The training progressed in complexity by integrating basic and advanced dual-tasks in the latter half of the program.  Before and after training the athletes underwent a rigorous battery of sophisticated vision and optometric assessments.  Throughout the training program, both athletes and their coaches also carried out a series of assessments on their mental performance.

What Was Found

The NeuroTracker training resulted in significant gains for static visual acuity, stereopsis, spatial contrast sensitivity, saccadic ocular movements, and selective attention.  Across all sports, the athlete and coach performance assessments showed large improvements in concentration, perception speed, and peripheral vision.  Although these assessments were subjective, gains progressed consistently throughout the training program, and in ways that were almost identical between coaches and athletes.

What It Means

This complex study showed that perceptual-cognitive training has the potential to improve a wide range of specific visual functions needed to perform at a high level.  As the performance assessments showed consistent and continuous improvements, it also suggests that NeuroTracker can keep improving mental focus with on-going training.  Lastly, the basic and advanced dual-tasks caused initial drops in NeuroTracker scores, however, the athletes rapidly recovered their levels with training.  This demonstrated that athletes can learn to manage high neurophysical training loads, leading the way to the NeuroTracker Learning System.

Study: Perceptual-cognitive Training with the NeuroTracker 3D-MOT to Improve Performance in Three Different Sports

In the next blog in this three-part series, we’ll find out how NeuroTracker goes beyond sports, and into diverse and surprising areas of human performance.

Interested in NeuroTracker research? You can find study summaries here:

Performance

Wellness

Learning

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With over 30 studies published on Human Performance, NeuroTracker research is revealing just how closely the brain and body are connected when it comes to sports.  Here we take a look at three key studies which show that athletes’ brains are key to their success on the field.

1. Discovering Athletic Neuroplasticity

Team sport athletes tend to get labeled with the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype, but maybe what makes them special is actually more about their brains than their bodies.  This study pit elite athletes against university students to see if they had a hidden intelligence edge.

What Was Studied

102 elite athletes from top teams in the NHL, EPL and European Rugby, 173 elite amateurs (NCAA), and 33 non-athlete university students all performed 15 NeuroTracker sessions over several weeks.  The aim was to find out initial ability on a demanding yet neutral cognitive task, and then measure how quickly participants’ brains adapted to NeuroTracker training.

What Was Found

The sports stars started out with the highest NeuroTracker scores. Surprisingly, they also learned at a much faster rate than the collegiate athletes, who in turn learned faster than the university students.

What It Means

This study showed that elite athletes have superior cognitive capacities for perceiving complex and dynamic scenes.  However, and more importantly, it discovered for the first time that they also have much greater neuroplasticity. Their brains are geared to adapting to the mental demands of NeuroTracker much more rapidly than even university students. Professor Faubert, who conducted the research, believes this ability may a determining factor in what separates the best athletes from the rest:

“The fact that they are there…is because they are more plastic.  I think that’s one of the criteria.  You would think that this brain is optimal at the highest competitive level, that it’s reached its maximum potential.  But maybe they are there because they can acquire new potential so much more rapidly and efficiently.”

Study: ‘Professional athletes have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning complex and neutral dynamic visual scenes’

2. Predicting NBA Performance

Basketball is the sport with the most advanced analyses of competition performance.  This study investigated whether there is a relationship between cognitive abilities measured by NeuroTracker and on-court performance stats of NBA players.

What Was Studied

12 professional NBA basketball players were tested with a single session of NeuroTracker (6 minutes).  The visual tracking speed score of each player was then compared with a range of competition statistics over the course of an NBA season.  This included Assists, Turnovers, Assist-to-Turnover ratio, and Steals. Reaction speeds of the players were also measured through a separate assessment.

What Was Found

NeuroTracker scores correlated strongly with Assist-to-Turnover ratio and Turnovers. Backcourt players were found to have the highest NeuroTracker scores and Assist-to-Turnover ratios. Reaction time was not related to any of the performance stats.

What It Means

NeuroTracker scores turned out to be a good predictor of which players would perform better on the court throughout the NBA season.  When it comes to competition, it’s traditionally difficult to predict when professional athletes have good days or bad days.  This study shows that cognitive profiling could be a useful tool for making decisions on who makes the team each game, improving the team’s performance consistency.

Study: ‘Visual tracking speed is related to Basketball-specific measures of performance in NBA players’

3. Revealing Sports Injury Risk

Instinctively we put sports injuries down to the physical demands of sports.  However, many sports tax the brain as much as the body, with research showing a relationship between cognitive functions and increased incidence of injuries.  This study looked to see if placing demands on the brain could change motor-skill performance, specifically in ways known to increase the chances of an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury.

What Was Studied

College level healthy athletes (soccer, volleyball, football) performed 16 single-leg landing trials involving a jump forward and a lateral jump to the opposing leg.  These movements were measured via force plates and motion capture of the legs and pelvis using 36 markers.  The NeuroTracker task was assigned randomly to half of the trials (dual-task procedure), with jumps performed during the tracking phase.

What Was Found

Hip and/or knee kinematics changed significantly when performing NeuroTracker at the same time as the jumps.  The largest change was found with knee abduction angle, known to be strongly associated with ACL strain.  The NeuroTracker task revealed that 60% of the participants had increased ACL injury due to added cognitive load.

What It Means

ACL injuries are known to be one of the most sports common injuries, which are self-inflicted due to motor-skill problems.  This study showed that using NeuroTracker to simulate the mental demands of sports performance could potentially reveal individuals who are susceptible to ACL injury.  Though specific to ACL injury, the same principle could apply to any sports injuries related to motor-skills influenced by cognitive loads.

Additionally, the research involved athletes who were not trained on NeuroTracker. A follow-up study will see if NeuroTracker training can reverse these types of injury risk factors.  Study author Professor Faubert explains the importance of the research:

“Athletes could potentially use cognitive training to limit their risk of sustaining an injury. 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.”

Study: ‘Evaluating the effect of a perceptual-cognitive task on landing biomechanics of the lower limb’

In a follow-up blog, we will cover NeuroTracker studies on the Holy Grail of human performance training - far transfer.  Watch this space!

Far transfer is the ultimate test of any training method.  At the elite sports level, cognitive abilities are known to be central to performance, but is there any scientific evidence that this training helps to improve results on the field?  Let’s take a look at research into that very question.

Assessing the Cognitive Dimension of Performance

At the Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences in Germany, a group of sports science researchers conducted a meta-review of studies in perceptual-cognitive training in sports. The aim of the review was to study the effectiveness of perceptual-cognitive training interventions with professional athletes.

The researchers explained that in interactive sports, perceiving and predicting the actions of teammates, opponents and the motion of the ball, then executing the correct action, is key for performance success. A wealth of sports science research has found that these perceptual-cognitive abilities are major factors in differentiating elite athletes from amateurs, particularly in team-sports.

1692 Sports Science Studies

Using rigorous benchmarks for methodological quality, they narrowed a total of 1692 perceptual-cognitive training studies down to just 16. Of these 16, 2 NeuroTracker studies were selected, 1 of which was the only study deemed to have an ideal sample size of athletes. All of the studies were then evaluated by four independent expert reviewers, who examined them for evidence on training and transfer effects, according to strict criteria.

The main goal of the review was to see if evidence for ‘far-transfer’ existed, that is, training on a task which leads to improvement in abilities very different from the training itself. This is what the researchers referred to as ‘...the gold-standard...the key consideration for the relevance of perceptual-cognitive training in sports’. They also identified the problem that, ‘...transfer, be it near, further or far, is mostly not studied empirically’.

What Was Found

Around 60% of the studies showed off-court performance enhancement in tests similar to the training activity (near-transfer), which included both of the NeuroTracker studies. However, when it came to far transfer, only 3 studies qualified for review. Of these, two showed no transfer effect. The remaining study was with NeuroTracker, which ‘showed a reliable positive effect’ - a 15% improvement in passing decision-making accuracy in competitive soccer play.

The absence of evidence for far transfer in sports has been revealed by other recent meta-reviews, which also included novice athlete populations. In this context, NeuroTracker is leading the way in the Holy Grail of cognitive sports science research.

A New Training Paradigm?

The researchers found the NeuroTracker soccer study to be of special interest because it raised questions about the traditional thinking on transfer in interactive sports. Namely the notion that practice conditions should closely recreate key situations of sports performance. For example, if you want to improve penalty shots, train skills that replicate specific aspects of taking penalties.

NeuroTracker is an abstract and neutral training task, designed to build up cognitive capacities that are fundamental to human performance.  For this reason, the researchers claimed that this 3D multiple-object tracking training method may counteract the idea that effective training requires a high degree of task similarity to end performance. Instead, training up core mental abilities may be the most effective way to achieve to success.

As well as setting the standard for evidence based far-transfer, NeuroTracker research might also be redefining the boundaries for training athletic performance.

Training in interactive sports - A systematic review of practice and transfer effects of perceptual–cognitive training.

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Across pro sports, vision training is fast-becoming the latest way to get an edge over the competition. Let’s take a look at why.

What is Sports Vision Training?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Growing Movement

Many optometrists are evolving their practices to incorporate sports vision training as more and more professional athletes and teams become aware of the performance advantages.  Dr. Charles Shidlofsky, a neuro-optometrist who has worked with many pro sports teams for decades, commented on this trend:

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

An increasing amount of media attention is covering the sports vision movement in elite sports, for example, there has been a lot of press on Stephen Curry’s recipe for success. This demand and awareness is, in turn, spawning the development of a greater range of new technologies and personal training solutions.

