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Mental health has dominated conversations over the last few years. While there has been budget cuts to mental health services, the private sector are funding services and the public sector are stretching budgets from other areas, to provide support and education one way or another. Here we'll discuss the paramount importance of having qualified mental professionals.

Unqualified Health Experts

I set upon my holistic health journey five years ago, I felt embarrassed that I would research details when buying a car or house but wouldn’t read the ingredients of my food.

Around this time we had the health shakes boom, shakes like Herbalife were taking off, people were making money and then all of a sudden we had a surge of overnight nutritionists. It was usually personal trainers and professional athletes pushing the product and saying it was healthy as they were fit and great billboards for how we view health. There’s only one problem, they did not know the chemicals in the product.

I know this because many of my friends approached me to help them promote the product, but when I asked about the chemicals in the product their responses were similar, “All natural ingredients”. I would say, “Oh really, so what do you know about Cyanocobalamin?”. They couldn’t explain. I admit that at times I enjoyed the conversation too much and would make up chemicals, sometimes people would still try to explain what the made up chemical does. Seriously.

The same pattern is happening in mental health. My concern is that the conversation is being dominated by celebrities, people who are ill or not qualified, and because of this there has been a miseducation. I’m not saying that you cannot have people in those groups facilitating, I understand how effective it can be when people share their experiences.

However, there is an overwhelming amount of people and new companies set up to profit from the mental health trend, having vulnerable lives in their hands. “It’s the equivalent of someone who has CCJs and is bankrupt facilitating sessions on accounts. It will never happen.”

Expertise Over Storytelling

A person who is bankrupt has a story to tell, whether it be the unique way they fell victim to a situation or just simply being unable to manage their money. They may tell this story in such a way that it would be more effective than a qualified accountant speaking to the same group, trying to achieve the same objectives. The difference between the person who’s bankrupt and the accountant is that you’re more likely to receive information from the accountant that does not put you at risk. We all know this, and will go with the accountant so why are we allowing this to happen in mental health? People who are not qualified (or taking short courses) or mentally ill, or both are taking sessions on mental health.

This is reflected in the overwhelming amount of people who think mental health is mental illness, because the conversation is excessively referred to in the context of illness and not the spectrum, by people reinforcing this with the same narrative (stories of their woe).

Please note: I am not saying that there is note a space for people who are not qualified therapists

The Switch Off

People are unplugging themselves from the mental health conversation because it has become repetitive and predictable, so they are not learning anything. The current narrative has led to people self-diagnosing based upon the stories their exposed to and this new unregulated space. Creating resistance from others who see them as using the “mental health outlet” as an excuse.

Mental Health is the Physical Education of Society

English, science and math seem immune to budget cuts. Teachers would never think to prevent students from doing a lesson in these subjects as punishment and these subjects would never be compromised to catch up on work from another subject. Physical education on the other hand is victim to those situations, a subject where the games blind people from its importance.

Physical education is linked to your health for the rest of your life, if students are taught how serious it is and staff take it seriously, they will create a healthy connection with their body. A connection that doesn’t wait for the doctor to tell you that if you don’t start exercising you will die, a connection that has you willingly socializing with friends over a game you connected with during your youth.

Although important, physical education is a token and unfortunately mental health has become a token too. When a topic has to be repeatedly justified with data, that is an indication of resistance from somewhere. Every year there’s a conversation on the worrying levels of obesity data, mental health now shares the same pattern. Topics that link to making money are prioritized and losing a small percentage of people along the way is seen as the sacrifice.

Reality of Being a Mental Health Professional

I love human behavior, I’m very competitive and part of my fascination is linked to the fact of it being a topic that cannot be mastered. You are always learning and society is always changing, when you qualify as a Psychotherapist, Psychologist, Psychiatrist etc.. your qualification gives you a new lens. A new lens to view yourself, your client and the relationships that involve you, and the relationships that your client brings to the session. The process of building this new lens comes with a great challenge, you are broken down and built back up again. This is what some of your clients will go through so it’s fundamental you experience the process to develop your understanding, bring your blind spots into view and the suppressed emotional history to the surface for you to deal with.