What are the Benefits?

Vision is the primary sense used by athletes and may account for 85% to 90% of the sensory processing demands during sports activity. Many sports science studies show that visual function is directly related to athletic performance.  Enhanced situational awareness, focus flexibility, reading of human movement cues, and tracking of dynamic scenes are some of the abilities that vision specialists aim to bring to competition performance.

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

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

Ten-time Pro-Bowler and Arizona Cardinals’ wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald claimed: “There is definitely a connection between the vision therapy that I did as a child and my performance on the field.” Fitzgerald received vision training at an early age from his grandfather (optometrist Dr. Robert Johnson).

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, sophisticated vision training practices have evolved into something called ‘neurovision’ – where vision is used as a means to enhance wider brain functions.  For example, studies have shown that training with NeuroTracker can widely enhance brainwave activity, including in the frontal lobe regions. This is backed-up with evidence of improved executive functions, working memory, processing speed and several forms of attention, even including auditory abilities.

Keep an eye on the movement in vision training - it might just become as common for athletic performance as strength and conditioning or cardio!

You can check out our related blogs here.

‍How the Brain Processes Our 3D Environment

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A pioneer in visual and visual-motor performance training for 35 years, Dr. Teig has worked prolifically with professional sports teams across the NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB, along with Olympic teams and the pro tennis and golf tours.  Dr.Teig thrives at the cutting edge of visual performance by combining a panorama of “spaced-aged technologies” with advanced training and assessment protocols.  If there’s a new tool on the market, you can bet he’s one of the first to put it through its paces.

Dr. Teig took some time out of his busy schedule to talk with the NeuroTracker team.  Here he tells us about the A Team, and “the beauty of what NeuroTracker is all about” for enhancing decision-making skills.

About Dr. Teig

Dr. Donald Teig O.D., F.A.A.O. is Executive Director of “The A Team – High Performance Vision Associates”. He leads a national group of sports trained eye care professionals on projects, individual practice growth and research directed to providing High Performance Vision for people who participate in visually demanding sports and careers.

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We recently covered Professor Jocelyn Faubert’s part 1 interview where he introduced the fundamentals of what NeuroTracker is all about.  To find out why it works and what the effects are from elite athletes to elderly people, he now peels back the science.

Though NeuroTracker is now widely available for personal use, Professor Faubert’s development of the technology grew out of multi-million dollar virtual CAVEs over decades of research.  Now with over 40 published studies and ongoing research around the globe, NeuroTracker science is leading the field in cognitive enhancement. In this part 2, Professor Faubert provides an easily digestible overview of why 3D multiple object tracking can deliver major gains in human performance.

To learn more about NeuroTracker science you can read this blog to find out why Dr. Bach of the Platypus Institute stated:

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

Read these other Expert Corner blogs by Professor Faubert:

Can Cognitive Training Limit Sports Injury Risk?

How the Brain and Body are Connected in Sports Performance

Professor Jocelyn Faubert is the mastermind behind NeuroTracker.  As the ‘world’s most preeminent expert in the field of visual perception’, he has worked on the neuroscience underpinning NeuroTracker for over 20 years.  Described by the New York Times as “an evergreen optimist with charismatic energy” with the ability to “distill expansive concepts into digestible bites”, he’s known to sum up NeuroTracker as “the gymnastics of the brain”. In a way that is surprisingly unusual for a neuroscientist, Professor Faubert makes the complexity of the brain understandable.

The NeuroTracker team had the pleasure of being invited to his office at the Faubert Lab for a video interview.  Here Professor Faubert brings us back to basics on “the fundamental principles of how the brain works”.

Here is the follow-up to this interview video, which covers the scientific evidence for transfer of NeuroTracker training to different fields of human performance.

Professor Faubert on the Science Behind NeuroTracker

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You can read earlier blogs by Professor Faubert here.

Can Cognitive Training Limit Sports Injury Risk?

How the Brain and Body are Connected in Sports Performance

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In this blog, we’ll look at how the future of sports could help keep athletes injury-free by finding out what’s going on in their brains.

The Cost to Sports Teams

In today’s ultra-competitive culture, pro athletes are pushed to train and perform throughout the year more than ever.  This is generating an on-going tsunami of injuries.  To take the English Premier League as an example, Manchester United's squad have suffered a massive 187 injuries during the last three seasons, costing them at least 74 million US dollars in wages.  In the 2017 season alone, just 6 of the top EPL clubs accrued 15,268 days of player injuries.

Many of these include reoccurring injuries or knock effects from injuries post-rehabilitation.  Even with large teams of top doctors, physios and sport scientists, injuries strike frequently and often unpredictably.

The Neurophysical Dimension

Traditionally, sports teams have only looked at the physiological dimension of injuries: what damage has been done to the body, and its state of repair.  However, an experimental study on injury risk shows that cognitive factors may be a hidden, and critical aspect of injury risk.

Professor Faubert, of the Faubert Lab at the University of Montreal, had been interested in the symbiosis between cognitive and motor performance of elite athletes for many years.  His research had discovered that the NeuroTracker Learning System could be used to apply an integrated neurophysical approach to training.  With this methodology, athletes could improve their overall performance more rapidly with dual-task training (cognitive + motor-skills), compared to single-task training.

Surprisingly, this was only effective if athletes first consolidated their cognitive training.  Another study showed that if dual-tasks were introduced too soon, learning rates would be reduced.  This led to the concept that motor-skills can be sensitively affected by cognitive load.

Testing the Pros

This effect was seen in unpublished research with NHL players. The athletes performed puck handling at the same time as NeuroTracker. The differences between puck handling alone, versus combined with NeuroTracker, were large. Motion tracking patterns of the stick revealed that puck handling skill dropped considerably.

Interestingly, the players, who had no prior training on NeuroTracker, did not notice their physical skills dropping.

Testing the Injury Hypothesis

In fast-paced competitive sports play, cognitive overload is common.  Professor Faubert hypothesized that this cognitive load could impair motor-skills under pressure, presenting a crucial factor for injury risk.  To test the theory he assessed soccer, volleyball, and football players on a motor-skill drill which involved two single-leg jumps.  These actions were chosen to apply pressure to the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). Approximately 200,000 of athletes in the United States are afflicted with an ACL tear or sprain each year. It’s both a common and problematic injury because it is usually self-inflicted, occurring without contact with others.

To record their movements he teamed up with an expert scientist in biomechanics.  Using force plates and motion capture of 36 body points, they examined the movement nuances of each jump precisely.

What Was Found

In all of the athletes, hip and knee kinematics changed significantly while training with NeuroTracker, compared to just jumping alone.  Specifically, the largest effect was a change in knee abduction angle. With 60% of the participants, this caused strain on the ACL directly associated with increased injury risk.

So when just performing the jumps alone, no movement problems.  However, when jumping with cognitive load, susceptibility to injury was revealed. The findings suggest that some people are more prone to this type of injuries than others and that using NeuroTracker may be a valid method to identify them.

Beyond ACL Risk

Though the focus of this particular study was specific to ACL injury risk, the concept of neurophysical loads may be valid to most types of injuries.  As NeuroTracker is a cognitive assessment that can be combined flexibly with a whole range of motor-skill exercises, it could be a practical solution for testing the true rehabilitation status of specific injuries, as well as for assessing performance readiness.

Furthermore, NeuroTracker training rapidly enhances athletes’ cognitive bandwidth – providing an opportunity to pre-emptively reduce risks of injury. This is why Professor Faubert is planning to see is this is, in fact, the case,

“We are planning to do a follow-up study investigating if NeuroTracker training can reverse these types of injury risk factors. We’re hoping to accomplish this using similar motion-tracking assessments, which will be conducted before and after training. If our hypothesis is valid, athletes could potentially use cognitive training to limit their risk of sustaining an injury.”

An effective cognitive intervention for injury prevention could change the face of modern sports as we know it, as well as helping athletes avoid the psychological stresses of being out of the game.

You can read more in our related blogs.

How the Brain and Body are Connected in Sports Performance

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The NeuroTracker Learning System is a scientific method for accelerated improvements in neurophysical performance.  This patented technique was developed over several years through Professor Faubert’s research with elite American, Canadian and Europe athletes.  Here we’ll get an idea of what it’s all about.

The Learning Curve

NeuroTracker training typically produces strong learning curves across all populations, whether it be for elite performers like sports stars and military special forces, or for lower functioning populations such as elderly people and children with learning disabilities.  This has been established from across 700 NeuroTracker training centers around the globe, as well as through 40 published NeuroTracker studies.

Due to the predictability of these conditioning effects, any factors influencing NeuroTracker training can be revealed in the learning curve.

The Effects of Stadium Noise

An example of this is an upcoming study at the University of Regina.  Lead researcher Kim Dorsch wanted to find out if football players’ mental performance was helped or hindered by the crowd noise that players experience in the stadium. She tested two groups of football players on NeuroTracker, one group without noise, and the other with the blaring roars of the crowds.

Initial NeuroTracker scores were similar, but after 18 sessions the noise group had steadily climbed to superior scores.  For the first time, this showed that stadium noise could have a boosting effect on high-level cognitive and learning functions of athletes.

Learning Sensitivity

On the flip side, back in 2012, it was found that even elite athletes at the top of their game could have their learning curved hampered by simply standing up. This discovery was made by Professor Faubert when he tested top NHL, EPL and Rubgy teams and saw that something was seriously off with the learning curves of one of the NHL teams (pink line below).