To shine a light on the depth trainee therapists go to on their pursuit of becoming accredited therapists, one of my colleagues told me that when she was studying to become a Psychotherapist she was in a class of 30, by the end of the course, half of the class had split up with their partners. They were able to view themselves, their partners and the world with a new lens, and what they saw, led them to take action.

When training we help each other sift through our past in mock therapy (triad) sessions. Triad sessions consist of a therapist, a client and an observer, on my course we continuously carouseled through triads practicing and being observed and assessed for the last three years, then did a placement year where we had to facilitate one to one therapy for 100 hours alongside our studies and in the last year we had see a therapist for 20 sessions too.

Why do therapists have to deal with their baggage? To help others be healthier, it needs to come from a healthy place, also you are a model of excellence and most importantly, your past can block the client’s present, if you don’t deal with it. I share this to give insight into how rigorous the process is. It’s this way because when working with a person’s mental health, they are vulnerable.

Be Careful What You Wish For!

Because of my work I get to see the world for what it is. I work in a schools where you see children playing and laughing, what you don’t see is that their battle with physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, abandonment and bullying. During this time they have learnt that while schools try to help, school work is priority.

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As these children journey into becoming adults they find coping mechanisms - suppressing their feelings, self harming, substance abuse and a gang. Some don’t make it into adulthood, for those that do (and not in correctional system), learnt from their time in school that their work is priority. Although this is not ideal, years of suppression helps people to survive. To survive this journey of life, retaining their sanity, avoiding substances and helping them to self contain and not spill out everywhere (emotionally).

''Our mental health is directly linked to the quality of life one’s, the length of one’s life and the safety of everyone’s life!''

If we encourage people to speak we must be aware of what we are asking them to do and what it could potentially lead to. In many instances we are asking people to venture into the unknown, a place they have locked up for years. This can reverse everything that the suppression was protecting them from. Suppression is their coping mechanism, like self harm. Self harmers are not advised to stop self harming, they are monitored and advised on how to be clean in the process, because taking away their coping mechanism can lead to suicide. It’s that serious!

Am I asking people not to speak about their problems? No. I’m saying be mindful of asking people to speak about problems when there is no support in place, therapy is expensive and only a portion can afford it. If you are asking people to potentially revisit a place of trauma, have a think about what it will do to them and the long term support that will be accessible afterwards.

I would like mental health awareness/support, what should I look for when booking for my organization?

• If you’re going for inspiration then it’s a free for all, get anyone with a story, engagement is your only concern. Please note that it would only be for inspiration, and not for mental health awareness/support.
• To provide training, support or education for students and staff, it’s important that you get a qualified therapist. A therapist that is registered to a governing body to ensure that they’re keeping in lined up to date with ethical practices.
• Here are a few of the professional bodies that qualified therapists will be registered too, BACP (British Association for Counsellors and Psychotherapists), UKCP (United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy), CPCAB (Counselling & Psychotherapy Central Awarding Body).
• After you draw up a shortlist of qualified therapists, it’s important to think about engagement. Someone present a PowerPoint and talking at the group, loses the group, theory is the skeleton, the facilitator needs to bring it to life, make it relatable and engaging for those present. Everyone has experiences, the facilitator must be able to draw on the experiences of those present so they feel part of the process.

What's the difference between good athletes and the true great sports stars like Matt Ryan, Cristiano Ronaldo and Steph Curry? They all have great sports vision and sports science has taken notice. Sports vision, or 'neurovision' training has been taking off big-time in recent years, with many professional coaches seeing it as the next frontier in performance enhancement. But what is sports vision training, why is it becoming so popular, and what is the science behind it how it boosts situational awareness and decision-making? Here are 3 key blogs to answer these questions and help you get clued-up in a matter of minutes.

What is NeuroVision Training?

A blend of optometry, sports vision training, and brain training, the neurovision approach is a sophisticated new way to enhance athletic performance. This blog covers the basics and how it applies to pro athletes.

Read the full blog here.

The Rise of 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. This blog covers how the key principles are being applied by specialists and why the benefits are evolving a new caliber elite athletes.

Read the full blog here.

Sports Vision for Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is critical for making game-winning decisions under pressure. In fast paced-sports, if you can make efficient and accurate decisions based on your visual processing, then you literally can't compete. This two part special first covers the conceptual principles and neuroscience behind this approach, and then goes deeper into why peripheral vision is such a critical performance factor.

Read the part 1 of the blog here.

Read part 2 of the blog here.

We hope you found this blogs insightful. If you're also interested in how to apply NeuroTracker for sports vision training, then checkout our NeuroTracker 101 as a great place to start.

NeuroTracker 101

With the New York Post reporting that we spend almost half of our waking hours facing a screen, it's safe to say that we live in a digital world. But while our devices do connect us to friends, family, and work, it's important to be mindful of just how much time we spend engrossed in them. After all, lessening screen time wherever possible can provide some key benefits for your overall health.

1. Enhanced Memory

A quick Google search can save you time and energy, as it provides you with facts and figures almost instantly. However, solely relying on the Internet for information can impair your intelligence, as being dependent on Google can diminish your memory and problem-solving skills.

However, this doesn't mean that you have to quit search engines entirely. To strike the right balance between digital convenience and brain health, do a web search only when you absolutely have to and the information you need can only be found online. But if it's a word stuck at the tip of your tongue or a piece of information you already know, then it's best to skip Google and try to remember it yourself. This will help improve your cognitive skills in the long term.

2. Better Sleep

Getting the recommended eight hours of sleep every night is key to leading a healthy life. But this can be quite the challenge, since it can be tempting to watch just one more episode or scroll through social media feeds instead of going to bed. But more than that, Verywell Health reveals that the blue light on digital devices can disrupt circadian rhythms, and therefore cause insomnia. This means the less time you spend looking at a screen, the higher your chances are of getting a good night's rest.

3. Improved Mental Health

Mental health troubles are on the rise, especially among the youth. One of the biggest culprits behind this is screen time, as a University of Montreal study has found that higher levels of screen time are linked to depression and other mental health concerns. These can have severe implications on one's everyday life. Case in point, psychologists from Maryville University have found that learning success is connected to mental health in ways that scientists are only beginning to fully understand. If your mental health is in jeopardy, then your academic or work performance will likely follow suit. So, try making simple changes like stopping the use of devices before bed or practicing a non-digital hobby that can help you alleviate the problem and boost your own mental health.

4. Better Posture

When using a device, the tendency is for you to be slouching or hunching. And the more time you spend using one, the longer your body will be in an unnatural position. This can result in straining your neck, harming your spine, and ultimately, developing bad posture. Spending some time away from your devices allows you to focus on taking care of your body. Try countering the issue by designating a certain time of the day to practice yoga in order to further improve your posture.

5. Body Image Boost

Did you know social media is one of the main drivers behind a negative body image? Indeed, researchers from York University have discovered a link between active social media engagement and the development of body image issues. Gawking over celebrities or other famous figures online may seem harmless, but social media is a silent killer to one's self-esteem. This is why setting a time limit on image-heavy social networks like Facebook or Instagram can do a world of good for your confidence.

This week's article was written by professional blogger and tech specialist Andrea Camper.

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The FA Cup third round fixtures will have a delayed kick-off, to promote mental health in football, and to its fans. The kick off will be delayed one minute to spread awareness of mental health. The campaign is called ‘Take A Minute’ and is the result of a collaboration between Heads Up and Public Health England’s (PHE) ‘Every Mind Matters’ mental health platform.

Elevating Mental Health

The President of the FA, Prince William, who also launched Heads Up, is on a journey to place mental health on the same level as physical health. Football is a place that receives a great amount of attention and where a lot of behaviors that contradict a mentally healthy lifestyle are contradicted. Promoting the message in football not only provides a big audience to support through the messaging and direction to supporting agencies, it also promotes information of supporting agencies so they better equipped to support their families and colleagues.

Soccology on Mental Health

In the Soccology book, we have a chapter dedicated to mental health, to show how it uniquely turns up within football from a playing aspect. We found that those who displayed most concerns and suffered the most, were those under great pressure, stress and victims of the strong alpha environment. Saying this, there are also models of excellence who turned their life around and others who lived a life of wellness from the beginning.

We are hopeful that campaigns that spread awareness, will progress to the next level. The next level being -

1) Looking at the mental health from a social aspect, and how everyday life affects our state.

2) Wellness: Mental illness has been hogging the limelight ever since the conversation has been normalised, so much so, people refer to others who are ill, as having “mental health”.