He dug deeper and found that the team’s player’s had done all their NeuroTracker training standing up, while all the other teams trained as instructed – sitting down.  Just the extra cognitive load of balancing while standing was holding back the athletes’ full mental focus.  Professor Faubert described the significance of this finding,

“A key insight we discovered was that even small, simple differences in training can impact an athlete’s ability to improve their performance. The mental resources involved with balance and proprioception for standing were clearly inhibiting these athletes’ capacity to perform and adapt at a cognitive level. This is quite remarkable given that the mental resources involved are very low-level compared to sports play. It became clear to me just how much physical motor-skills and cognitive abilities are intertwined.”

By demonstrating just how useful cognitive assessments could be, the finding opened up a new avenue of neurophysical performance research.

Evolving Training through Dual-Tasks

Though it initially seemed that isolated cognitive training yielded the best learning, this was just the first piece of the puzzle.  Another study with Olympic athletes at the Catalan High Performance Center in Barcelona, showed that complex dual-tasks could be successfully integrated with NeuroTracker.  The key was timing.

Across a 26 session NeuroTracker program, training progressed from sitting, to standing, to a complex balance task.  Though standing and balance did impact NeuroTracker scores, the effects were only temporary. This is because the athletes had first completed training of 15 sessions sitting.  This allowed the athletes to quickly adapt to dual-tasks and perform NeuroTracker at levels they would normally be at if just sitting.  The research showed that with the correct training load over time, new levels of neurophysical performance could be achieved.

Professor Faubert believes this is because NeuroTracker provides consolidation for the brain, preparing it for learning.  This is supported by evidence of NeuroTracker training sustainably boosting brainwave activity in ways that are associated with increased neuroplasticity.

This video gives an idea of how dual-task training can evolve over time:

Here we can also see how dual-tasks can be adapted to meet the specific performance needs of a sport:

Performing Under Pressure

A major challenge in coaching is simulating competition-level pressure in training.  No matter how hard the workout is, physical training alone just doesn’t cut it.

In contrast, the NeuroTracker Learning System allows coaches to progressively push the boundaries of performance.  This is because NeuroTracker always tests athletes at their mental threshold.  When physical skills can be mastered under cognitive load, they can transfer to superior performance on the field when it matters most.  With the key principles of consolidation training followed by progressive integration of dual-tasks with performance specificity - the sky is the limit!

Read our related blogs here.

The Multiple Stages of NeuroTracker Training – Performance

Mastering Performance the Ronaldo Way (Expert’s Corner)

How the Brain and Body are Connected in Sports Performance (Expert’s Corner)

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In this blog we’ll take a look at 3 of the hidden dimensions of elite sports performance, and why training them can provide athletes with a pivotal edge over the competition.

More Than Physical

Athletic skillsets can vary greatly from athlete to athlete, even at highest levels of sports.  For example, Messi and Ronaldo - two soccer greats of modern times - have very different physiologies and play styles.  A player with a prolific career throughout Manchester United’s golden era was Paul Scholes.  Zinedine Zidane proclaimed him to be “undoubtedly the greatest midfielder of his generation”.  A small athlete with a very light build for the sport, he didn’t have much physical prowess on the pitch. However, his mental game was renown, which is why Sir Alex Ferguson described him as: ‘One of the greatest football brains Manchester United ever had’.

Sports science shows that when elite players are compared to sub-elite players, differences in mental performance are dramatic.  Reading and responding to game flow, predicting opponents and ball trajectories, and responding rapidly under pressure are key areas where elite performers gain a critical edge in competitive play.  This clip testing Ronaldo’s abilities gives an idea of how large the mental advantage can be.

A New Training Paradigm

These factors of mental performance have been traditionally difficult to train. However neuroscience is paving the way for technologies that can leverage the brain’s neuroplasticity to provide major performance advantages.  NeuroTracker is a key example for this.  In a meta-review of 1692 sports science papers, a NeuroTracker study with soccer players was the only study to show clear evidence of transfer to elite competitive performance.

Matt Ryan of the Atlanta Falcons became a role model adopter of NeuroTracker as soon as the Falcons acquired the technology for the team.  Over the course of a year, his career skyrocketed him to the Super Bowl final and he earned NFL MVP in 2017.  In an article for the New York Times, he spoke about the value of cognitive training,

“We spend a lot of time working on our bodies. It’s equally important to have your mind operating on a high level. That’s key as a quarterback, to be able to see things and how they relate to each other really quickly. I think that’s exactly what NeuroTracker helps you do. I use it all year-round.”

Len Zaichkowsky implemented NeuroTracker for the Vancouver Canucks when he was their Director of Sports Science.  He explained how performance data made it clear that this mental training helped them reach the Stanley Cup final and dominate the NHL in the same season.

“The players or coaches would ask, ‘What is the transferability of the work we’re doing (NeuroTracker) with what’s going to happen on the ice?’  In a matter months, I could show them the data - the people who trained the most were the best decision-makers on the ice.  There was almost a one-to-one correspondence.  You can’t provide better evidence than that.”

So let’s take a look at three reasons why cognitive training tools like NeuroTracker can deliver a performance advantage in elite sports.

1. Attention

In order to excel on the field, awareness is fundamental. One of the biggest challenges is maintaining attention over many moving targets at the same time. On the field this involves perceiving players moving around the athlete, identifying movement patterns in and out of vision, and predicting motion trajectories.  During complex play under pressure, athlete’s attentional resources are continuously overloaded. Momentary attentional lapses often result in critical errors during intense moments of big games. However, as NeuroTracker studies show, these fundamental resources can be improved hugely.

Mick Clegg, a Manchester United Coach who helped the club win a series of Premier League titles, explained how useful heightened attention can be.

“Rather than coaching athletes for specific plays or situations, ideally we want to sharpen a player’s cognitive abilities in a way that can be applied to any game situation. It’s a similar idea, for instance, to doing squats to improve sprinting and jumping power.  Attention-based training like NeuroTracker benefits the all-important decision-making area of the brain.”  

Decision-making relies on attention because the speed and quality of action-response choices rely heavily on situational-awareness and reading the scene fluidly.  Training attention capacities to very high levels allows an athlete’s mental game to become robust enough to withstand the pressures of competition.

2. Processing Speed

It’s relatively easy to follow the action when there is little movement, but when motion speeds up, the demands on the brain ramp up very quickly.  Most sports require reading dynamic and rapidly moving scenes, with complex movement patterns.  Top athletes need to not only process this, but to do so at an incredible speed.  Top athletes that can do this have a pivotal edge over opponents in the heat of the action - when it matters most.

NeuroTracker training actually pushes each athlete’s to their limits of speed processing in every session.  The training effects show this actually speeds up brain waves, associated with greater alertness, mental focus and faster information processing.  Being able to process complex scenes much more quickly means being able to react to plays more rapidly.  A common feedback from athletes is that the game seems to ‘slow down’ for them.  Pierre Beauchamp, founder of Peak Sport Performance Mindroom and coach of Canadian Olympians, summed up elite athletes’ experiences from NeuroTracker training.

“Our elite athletes report better reading of game flow, heightened anticipation of collisions, faster decision making, and ultimately more confidence under high pressure play.”

3. Peripheral Vision

Vision dominates about 80% of the river of sensory information we take in every second.  In team sports, mastering how to use vision is a skill which separates the best from the rest.  Mick Clegg explained why.

“The classic difference found between elites and amateurs, is that amateurs over scan for detail, darting their focus point around too much.  Why is this a problem?  It causes blurred vision in-between scan points, so if your eyes are constantly moving from point to point, most of the time the scene is blurred – compromising peripheral awareness.”  

Sports science shows that elite athletes tend to scan much less frequently, focusing only on pertinent details. This allows them to spread their visual attention mentally to draw in as much information as possible.  This is even true for anticipating a single opponent’s next move. This is because reading body language involves perceiving many cues across the body simultaneously.

NeuroTracker involves a technique known as a ‘visual pivot’, which is something which you anchor your focus point to, while actually paying attention to action in the periphery.

The task helps an athlete to process complex information across a wide field without having to individually focus on each target.  This is much more efficient for the brain and greatly increases the bandwidth that can be put to use for perceiving plays across the field.

Seeing the Difference

Superior attention, processing speed, and peripheral vision are all critical attributes of an elite athlete’s performance skill set.  What’s more, these are all very trainable with cognitive technologies like NeuroTracker.

“Once these athletes see the difference NeuroTracker is making on the field, they become completely devoted. It’s the biggest testimonial for a training tool when your clients say ‘Look, I can’t live without this’.”

Dr. Smithson, O.D., Director of Visual Performance for the Washington Nationals

Interested in delving more into the dimension of mental performance?  Read our related blogs here.

5 Key Mental Skills of Elite Athletes

Why Cognitive Training is a Rising Athletics Trend

It’s likely you just assume you see 3D information the same as most people.  However, the latest NeuroTracker study by Professor Faubert at the Faubert Lab reveals this may not be the case.  The way we see the 3D world around us can vary greatly from one person to another. Here we’ll take a look at why.

What is 3D?

Perceiving 3D information is not as straight-forward as it sounds.  For example, our brains visually interpret flat images such as photos or on movie screens to be convincing 3D.  This is because all sorts of cues such as perspective, colours, tonal shades, and context are used to make sense of the positions of everything we see.

However, a powerful system for perceiving the distance and structure of objects is what’s called ‘stereopsis’ (or ‘stereoscopic depth perception’).  This makes use of ‘binocular vision’ - seeing with two eyes.