3) Attention goes towards mental health outside of campaigns and is valued among other values at the top of the hierarchy, in our personal lives and among organisations. Especially those that hold young people long lengths of time - schools, sports clubs etc

Here’s to a mentally healthy future!

If you’d like to read more of my insights into the great game, head to my blog, or checkout these previous NeuroTracker blogs.

Understanding the Whole Experience of Football

The Similarity of Prison and Professional Football

Kevin George’s New Book ‘Soccology’

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With advances coming faster than in any other field of science, a lot has been going on in neuroscience throughout 2019. Here are three genuinely mind-blowing areas of neuroscience research that challenge our preconceptions of who we are, or who we could be.

Reincarnating Neanderthal Brains

As we speak, neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology are literally building “miniature brains” genetically grafted with multiple versions of Neanderthal DNA. Using the bottom-up futuristic biotech known as CRISPR, these lentil-sized mini-brains will contain clusters of live neurons grown from stem cells, performing real brain activity.

Although they will be too small to involve any complex behavior like communication, it is expected that they will reveal differences in fundamental brain activity that Neanderthals may have had. In this way genetics is providing a kind of historical telescope for neuroscience, allowing it to peer into the workings of ancient brains. All this from DNA preserved in bone fragments for tens of thousands of years.

And if you think this is something as simple as a few cells in a petri dish…think again. The German researchers are planning to hook-up the Neanderthal mini-brains to robots, in order to observe behavioral outputs. Even more ambitious than the plot a futurist sci-fi movie, if successful the mind simply boggles at what will be possible in the coming years – Neanderthal robot house maids anyone?!

Zombie Pigs

One of the biggest challenges neuroscientists face is that it is very difficult to study live brains. Even with brains recently deceased, neurons rapidly decompose in the hours after death, literally disintegrating. To tackle this challenge gung-ho neuroscientists at Yale University created a vanguard biotech called BrainEx. This high-tech support system was designed to keep brain cells alive in the way that hair and finger nails keep growing post-mortem.

Putting the tech to the test, the researchers used BrainEx to restore synaptic activity and circulation to a pig brain that had been dead for four hours. The brain had been removed from the pig and revived with an artificial blood supply using a proprietary mixture of protective, stabilizing and contrast agents. This took place just before the destruction of cellular and molecular functions started to take place. The image below shows the difference between a normally disintegrating pig brain 10 hours after death (left), and health looking cells on the revived pig brain (right).

Here comes the zombie part. Although the neurons were being kept alive and kicking, there was no higher-level functional activity in the brain circuits – so alive and dead at the same time. This flip from Frankenstein-like fiction to non-fiction, shows how neuroscience can change big ethical questions from the philosophical to the practical.

The biotech isn’t limited to zombie pigs though, in principle it will work with any kind of mammalian brains…including humans! The breakthrough has huge potential for improving our working knowledge of how our own minds operate. At the same time, it does looks unnervingly close to bringing the dead back to life.

Voice Telepathy

On a more inspiring note, 2019 also saw the development of a computer system capable of translating brain activity into synthesized speech. It works by decoding the movements of muscles involved in speech via nerve impulses analyzed through electrophysiological activity. The results of an experiment at the at the University of California San Francisco showed that a prototype version could successfully interpret language through muscular nerve signals, if speaking slowly.

The researchers expect to improve the biotech to natural speech speeds, which are around 150 words per minute. Still, it is already quite remarkable considering that only brain signals are measured. Here is a video demonstrating how patterns of brain activity from the speaker’s somatosensory cortex, decoded into vocal tract movements, can then be interpreted as language.

Many scientists have tried to solve this problem before and failed. These researchers took a fresh approach by creating artificial intelligence models for building simulations of vocal tracts. In effect the AI then taught itself from a library of speech experiments data and trained its neural networks to be able to decode language from vocal movements. These developments could be important steps in simulating human biology in computer programs for research purposes.

From a medical perspective, many patients with throat or neurological conditions, such as strokes or paralysis, can completely lose their abilities for speech. This neurotechnology paired with a smartphone could allow the voiceless to talk normally in real-time, on an everyday basis, simply by thinking about speaking.