In a nutshell, stereopsis involves your brain using the different viewing angles of each eye to calculate depth with high precision.  This stereo vision processing uses higher order brain functions.

Dynamic Scenes

Stereopsis for perceiving static objects is pretty well understood.  However when it comes to perceiving one or more things moving quickly across a wide field of view things, less so.  Things get a lot more complex, especially as stereo vision isn’t just used for what you focus on – it’s also used for peripheral vision.  For this reason its an active area of research for vision scientists.

It’s also an important topic. When you are processing dynamic scenes, stereo vision provides a critical edge. We rely on this form of 3D perception in everyday situations such a driving in traffic, navigating through a busy street, or playing sports.  Just try something as simple as catching a ball one-handed with one eye closed, and you’ll realize how useful it is.

Isolating Stereo Vision With NeuroTracker

Professor Faubert wanted to investigate how much we use stereopsis to process dynamic scenes and to see if this varies across different populations.  To do this he tested three groups on NeuroTracker: healthy children, adults, and older people.

Each person performed a baseline both in stereo (with Active 3D & glasses), and in non-stereo (without Active 3D or glasses).The differences in baselines isolated exactly how much advantage each person got from performing NeuroTracker with stereo vision.

What Was Found

In all of the groups stereo vision allowed people to perform better at NeuroTracker.

For adults the advantage was large, then not quite as large for children, whose brains are still developing stereo vision capacities.  However, for elderly people, it was greatly reduced.  In fact, adults had an approximately four times larger advantage than elderly people when donning Active 3D glasses.

What The Results Mean

The findings suggest that higher order brain processes used for perceiving dynamic stereoscopic information are strongly affected by the normal aging process.  In terms of how this could affect everyday life, two separate studies (1 & 2) showed that lower NeuroTracker baselines (with Active 3D) related significantly to the increased risk of accidents when driving.

Interestingly, a separate study by Professor Faubert showed that although older people initially perform NeuroTracker at lower levels than young adults, they have equally good learning capacities.  This showed that their neuroplasticity is still very much active, allowing them to achieve the levels of young adults with just a few hours of distributed training.  It has also been found that such NeuroTracker gains in older populations transfer to improved abilities to process human movement.

From this perspective, NeuroTracker could be used to identify weaknesses in stereo vision, and then potentially improve them with training. Professor Faubert underlined the importance of learning capacity and transfer to real-world needs.

“You can see your ability to improve on this task just get better and better and better.  This improvement in ability that we see clearly on the NeuroTracker score relates to real function.  Whether it be attention measures, brain function, abilities in the field when it comes to sports, anticipating… movements to avoid collisions.  It’s getting your brain more efficient at what it does.”

NeuroTracker Studies

Effect of age and stereopsis on a multiple-object tracking task

Three-Dimensional Multiple Object Tracking Speed Thresholds are Associated with Measures of Simulated Driving Performance in Older Drivers

Driving simulator scenarios and measures to faithfully evaluate risky driving behavior: A comparative study of different driver age groups

Healthy older observers show equivalent perceptual-cognitive training benefits to young adults for multiple object tracking

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By Rob Gronbeck

A Common Language

When ‘sport psychology’ becomes the topic of discussion, I feel that sports trainers, coaches, parents, referees, athletes, sport scientists, and medical practitioners lack a common language to share.  I often get asked, “Can you talk to my son about his mindset?” And “Can you come to our training camp and do a talk on psychology?” Sport psychology is deeply ingrained as a talk based interaction between two or more people. However, as a psychological scientist and researcher, this is just not good enough in this age of sensors, technologies and scanners informing us of what our brains are doing.  We’re now much better equipped to know what our minds are capable of, and whether they are improving or deteriorating.

I believe we need to bring the common language of sport science to the table. Repetitions, sets, volume, thresholds, training session duration, and performance power outputs can map onto applied sport psychology methods. NeuroTracker fits perfectly and allows us to do this seamlessly and provide a metric capable of quantifying these three things:

1) How demanding (or intense) a NeuroTracker training session is (or will be?)

2) How much capacity an athlete’s brain has to perceive and track multiple objects?

3) How much capacity does an athlete have to sustain cognitive processing over time?

The Journey of 600+ NeuroTracker Sessions Began with One

Let me take you back to where it all began. On the 5th of February 2014, at 11:20am, when I completed my first NeuroTracker training session of the Core type. My visual tracking speed threshold was assessed to be 1.0 and the session took me 380 seconds to complete. The projector screen was 70 inches, 4:3 orientation.

I tracked four 4 NeuroTracker targets for 8 seconds. I was shown four balls to follow for 2.5 seconds prior to each trial (reps). Feedback showed my incorrect answers for 1 second after each trial. I tried to answer as quickly as possible for each of the 20 trials. This is what comprises a NeuroTracker session.

Here is an example of a NeuroTracker Core session with these settings (for those unfamiliar with what NeuroTracker is or what the task involves).

1.0 @ 2.5s, SEATED, 1s FEEDBACK, 2s AUTO ENTER

These two data points allow us to calculate the processing power my brain can produce per second.

In physics, power, commonly known in sports as ‘intensity,’ is calculated with the following formula:

Where W equals work, and t stands for time.

Therefore, my brain’s power was calculated to be 1/380 = 0.00263/sec.

Over the past 3 years and 11 months, I’ve completed another 626 sessions and coached 5000+ sessions for hundreds of athletes, students, professionals, and those suffering with brain injuries or impairments.

Quadrupling Processing Power

On my most recent NeuroTracker session my visual tracking speed threshold was scored at 3.26, and it took me 259 seconds to complete it.

Using the same work formula, my brain’s work capacity was 3.26/259 = 0.01258/sec.

This represents an increase in power or work capacity of 378%!

The most processing power I’ve been able to produce is 0.01508/sec = 3.730 / 247 seconds, which represents a 474% increase in processing power from my very first NeuroTracker session!

My gains in visual tracking speed were obtained through lots of repetitions and hard work followed by recovery, growth, more training, etc. This is neuroplasticity in action. Yet, you may be wondering how I managed to complete each session in a shorter time - as I was always tracking four balls for eight seconds, twenty times per session, right?

Let me illustrate for you:

3.26 @ 0.1s, 0.25s FEEDBACK, 0.0s AUTO ENTER

My most recent session used the following settings:

I tracked four (4) NeuroTracker targets for 8 seconds. I was shown the four target balls for 0.1 seconds prior to each trial. After each trial the feedback which showed incorrect and correct answers remained on the screen for 0.25 seconds. Just like my first session, I tried to answer as quickly as possible for every one of the 20 reps. I finished the session 121 seconds faster by reducing “rest periods” between each repetition to level I could manage.

Adding Dual-Task Loads

As you can see this made the task much more demanding as I only had 0.1s to see the four targets. When I made a mistake, which was 18% of the time, I only had 0.25s to see where I went wrong, and 0.1s to locate the four target balls for the next trial. I was still tracking for 8 seconds, 20 times, so the actual tracking time remained the same.

There is also one other major difference between my first session in February 2014 and this most recent session in January 2018. NeuroTracker was made significantly harder as I had to perceive the beam of light on the screen, coordinate my body to dodge the beam, three times in 8 seconds, while also tracking the four targets!

AGILITY @ 0.37

On that first Agility session, I scored a mere 0.37 and it took me 420 seconds. My cognitive output while dodging beams dropped to 0.0008809/sec. Adding a second task to the NeuroTracker session reduced my cognitive processing capacity by 88%.

We can compare the processing power output of my first Agility session 0.0008809/sec with my most recent 0.01508/sec, where we find a whopping 1611% increase in cognitive processing power!

AGILITY 3.59

Also, keep in mind that prior to completing my first Agility session on the 19th of June 2014 at 1:25 pm I had completed one hundred NeuroTracker sessions. My cognitive processing power was up to 0.00765/sec and I had only recently scored a P.B. of 3.04 which took 397 seconds.

OVERLOAD @ 2.87

Upwards and Onwards

My journey with NeuroTracker goes on as I continue in my quest to be able to track visual objects at faster speeds, with less time between reps.  This is also over more and more back to back sessions, and while performing increasingly difficult tasks at the same time.

It is my belief that coaches, trainers, and athletes need to know that we can apply the same training principles we use in physical and skill acquisition to training the brain. That is why I went into such detail to show how this is measured and accomplished. We need a training methodology, programming principles, and ways to measure and track the cognitive processing power our athletes are capable of.

Adapting Neurons

Let’s treat the brain like it is - an organ, and train it like one (minus the psycho-babble). Assess it, make sure it has ample energy and rest, and seek to fatigue it through appropriate training. Neurons will adapt, becoming more energy efficient and fire faster and in greater synchrony, for longer, even while physically fatigued. When we do this, we can begin to have discussions about capacity, endurance, efficiency, power output, and can train these capacities in tangible ways. Reliable. Predictable. Measurable.

If you want to learn more you can click on this link to hear me go into detail with a case study discussion where I put this all into practice.

Case study: How I quadrupled my visual processing speed

Interested to find out more about how NeuroTracker can improve performance?  Check out this related blog.

‍Brain Holds Key to Performance Edge in Elite Sports‍

Professor Faubert had the pleasure of being interviewed for a Neuronfire podcast by Dr.David Bach.  David Bach, MD, is a Harvard-trained neuroscientist and Founder and President of The Platypus Institute, a research institution focused on how to radically enhance cognitive functioning and the human experience. After reading research from the Faubert Lab in detail, Dr.Bach wanted to delve deeper into how visual based training can deliver improvements in cognitive abilities.  Here we cover some of the key points discussed.