However, as the simulated voice only requires reading a small region of brain activity, and the speech could be sent to virtually any computer, then potentially anyone could silently and covertly communicate to anyone with a smartphone and headphones. As that system could be two-way, it represents a literal neurotech solution for human telepathy. The possibilities are endless.

If you enjoyed this blog, then checkout our other blogs on the top neuroscience of 2017 and 2018.

5 Neuroscience Breakthroughs of 2018

7 Major Developments in Neuroscience of 2017

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Modern advances in military operations means more technology and resources are being made available to airmen in order to enhance decision-making capabilities in high stakes and high-pressure environments. This new approach also means airmen are integrating data and information sources more rapidly than ever before, placing them at increased risk of exceeding their cognitive load capacity and committing errors.

The Air Education and Training Command (AETC) has not only recognized the urgent need to take action on the current shortage of Air Force pilots through the creation of the Pilot Training Next (PTN) program. AETC also understands the importance of using emerging technologies to assess and monitor cognitive load under increased task demands and flight simulation. This has the potential to optimize the training environment and improve the learning potential for pilots at all levels of the military.

Despite the innovative approach to revolutionizing pilot training, it is not without its challenges. The need to profile talent and improve training efficacy requires scientifically-validated technologies in the field of perception and cognition that assess and enhance elite human performance. Although there are potential solutions in the emerging tech and neuroscience industries, there is still a large gap between theory and practice.

This is one of the reasons why officials from AETC have established a vanguard partnership with NASA, focused on biometric and human performance data collection with the goal of researching the physiological and cognitive factors that contribute to optimal student pilot learning. As a part of the collaborative research agreement between AETC and NASA, a machine-learning algorithm is being developed to generate a comprehensive view of human performance for optimizing the student learning experience.

NASA will also be contributing expert knowledge on how to draw inferences from student-specific, biometric data. In addition to the biometric data, they will also be utilizing eye-tracking data visualization technology that traces and records student pilots’ eye movements during simulated rides, allowing instructor pilots to analyze the data in real-time and post-flight. NeuroTracker will be used to assess and enhance key cognitive skills that impact pilot performance.

NeuroTracker was selected as a finalist for the Aviator Training Next Program and was the only neurotechnology selected to be a core component of the Applied Biometrics and Analytics program for the PTN curriculum. NeuroTracker is currently being used to train working memory, attention, and executive functions, all of which are critical for maintaining situational awareness and executing effective decision-making capabilities in environments of high stress and pressure.

This partnership brings together multi-disciplinary expertise to enhance the performance and mental resilience of airmen through a focused, scientific methodology that integrates interactive and accessible technologies into the learning process.

Science Applications International Corporation’s (SAIC) Applied Biometrics and Analytics team led much of this effort at PTN. Baseline cognitive and psychometric profiles were completed to identify areas of strength and limitations. A holistic approach to monitoring and improving both cognitive load capacity and resilience was implemented using a combination of cognitive exercises, physical training, neurotechnology (NeuroTracker), biometrics, and sleep tracking. The stress response throughout live and simulated flights was measured and analyzed using biometrics such as heart rate variability (HRV). These strategies were employed on a daily basis throughout the duration of the program, with ongoing feedback from both the instructor pilots (IP’s), and the SAIC’s Cognitive Coaches.

Following completion of the post-test analysis, a 36 percent improvement was found specifically in working memory capacity, with other cognitive functions improving between 9 and 20 percent (findings to be published).  Additionally, NeuroTracker speed threshold data showed a predictive capacity in determining which pilots would be assigned to each flight track. While the sample size was too small to determine statistical significance, these findings are very similar to previous research by Professor Jocelyn Faubert, demonstrating that a distinguishing factor of professional athletes is their ability to learn how to rapidly process complex dynamic visual scenes, as assessed using the NeuroTracker task.

These preliminary data results and collaborative research partnerships have profound implications for what these programs can achieve as they continue to assess, adapt, and integrate into the student environment. This modern approach to training airmen has not only the potential to revolutionize training within the United States Air Force, but for other training programs within the military. One example is the Aviator Training Next Program (ATN) for rotary wing aviators in the U.S. Army. The ATN program has followed the “learning next” model, using a customized approach to try and understand how aviators best learn within the academic, synthetic, and live environments.