Nothing is as Obvious as it Seems

Professor Faubert started out his career decades ago in artificial intelligence and found that “…when it comes vision, nothing is as obvious as it seems”.  The old thinking that brain functions like perception and cognition are separate is not true, it’s much fuzzier, and integrated in very complex ways.

When it comes to seeing, we detect energy through light waves, however, that information does not provide meaning.  There are perceptual qualities that go beyond energy processes and require high-level cognitive functions to process the world around us.  For instance differences in attention can literally change the way we interpret what we are looking at.

Elite Athletes

Professor Faubert’s interest in athletes evolved out of trying to understand the demands required to process dynamic scenes.  These include everyday things like crossing the road, driving or navigating a shopping center.  But it’s elite athletes who actually make a living from processing dynamic scenes, and have remarkably superior abilities.

The question is whether this is because they’re exposed to these kinds of scenes and simply get used to them, or if it is because their brains adapt to these demands at a fundamental level to get better at dealing with them.

What Makes Them Different?

To test this, Professor Faubert compared elite athletes to university students on NeuroTracker.  What was found, unsurprisingly, was that elite athletes were initially better. However, the interesting thing is that elite athletes also got better at NeuroTracker much faster than university students, even though NeuroTracker was a new and neutral task to them.  So their brains are somehow built to be more plastic, and more adaptive in learning to process dynamic scenes.

Real-World Transfer

The holy grail for Professor Faubert is if this kind of change in NeuroTracker ability (an abstract task), can achieve improvements in real life functions.  So he trained soccer players on NeuroTracker and evaluated their performance in competitive play.  He found a significant improvement in their passing decision-making accuracy, yet no difference found with controls.

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Dr.Bach emphasized the importance of this kind of transfer to real life performance:

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

The Pivotal Role of Plasticity

Neural plasticity is the brain’s ability to physically adapt to specific demands to perform better.

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The big surprise for Professor Faubert was the finding that elite athletes have ‘residual plasticity’. He explained the meaning of this for world-class athletes,

“The fact that they are there…is because they are more plastic.  I think that’s one of the criteria.  You would think that this brain is optimal at the highest competitive level, that it’s reached its maximum potential.  But maybe they are there because they can acquire new potential so much more rapidly and so more efficiently. It’s been fascinating actually.”

Beyond Athletes

Elderly populations are known to have natural changes in brain functions that lead to a reduction in real-life abilities.  For example, when something is moving quickly they may not have the same capacity to track it at a cognitive level. For Professor Faubert, the question is, are these processes still plastic in older people?

“What’s very interesting is we did a study on just that. In fact, we saw no difference in the plasticity between the elderly and young adults.  Of course, their abilities are much lower to start, but the progression rate was the same.  We’ve shown that that change…actually transfers into something meaningful for them.  We looked at their ability to read body movement cues.  We saw that their ability…was improved dramatically.”

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Dr.Bach and Professor Faubert concluded on the importance that this these kinds of improvements typically require only 2 hours of total training, and that cognitive training can be both practical and useful for improving almost anyone’s lives.

You can listen to the free podcast here:

Jocelyn Faubert - Cognition Improvement Through Visual Training

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By Aaron Kemp

At the Skills For Sports Academy we have established a professional training environment where sportspersons of all ages and levels have the opportunity to achieve their personal best. We strongly believe that there are huge benefits in cognitive training in athletes, and so all our training sessions include some form of cognitive work, and we also extend this to home-based training.

Elite Performance

There are some principle advantages we are looking to gain from cognitive training, which include improvement in the following:

• Awareness and mental focus
• Ability to read and anticipate complex scenes
• Faster reading and response to the evolution of play
• Ability to deal with the unpredictability of play
• Training core athletic abilities when physically injured

Using modern training methods and technologies, these are all achievable as part of cognitive development programs.  Developing an athlete’s ability to process key information rapidly, decide upon an appropriate action, execute the action, and then evaluate the outcome of the action, is central to achieving elite levels of athleticism in team sports.  Being able to strategically make future decisions based on dynamic action happening on the fly is what separates the best from the rest.

Developing Athleticism at the Level of the Individual

At the Skills For Sports Academy our athletes receive individually tailored training programs and sessions that are designed specifically to foster their talent, while developing the skills and techniques of the individual, group or team across a wide range of sporting disciplines. We use NeuroTracker programs specifically to help young athletes develop their abilities to make decisions under pressure, anticipate opponents earlier, pick out key play opportunities, boost situational awareness, and finally to maintain sharpness through a long season.

The fact that we can use NeuroTracker to train these in short and effective 6-minute sessions, allows us to implement cognitive training on a regular basis.  Assigning practical home training programs also helps us go the extra mile, so we can accelerate learning in between Academy-based training. The fact that top NFL, NBA, NHL and EPL teams use NeuroTracker is great for motivating athletes to get stuck into the mental dimension of their development.

Training Without Exhaustion

With young athletes especially, parents and coaches are often keen to pressure them, including adding high physical loads of training. Unfortunately, this comes with the risk of overloading their bodies while they are trying to grow and develop. It’s a major reason why I see cognitive training as the perfect method to enhance current training regimes, as it only adds load to mental functions.

Young athlete’s brains are basically learning machines, and so they are much more flexible for dealing with mental loads over physical.  The last factor is that this boosting mental performance can help them to gain the edge over their peers, especially if they are not as well matched physically.

The Psychological Dimension of Training

As Director of Skills For Sports Academy, I believe in fostering a community focused Academy that prides itself on a fun, inclusive attitude. All of our coaching staff are passionate about building the confidence of each individual allowing them to enjoy their sport while striving to be the best they can be.  Intrinsically motivating players means going beyond teaching them how to play well, or telling them what to. You have to also build-up fundamental abilities that allow them to go on to learn and develop themselves more effectively.

Techniques like NeuroTracker help us build-up the mental tools kids need to in order really engage in self-improvement. There’s nothing better for instilling a love of sport than the proud feeling that you have developed yourself to new level of performance.

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I worked with Cristiano Ronaldo from the time he came into Manchester United as an 18-year-old. He was pretty light for a footballer so we worked on his power development early on, later turning him into what England captain Rio Ferdinand described as “The perfect physical specimen”.

Although it's hard to imagine now, he lacked senior experience. His play on the pitch showed he had talent but a lot to learn. And that's what he did. His commitment to physical conditioning was just the tip of the iceberg.  Over the next 5 years, I saw him prove himself, day in and day out, to be the most dedicated footballer I have ever met. He did all the training that anyone at Manchester United asked of him.

He also did something more.

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

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Only when he had nailed these perfectly in solo, did he practice them on the pitch when training with the team.  Then ultimately when he got everything right, he would try his new formed skills in the big stadium under real pressure. At every step of the way he made mistakes, but always within the risks, he needed to take to ensure continued growth. Every time he learned something about his limits, he would go to town and train to surpass them.

This understanding of working and competing just at the threshold of his neurophysical performance limits was fundamental to him becoming the world’s best soccer player, perhaps even the best player in the history of the game.

I'm describing him here because I believe his success wasn't down to any significant talent advantage. Rather Ronaldo combined a dedicated hard work ethic with a systematic method to develop isolated skill, then skill under pressure, then ultimately skill in the game.

It's when you see a training recipe like this work so unbelievably well, that as a coach, it becomes a real eye-opener. It changed the way I coach all my athletes, and it can be covered in 3 key principles.

1. Skill is Absolutely Central - Everything Must be Trained Around It

Although I am a specialist in physical and cognitive fitness, in team sports, skill is the be all and end all. It's critical to structure training goals around this ultimate aim, and in a club setting, coordinate development objectives alongside coaches who work with athletes on the field. There are a plethora of training for overall performance development. But the trick is never seeing any aspect as fundamental, and instead, make sure that everything is working in one overall direction.

2. Build-Up Load Progressively - Break Down Key Abilities and Push Them at Increasing Thresholds

There is an art to know what to try and when to try it. This is a critical guidance role for a coach, and it involves judging each athlete's confidence. Try something they're not ready for and their confidence gets knocked, stepping them back. Pull off something that's just about doable and successfully apply it in competition, and your athlete's motivation skyrockets. The aim is to balance learning pressure through the three stages of basic exercises, testing in training, then mastery in the game.  Critically these need to be formed within the mental dimensions of performance.

3. Evolve Mastery - Combine Exercises in Complex Ways to Push Beyond Performance Limits

It's not enough to master just one chunk of performance after the next. What takes truly elite athletes beyond their contemporaries are meta-abilities, where players can execute multiple high-level performance sequences at the same time. To become great, players need to evolve through progressively advanced combinations of training exercises which integrate the demands of refined skill, physical exertion, and cognitive challenges. This is the domain of coaching expertise, as the drills need to be sophisticated, as well as matched precisely to the needs of the individual.

To be able to properly evolve mastery, using the right training gear is of paramount importance.  This can be low tech, for example, I’ve used boxing pads combined with reactive drills to the Nth degree.

But high-tech tools, like NeuroTracker, D2, and Fitlight, are really effective for optimizing cognitive load to each athlete’s needs.

This is especially true when they can be flexibly integrated with other training exercises or equipment, which is why I’ve now coached over 15,000 NeuroTracker sessions.  When you’re always matching training with the neurophysical limits of performance, the learning curve is potentially endless.

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Unlike a lot of other fields of science, the pace of progress in neuroscience has been accelerating for many years, and 2017 showed no sign of stopping.  Let’s take a look at 7 high points of this past year.