It is these types of collaborations that will lead to similar innovations growing throughout all areas of military training, with the potential to produce warfighters in an accelerated, efficient, and learning-focused manner.

A prolific field of research, neuroscience is exploding with discoveries year on year. From discovering that we grow new neurons out of progenitor cells well into old age, to finding ways to directly program brain activity through optogenetics, it can be hard to keep up with the latest revelations. Here are 3 surprising discoveries that might challenge your preconceptions of how your brain is wired.

Super Meditators have Brainwaves on Steroids

Revered in many cultures for centuries, neuroscientists are only now beginning to objectively unpick what makes meditation such a special state of brain activity.

American neuroscientist Richard Davidson applied a scientific examination into just how powerful the effects of transcendentalism can be on our brains. He scanned the minds of truly veteran meditators who had practiced their craft for up to 62,000 hours – the equivalent of over 7 years of non-stop meditating! This revealed a major difference between the Zen masters and normal people.

The lifelong experience of meditating amped up their brains' ability to produce gamma waves. Brainwaves are mass pulses of rhythmical electrical activity that resonate through neural networks, a little like how groups of muscles fire in concert. Gamma brainwaves are the fastest frequency pulses, associated with attention, memory and simultaneous processing of information across different brain areas.

The super meditators' gamma waves were already heightened above normal levels when they were not meditating. However, when asked to get into a state of focus on compassion, their gamma levels sky rocketed up to 800 percent faster. If you imagine this as an analogy to physical performance, it would be like be able to run at super human speeds.

Daniel Goleman, coauthor with Davidson, summed up the revelation.

"We have to assume that the special state of consciousness that you see in the highest-level meditators is a lot like something described in the classical meditation literatures centuries ago, which is that there is a state of being which is not like our ordinary state."

Brain Surgeons can Control Laughter

If we had to decide on one thing that makes us genuinely human, it would probably be humor. Laughter activates regions in the center of our brains, heavily influencing emotions and memory formation. It also has distinct physiological effects, reducing pain, as well as boosting heart rate, antibodies and the functioning of blood vessels.

Using an experimental approach at Emory University School of Medicine, neuroscientists and brain surgeons attempted to hack this human behavior in a bid to make surgery safer. By stimulating white matter fibers that communicate between limbic system, they triggered instant laughter in patients on the operating table.

This effect was proceeded by a sense of calm and contentment, even while unconscious. The key advantage was this helped prevent the risk of panicking patients awaking from brain surgery prematurely due to, allowing for safer operations.

Seeing as laughter is the best medicine, known for instance to alleviate the effects of depression, this form of cognitive puppetry could become a future tool for regulating our mental and physical wellness.

A Virus Created Your Capacity for Memory

An international team of researchers recently investigated Arc, a protein that is essential to memory formation. The neuroscientists found that Arc has properties in how it operates that are very similar to the HIV retrovirus - unlike any other non-virus protein. This allows it to transfer RNA to neurons, which floored the researchers who discovered this behavior.

Surprisingly, up to 15% of human DNA is derived from viral DNA that worked its way into our genes over evolutionary timescales. Mostly it is thought of as ‘junk DNA’, though in some cases it is plays a critical part in making us human. For example playing a central role in the development of wombs in female mammals.

Though hard evidence is still needed, it appears that Arc proteins evolved 350-400 million years ago as a very early retrovirus, and inserted its genetic material into animal DNA, leading to in adoption our brains today. No Arc means no long-term memories. Like science on our microbiome, this line of research is very new, but is already shedding important light on what actually makes us human.

This fascinating finding of a viral co-evolution being behind one of our essential brain functions typifies the young and enigmatic field of neuroscience. Lots of breakthroughs are being made, yet it is clear there is still much to discover.

Look out for our end-of-year blog on the top neuroscience discoveries of 2019. In the meantime you can catch-up by checking out these.

7 Major Developments in Neuroscience of 2017

5 Neuroscience Breakthroughs of 2018

Scott is President of NeuroTracker and an expert in it's application to military performance. Having collaborated with major groups like the US Airforce and US Army, in this interview he shares what he has learned on how NeuroTracker is being used in innovative ways to assess and train military performance, and how these could evolve into solutions for optimizing human performance more broadly.