1. The Human Brain Atlas

Late this year, the Allen Institute for Brain Science released a publicly available tool for researchers to explore the building blocks of the human brain. This open-access service will massively help neuroscientists worldwide to interpret human nerve cell data. This will help accelerate advances in our general understanding of the brain.

Image source

2. The Heart of the Brain

It was revealed that low-frequency oscillations in the hippocampus help to synchronize overall activity in the brain. Researchers at the at the University of Hong Kong used optogenetics and resting-state fMRI to show that slow hippocampal activity controls and connects activities in different areas of the brain. This represents a big step towards the lofty goal of understanding functional brain connectivity and the human connectome.  In a separate study, it was also revealed how the hippocampus influences our future thinking.

Image credit: University of Hong Kong https://www.hku.hk/

3. AI Brain-based Network Learns by Itself

The DeepMind artificial intelligence system AlphaGo Zero not only learned how to play the board game ‘Go’ all by itself, it also beat the current champion, its predecessor AlphaGo! Using human brain network algorithms, it demonstrated the power of the intelligence built into our grey matter.

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4. International Brain Lab

Setting a new precedent, neuroscientists across the globe began a large-scale collaboration called the International Brain Lab.  Their goal is to understand how the brain computes choices and makes decisions from simple levels through to the coordinated activity of a complex network. Using large amounts of brain scanning, the project is expected to rapidly speed up our understanding of brain computation.

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5. The Internet is Taking Over Human Memory

Our reliance on the Internet for vast online resources has been shown to be affecting our thought processes for problem-solving, recall and learning. Research published in the journal Memory, found that ‘cognitive offloading’ (using external resources instead of brain power), increases cumulatively with internet use. With smartphone and smart glasses technology set to rise rapidly across the global population, this research unearths potentially huge consequences for how human interactions with technology will evolve over time.

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6. New Paradigm for Neuron Behavior

Neurons are the basic building blocks that compose our brain and control everything we do. According to the common understanding for over a century, each neuron fires when it accumulates a certain amount of incoming electrical signals from other neurons - as a spike or action potential.  However, this year scientists at the Department of Physics at Bar-Ilan University showed this view to be inaccurate.  In fact, neurons behave in much more complex ways that compute the combined strength and directionality of incoming signals to generate different spike waveforms.  The discovery opens up the possibility that networks of neurons could produce far greater complexities of behavior than traditionally thought.

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7. The Gut is Like a Second Brain

Trillions of organisms including bacteria, viruses, funguses and microscopic animals call our body home. Amongst a wealth of new research finding that the microbiome of guts play a central role in our health, a 2017 study identified gut microbiota that directly influence our mood and behavior.  As there are also links between gut health and psychological disorders, the finding should lead to new ways to treat common problems like anxiety and depression.

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When it comes to getting into the holiday spirit some people are all abuzz with merriness and Christmas joy, while others see it as just some time-off and choose to Scrooge their way through the season.  Even just hearing Christmas songs can have juxtaposing effects from one person to another. Christmas can certainly be both a time of stress and the most magic holiday of the year, but why do people often have such different feelings about it?

Polar Experiences in the Brain

The festive spirit influences some of the chemicals in your brain (dopamine and serotonin) which affect your happiness levels. Dopamine is known to be involved with reward-driven behaviour and pleasure seeking and serotonin is thought to increase our feelings of worth and belonging.

When it comes to the act of gift-giving, generosity is linked with the reward circuitry of our brain, causing the release of endorphins, often dubbed ‘the helpers high’. Bonding with loved ones also releases Oxytocin (the ‘cuddle hormone’).  So “Christmas cheer” is in some ways a bit like a cocktail of natural drugs.

On the flip side, the challenge of navigating busy shopping malls searching for ideal gifts, or stocking up on all manner of food, can trigger stress responses. This releases adrenaline and cortisol, which affect the hippocampus and can make it harder to recall things and multitask.

Stress responses are also cumulative. So a series of stressful episodes such as struggling to find a parking space, finding out the gift you need has sold out, then getting home to realize you forget to buy wrapping paper – all add up over time.

Nailing Down Christmas Spirit

It's not the typical domain of neuroscience, but a team of Danish researchers set out to see if these contrasting feelings show up as differences in brain activity. Published in the science journal BMJ, their stated objective was “To detect and localise the Christmas spirit in the human brain.” To do so they tested people from around Copenhagen in two groups: one who had strong positive feelings about Christmas traditions, and another group who had weak or negative associations. The first group were ethnic Danes, steeped in holiday tradition, and the second group was mostly people who had immigrated to Denmark. All of the subjects’ brain activity were analyzed while they viewed a mix of Christmas-themed and neutral images.

A Christmas Zone in the Brain?

By using fMRI, the researchers were able to localize increased activity in specific brain regions in the subjects that responded strongly to Christmas images. They found increased activation in several motor cortex areas and the parietal lobule.

These regions are known to be involved in functions related to self-transcendence, spirituality, somatic senses, and the recognition of facial emotion. Together these play a role in enabling people to experience a connection or sense of harmony with the world around us.

While this couldn’t really be called a ‘Christmas network’ (these regions are involved in a many cognitive processes), it did reveal that experiencing a Christmas vibe is likely about connecting beyond what we normally do.  The researchers pointed out that this may be similar for other types of festivals

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Learning how to a fly a jet is extremely demanding.  Not only does a high degree of skill need to be matched with an enormous amount of information processing from the aircraft’s dashboard, these have to be managed under high physical stresses.  Becoming a jet pilot takes hundreds of hours of training to achieve proficiency.  This comes at a very high cost, and the rate at which pilots learn varies greatly.  For years, the aviation industry has been challenged with the question of how to measure training effectiveness.

In a ground-breaking study, a new method was devised to reveal what happens inside the minds of pilots when they take to the air.  In a collaborative research project, the Faubert Lab, the University of Iowa’s Operator Performance Lab, the University of Montreal, and Collins Aerospace (avionics and simulation training company), partnered their fields of expertise to come up with an innovative way to assess the mental loads of flying.

A Flying Experiment

In an experimental combination of man-machine technology, an Aero Vodochody L-29 jet plane had a NeuroTracker system integrated into the dashboard and pilots were hooked up with eye tracking and ECG equipment.

This setup was also mirrored in a flight training simulator. The goal was to objectively measure cognitive and physiological loads across three levels of flight maneuvers, assess effects on performance, and compare these for both live and simulated flight.

Training & Testing

Pilots in the study first completed a 15-session NeuroTracker program to establish an elevated cognitive baseline.  They then carried out a first round of live and simulated test flights involving low, medium and high difficulty flight maneuvers, such as performing steep climbs with rolls within a set time duration.

Eye tracking and brain signals were measured, along with an analysis of technical performance.  On a second round, they repeated the same test procedure, but with an added twist – pilots were also tasked with performing NeuroTracker while executing maneuvers.  The researchers’ theory was that NeuroTracker would measure the pilot’s spare cognitive capacity.  In turn, this would reveal the mental loads involved with each task – something never before attempted.

What Was Discovered

The demands on the brain were found to be surprisingly large for all tests. The pilots’ ability to perform NeuroTracker was drastically reduced, using up almost all of their spare cognitive capacity.  This effect consistently increased the more difficult the flight maneuver was.  The simulator had less effect on mental and physiological loads than live flight, a finding of particular interest for identifying limitations for virtual training.

How It Can Be Applied

By measuring pilot workload for various scenarios and in parallel with performance metrics, this approach could be used to assess a pilot’s training capability and to personalize training loads to his or her specific needs.

Benefits would be reduced training fail rates and accelerating learning rates through properly optimized training programs.  Additionally, evaluating spare cognitive capacity may also provide a measure of performance readiness.

Award-Winning Study

The research was recently presented at I/ITSEC (Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference) – the world’s largest get-together of professionals in the simulation and training industries.  Due to a real need for solutions which improve the cost efficiency and effectiveness of personnel training, it was awarded ‘Best Paper’ for training, being described by military leaders as the ‘first objective measure of operational readiness.’  The study represents the initial stage of a multi-year research project, with expert pilots currently being tested for the next phase.

Study Reference

Perceptual-Cognitive & Physiological Assessment of Training Effectiveness

Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2017

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Concussions have gained a lot of attention in recent years, yet the repercussions of mTBIs are still not well understood.  With insights from leading concussion experts, let’s look at a few effects of concussions that you might find surprising.

Symptoms Can Vary Dramatically

The brain is a highly complex organ.  Damage from head impacts can affect any part of the brain, disrupting cognitive processes in myriads of ways.  Dr. Charles Shidlofsky, a leading concussion specialist who heads Neuro-Vision Associates of North Texas, explains:

“When you’ve seen one brain injury…you’ve seen one brain injury.  It’s pivotal to recognize that there are many different dynamics to concussion, both in the functional effects and in the symptoms.”

Most people are aware of headaches, nausea, and perhaps light sensitivity, but psychological symptoms can include anxiety, depression, insomnia, irritability, and basic ability to focus or concentrate.  Post-Concussion Syndrome can also have physical effects through influences on the central nervous system. For example making balance difficult, both in terms of vestibular effects (ear based), and proprioceptive effects (body feedback), as well as impair movement coordination.

Dr. Keith Smithson, a sports vision concussion specialist and Director of Visual Performance for the Washington Nationals, outlined some of the specific ways mTBIs can change brain function:

“Symptoms can involve optic distortions, ocular-muscular problems, multiple object tracking deficiencies, as well as sensory integration and overload issues.”

For this reason, he states that a range of recovery interventions need to be used specialized for dealing with each of these effects.

Effects Can Last For Months

For specialists managing concussion recovery, it’s not unusual to have patients in treatment for six months or longer. For example, Dr. Smithson finds that severe cases of mTBI require up to eight months of recovery treatment.  Somewhat surprisingly, this is not necessarily down to the severity of the actual head injury.  Dr. Shidlofsky gave examples of this phenomenon:

“There are often very different recovery trajectories from one person to another. For example, sometimes we have patients who’ve been hit in the head really hard and they come in for six sessions and they’ve actually recovered. But then you can have someone else who’s had a minor fender bender, and they have such debilitating symptoms that just a slight rotation of their chair triggers severe dizziness.”

Dr. Michael Matter, President of the Geneva Medical Doctor Association and Director of Neurovision Consulting, provides cognitive rehabilitation for professional athletes and highlighted how difficult the recovery process can be for athletes:

“We had hockey players with no ice for 5 or 6 months with no return to play. It’s a reality, they are unable to focus, to have attention”.

As concussions can affect almost all aspects of daily life, therapy is usually needed to monitor effects all the way to the end point of recovery.

Symptoms Are Affected By Preconditions

According to a new study published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, recovery from concussions can take twice as long for young female athletes compared to young males.  This is believed to be due to underlying cognitive conditions that are more common in girls, including as headaches, depression, anxiety, and stress.

As these are common mTBI symptoms, the effects can overlap and lengthen the recovery process when already existent. In this study with 212 male and female young athletes, 58% of the girls still had concussion symptoms after 3 weeks of injury, compared to 25% of the boys.

This means that any person, with any kind of pre-existing cognitive condition, is likely to have both increased susceptibility to concussion symptoms, and more difficulty recovering from them. John Neidecker, an orthopedic specialist in concussion treatment, highlights the fact that student-athletes with concussions often become stressed about not being able to play sports.

This is common because athletics are also a key activity that normally allows them to burn off stress, and the primary treatment for concussions is simply resting.  Stress compounds many of the hallmark symptoms of mTBI, making recovery more challenging than for non-sports children.

Modern neuroscience and sports science is challenging the idea that performance is primarily about physical prowess.  Instead, skillsets between the ears are proving to be defining traits of super-elite athletes.  Let’s take a look at 5 of the key mental skills that make up a truly pro athlete.

1. Situational awareness

Whether it’s cycling, running, tennis, soccer or basketball, most sports involved dynamic scenes where many things going on all around change rapidly.  Often how these elements change is hard to predict. Being aware of the play as its happening involves maintaining focus on many things throughout the field of view, and all at the same time.

This is an extremely demanding cognitive skill that most people become quickly overwhelmed by.  The result is that amateur athletes tend to collapse their field of view, especially when under pressure, or choose to only focus on one or two things, such as the ball or an immediate opponent.  At the other end of the scale super-elite athletes seem to have a sixth sense of everything that’s happening, and at each moment the action is unfolding.

2. Decision-making

Reading the play as it happens is one thing, but what matters most is choosing what to do.  Team sports in particular involve myriads of play options at any one time.  The complex thing is that these quickly branch off into potentially hundreds of plays.  Germany dominated the last FIFA World Cup with spectacular concatenations of passing, turning them into a playmaking machine that defeated Brazil 7:1.

Making the right decision at the right time involves predicting the future, as Wayne Gretzky famously said ‘A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.’ This requires holding in mind the current state of play and accurately imagining what will happen next, pushing working memory and executive functions to the limit.  An example of supreme decision-making is a player like Lionel Messi, who can make game-changing passes at the drop of a hat.

3. Reading opponents

Sports that involve anticipating an opponent’s next move rely on our ability to read human movement – a skill known as biological motion perception.  Reading body language is not as simple as it seems, to be accurate athletes need to pay attention multiple key parts of the body at the same time.

Together these provide critical cues that, for example, can allow a top tennis player to predict serve direction even before the tennis ball is hit.  Soccer star Ronaldo has demonstrated how powerful these cues can be by scoring goals in complete darkness, without even seeing the ball being kicked.

As athletes’ body parts are usually moving, reading body kinematics relies on multiple object tracking skill. Research has shown that athletes have a major advantage over non-athletes in their biological motion perception, showing that these mental abilities to be a defining trait of their performance.

4. Processing Speed

Quick reactions are far more about the brain than muscular condition.  For each reaction a stream of sensory information must be processed along with calculation of the best action-response, then execution of movement.  Most reactions in sport are not simple ones like dodging an incoming object.  Instead they are complex reactions, such as blocking an opponent with the ball attempting to make a pass, and so they involve skilled interpretations of the best play outcome.

This means processing a ton of information on the fly, and often under serious psychological pressure and physical fatigue.  Neurons fire in frequencies called brainwaves, and to be ready to respond quickly, the brain must alert and firing at high frequencies associated with peak performance states.

5. Neuroplasticity

In a ground-breaking study published on the homepage of www.Nature.com, hundreds of elite athletes from the NHL, EPL, Rugby and NCAA sports were tested to see how well they could adapt to NeuroTracker training.  The results showed that top professional athletes had brains with a superior ability to adapt to new training, compared to lower level athletes or university students.

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This heightened state of neuroplasticity in an athlete means they are a more efficient learning machine.  It’s likely a key ingredient for success, improving responsiveness to training and competitions, and allowing athletes to adapt their mental skills to thrive throughout their career.

Smartphones are changing our lives so much that there’s a new word to describe our fear of being without them: ‘nomophobia’.  Unlike other phobias, this one isn’t derived from any Greek translation.  It’s a 21st-century term for "no mobile phone phobia"!  Neuroscientists and psychologists are now considering smartphone addiction a serious condition which can disrupt your quality of life.

Surprisingly Common

Global smartphone ownership is rapidly on the rise, with over 90% of Americans owning mobile devices - collectively checking them upwards of 8 billion times per day. Most of us check our phones an average of 34 times per day. Surveys show this is a major factor for road safety with adults commonly admitting to texting while driving, while pedestrians injuries related to using a phone while walking are increasing dramatically.

Research polls carried out in the United Kingdom found that over two thirds of the population have some form of nomophobia.  Compared to polls carried out 4 years earlier, where men were dominantly affected, it is now women who are more likely to be dependent. One in three UK adults claimed to have argued with their partner about using their mobile phone too much. For the youth generation, over 50% of teenagers now claim that they feel addicted to the device that never leaves their side.

Rate Your Addiction

This free questionnaire, created at the State University of New York, is designed to give you a quick and objective reference of your relationship to your smartphone. Scores give you a rating as follows,

20 or below – you’re not an addict

21 to 60 – you’re a little bit nomophobic

61 to 99 – you’re clearly nomophobic

100 to 200 – you’re addicted and suffer severe anxiety without your phone

What are the Effects?

High scores on the test mean you’re much more likely to have your social life negatively affected by smartphone dependence.  This typically includes avoiding face-to-face interactions with family and friends, social anxiety, insomnia, or having your ability to work affected.  On top of this, a concept termed ‘cognitive offloading’, means your smartphone may even be making you less smart.  This stems from relying on Google to find answers to things you could actually figure out or remember with a little bit of mental effort.  This prevents the flexing of cognitive muscles that keep your memory sharp.

Neuroscientists at Korea University in Seoul found that teenage boys with smartphone addiction had suffered from significant changes in brain function. Using brain imaging techniques they found an increase in neurotransmitters that inhibit neurons, reducing their brains' ability to energize neuronal signals. Fortunately, after under-going a course of cognitive behavioral therapy the same neurotransmitters returned to normal activity.

Finding a Balance

Most of us love our phones and they certainly have a valuable role to play in our information driven lifestyles.  For those people veering towards addictive relationships with smartphones, the key factor is being aware of dependence.  Then some simple behaviors, like turning off phones in meetings, while driving, or having dinner with family, and not keeping a phone in the bedroom, will significantly reduce its influence on daily life. Another step gaining popularity is to remove social media apps, like Facebook and Twitter from phones, and only access them from laptops.

Reversing Effects

Modern neuroscience shows that the brain is amazingly adaptive.  Neuroplasticity is a door that swings both ways, allowing the negative impacts of smartphones, such as reduced attention or memory to be reversed with the right mental activities.

Switching time spent on smartphones with healthier activities such as meditating, face to face socializing with friends, exercising physically, or engaging in cognitive training, are all ways shown to recover mental function to normal and beyond.

As everyone who’s taken a driving test knows, navigating the road is a complex task that places demands on a range of mental skills. A team of 9 neuroscientists at the Faubert Laboratory, University of Montreal, used sophisticated driving simulations and NeuroTracker assessments to see if cognitive abilities could reveal which people are most at risk behind the wheel.

In a landmark study spanning several years, 115 young (18-21 years old), middle aged (25-55 years old), and elderly drivers (70-86 years old) had their driving skills put to the test in the VS500M – a high-tech driving simulator built with real car parts and force feedback steering. Immersed in a display with a 180° field of view, the participants spent two hours driving in city and rural environments, as well as on the highway.  Each scenario included dangerous events that forced emergency responses to avoid accidents with other vehicles or pedestrians.   Drivers had to steer or brake suddenly in order to safely react to life-threatening encounters.

Breaking new ground

The simulator captured a wealth of data on driving performance, including 18 specific measures of driving skill.  These were rigorously analyzed to capture not just errors, but also nuanced driving behaviors, such as the anticipation distance at which a driver starts to respond to an oncoming threat.  With the goal of breaking new ground in driving simulator research, this new level of analysis allowed the researchers to reveal poorly adapted skills that could contribute to potentially high-risk driving.

It is known that when mental resource demands exceed what’s available, driving ability can be critically impaired.  So the research team also compared driving behavior across low, medium and high cognitive load scenarios. They then evaluated this load against age and driving experience to identify which combination of factors put people most at risk of driving accidents.

What was found

Previous research has shown that young drivers tend to be less safe on the road due to a lack of experience and greater risk-taking tendencies, while older drivers tend to be less aware with slower reactions, and compensate for this by driving more slowly.

In the simulator drivers were not told what speed to drive so they would behave more naturally.  As expected, older people mostly drove more slowly. Iinterestingly though, experienced drivers of all ages also tended to drive more slowly than inexperienced drivers.  Younger participants were more likely to be involved in near crashes than older drivers, and after perceiving potential threats, older drivers took defensive action earlier than younger drivers. However, older drivers were also less likely to identify threats in sufficient time to react appropriately. The researchers suggested this behavior may be linked to perceptual-cognitive changes associated with ageing.

In terms of strategies for responding to dangerous events, younger drivers tended to favor steering movements to avoid crashes, while older drivers were more likely to brake abruptly.

How it related to cognitive function

NeuroTracker measures an individual’s ability to capture and integrate relevant information in a highly complex visual environment. While previous driving studies have compared isolated measures of cognitive function such as working memory, NeuroTracker was used as an integrative and dynamic test in order to be more relevant to the broader cognitive abilities involved in driving.

Statistical analysis of NeuroTracker results demonstrated that they effectively predicted elevated risks of crashes.  More specifically, NeuroTracker data predicted steering rate and the distance at which large steering reactions were made, suggesting that mental speed of processing may be a factor in making earlier evasive responses.

Lower NeuroTracker scores also correlated significantly with slower average driving speed for older adults, providing evidence towards the theory that driving more slowly is related to the cognitive effects of aging, rather than simply being more careful.

Very similar findings were discovered in a separate 2017 study, again using NeuroTracker and driving simulator assessments, but focused on older drivers only.

Practical applications

While putting individuals through driving simulators to assess their skills on the road is good in theory, it’s not practical due to high costs.  High-level cognitive tests like NeuroTracker however, are cheap, take just minutes to complete, and can performed at home.  This study shows that such perceptual-cognitive measures can reveal factors underlying driving risks, and even help to identify people using compensatory driving behavior but still at increased risk.

Assess then improve?

Although NeuroTracker is a scientific cognitive assessment, first and foremost its used by a many people around the world to enhance human performance, including elite athletes, military special-forces, and Formula 1 drivers.  With evidence for rapid enhancement of a wide range of high-level cognitive functions known to be relevant to driving abilities, as well as far transfer to performance abilities, it could provide a means to not only identify those at risk on the road, but also to improve their abilities to drive safely.  Professor Faubert, a researcher on the study, commented, “There’s clearly a high relevance of this type of cognitive tool for assessing driving skills, but I see even greater potential to improve those skills for people of all ages.”

Study references

Driving simulator scenarios and measures to faithfully evaluate risky driving behavior:  A comparative study of different driver age groups

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185909

Three-Dimensional Multiple Object Tracking Speed Thresholds are Associated with Measures of Simulated Driving Performance in Older Drivers

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1541931213601505

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With so much attention in the media over the NFL ‘concussion crisis’, parents have growing concerns for youngsters playing contact sports.  But what are the actual risks?

The scale of contact sports injuries

Researchers at Yale recently calculated that in the US contact sports are responsible for over 650,000 serious injuries per year for young male athletes. More than 80% of these are with high school students, many of occurring with the approximately one million football players in US high schools.   The associated medical costs of these injuries have been estimated at $20.7 billion per year - without taking into account the long-term effects of concussions.

Concussion rates

According to the results of 13,000 questionnaires published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the fears of many parents were confirmed. These showed that concussions start showing up at a high rate for teens engaging in contact sports.  Around 1 in 5 teens from all over the US reported that they have been diagnosed with one or more concussions.  This does not take into account undiagnosed mTBIs, which are suspected to be more common in younger populations due to less awareness of common symptoms.

Increased risks for young females

According to a new study published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, recovery from concussions can take twice as long for young female athletes compared to young males.  This is believed to be due to underlying cognitive conditions that are more common in girls, including as headaches, depression, anxiety and stress.  As these are common mTBI symptoms, the effects can overlap and lengthen the recovery process when already existent. In this study with 212 male and female young athletes, 58% of the girls still had concussion symptoms after 3 weeks of injury, compared to 25% of the boys.

Greater challenges for young athletes

John Neidecker, an orthopaedic specialist in concussion treatment, highlights the fact that student athletes with concussions often become stressed about not being able play sport. This is common because sport is also a key activity that normally allows them to burn off stress, and the primary treatment for concussions is simply rest.  Stress compounds many of the hallmark symptoms of mTBI, making recovery more challenging than for non-sports children.

Complications with children

Other sports injuries like broken limbs or torn muscles are easily recognized through pain or medical scans.  However concussions are difficult diagnose as there are usually no external signs, and they can involve a wide range of symptoms. For example a head CT scan does not diagnose a concussion, which is mainly used to detect bleeding within the skull, or a fracture.

When a child is diagnosed with a concussion, it is typically more serious than with an adult.  This is especially true between the ages of 7 and 12, which is when young brains are developing very quickly.  Special concern has been raised for children playing tackle football. New findings by researchers at Boston University, revealed that playing before the age of 12 led to an increased prevalence of behavioral and cognitive problems later in life. This study followed 214 former players until 50 years of age, and found a threefold risk of clinically elevated depression scores.

Associated long term risks are now being taken more seriously than ever. This is largely due to the increasing number of studies linking professional football playing with the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).  The latest and largest ever study of cases of football players with the disease, looked at the brains of 111 deceased NFL players, and found significant CTE in 110 of them.

Taking youth concussion risks seriously

Though they don’t get the anything like the attention in professional sports, child concussions are surprisingly common, with potentially more significant consequences. The first line of protection for young athletes is to limit exposure to physical contact injuries while actually playing sports.  As a key example the NFL has now begun promoting non-contact ‘flag football’ for school children, as an alternative to tackle football.  Alongside this is the need for better diagnosis of concussions, which has prompted calls for training of high-school coaches to be more vigilant to the signs of potential injury.  In addition, better solutions are needed for managing the recovery process, particularly as prolonged periods of inactivity can exacerbate the recovery process for young athletes.

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One of the main objectives of formal education is to prepare children to become contributing members of society. While this goal has not changed in recent decades, modern society certainly has. Nowadays, there is a thirst to constantly stay connected and have access to a wealth of information.

As a result, the future of learning and the job world are starting to feel the impact in very profound ways. For instance, children are now digital natives, while their parents are digital immigrants. So, from an educational standpoint, how can we best prepare our children to become contributing members of society?

Traditional Approach to Learning

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.

Improving Fluid Intelligence

It’s very likely that enhancing fluid intelligence early on in a student’s education, will dramatically improve their academic performance. For modern educators, however, there have been two issues blocking the adoption of this approach. One, there seems to be a lack of clear evidence for methods that improve fundamental learning capacities. Two, methods that are practical to implement (minimal time, cost-effective and so on) do not seem to be readily available.

Technologies to Enhance Learning

From my perspective, NeuroTracker is a pertinent example of a technology with the potential to change the way we foster academic growth. Firstly, it has demonstrated training transfer to significant gains in fundamental learning capacities. Secondly, it has done so widely; boosting executive function, working memory, attention, processing speed, inhibition and response control.

Below you can see the cognitive training improvements in students based on standardized neuropsychological evaluations. These results are also backed up with qEEG readings of increased brainwave activity at rest.

Based on the fact that these are some of the best available measures for fluid intelligence abilities, gains of about 10% are significant when taking into account that the measures are highly resistant to change and have the potential for continued increase with additional training.

Transfer to Learning

In terms of practical implementation, NeuroTracker also sets desirable standards. Transfer to learning skills is rapid, with significant effects seen within a few hours of distributed training.  Most importantly, new studies show that students with learning difficulties respond to the intervention as well as students without them.

Perhaps more fundamentally, NeuroTracker robustly improves several types of attention. This is a critical factor, because when students struggle to pay attention in the classroom or when doing homework, their learning abilities are directly compromised. Boosting attention capacities means boosting skills that are critical for academic performance in the long term.

Finally, getting benefits from as little as 6 minutes of training per week, is critical. NeuroTracker differentiates itself from other contemporary interventions, which typically require several hours of training per week.  One Canadian school was so impressed by the practicality of ‘bite size’ training, that it went on to implement training during lesson times in their classrooms. This occurred after they participated in a study that assessed if NeuroTracker could train attention in students with learning disabilities.

Integrating New Learning Interventions

With more of these types of learning interventions and pilot projects across school populations will be helpful for investigating just how much student learning abilities can be enhanced, as well as reveal what positive effects this can have on long term academic performance.

In our increasingly digitally connected world, where attention is in such high demand, it is paramount to teach children to proactively train their mind. Enhancing these abilities will allow them to focus on a deluge of quality information, while ignoring distractions.

As a result, they will increase their mental performance and attain their desired outcomes. Once a definitive connection has been established, that’s when we’ll see a major change in educational culture, with NeuroTracker spearheading the way.