Q1. Can you first tell us a little about how NeuroTracker came to be applied in the military and what kind of solutions did it offer?

Sure. Originally it was elite American military forces that were the first to adopt NeuroTracker. They were primarily looking to move the needle at the very high end of human performance, so the fact that NeuroTracker was already being used by world class teams in the NFL, NHL, NBA and EPL attracted the interest of groups like the Navy Seals. Their main challenge was actually similar to that in top tier sports; how do you maintain situational awareness and effective decision-making under extreme performance pressures? For example, we worked with USSOCOM to innovate solutions for the extremely high casualty rates in Close Quarter Battles, which are sometimes higher than 50%. You can imagine in those scenarios how quicker and more accurate decisions can save the lives of warfighters.

Q2. That’s interesting, were there any particular applications of NeuroTracker that dealt specifically with CQB risks?

Yes, we collaborated with SOCOM to develop a special version of NeuroTracker Tactical Awareness (NTTA). This is a dual-task training methodology originally developed in sports to train certain skills to be robust under high-cognitive loads. Specifically, we evolved a situational awareness version of NTTA, similar to what we co-developed with the Atlanta Falcons for their MVP quarterback Matt Ryan. For SOCOM’s war fighters we integrated CQB scenes within the NeuroTracker environment, with decision-making demands such as shoot-don’t shoot. They actually ran a case study which showed that the NTTA training transferred to fewer tactical errors in CQB simulation assessments.

Q3. Fascinating. Somehow these kinds of projects later led to pilots performing NeuroTracker during live jet flights, which is pretty wild. What was the purpose of this?

Well this was a fairly large collaborative NeuroTracker study with Collins Aerospace, the Faubert Applied Research Center and the University of IOWA Operator and Performance Lab. It all kind of started with a veteran flight instructor wanting to know how the demands of live flight compare to simulated flight. In fact, in his words, ‘trainee pilots lose half their brains when they get into the air’. The question was how to measure if that was true?

The research team focused on the concept of spare cognitive capacity, that is, when you are doing task A, how much attention do you have left over to perform task B at the same time? If the answer is ‘not very much’, then the conclusion is that task A is highly demanding. NeuroTracker was a great fit for task B because of the objective and sensitive speed threshold measures it produces. The study showed that when performing advanced flight maneuvers, live flight sapped spare cognitive capacity more severely than simulated flight. This might not sound so important, but training jet pilots is extremely costly, so you need to make sure you have the optimal workload for each pilot, on each and every flight.

Of course, the same principle is true for any form of training which is mentally demanding, and for this reason the research won Best Paper for Training at I/ITSEC 2017.

Q4. This year NeuroTracker was accepted into the US Air Force’s Pilot Training Next program after winning the AFWERX competition. How is this different to previous work with pilots?

The Pilot Training Next, or PTN program, broadened the scope of NeuroTracker from assessment, to also incorporate accelerated training and performance enhancement. There is a major shortfall in the recruitment and graduation of new pilots for the US Air Force. For this reason, the primary goal of PTN is to innovate new training methods to speed up the time it takes to train new pilots. For example, this includes using the latest VR-based flight simulators as well as new applications of AI and analysis of biometric data.

NeuroTracker was immediately accepted as a complementary part of the overall approach, where training was completed as a component of the SAIC's Applied Biometrics and Analytics program. This program was led by SAIC’s Cognitive and Mental Performance Coaches, and included other cognitive, psychometric, physical and physiological assessments. Recently another aspect of NeuroTracker’s involvement with PTN has included working with NASA to integrate their expertise for analyzing eye tracking behaviors. We’re also evolving the performance enhancement to incorporate pilot specific dual-tasks for advanced performance training, such as maintaining situational awareness with Air Traffic Control commands while NeuroTracking.

Q5. Is there anything you can tell us about how well the program is going overall?

Usually with the military the answer is no. However, the PTN initiative is purposely leveraging emerging commercial off-the-shelf technologies, so is actually quite open. I can say it has gone very well so far. Even at this stage, NeuroTracker learning rate measures are showing some promising signs of being valuable in predicting the performance levels of students. We’ve also seen some nice indications of training transferring to significant improvements in high-level cognitive functions like working memory.

Based on these initial findings NeuroTracker has now been accepted into the Aviator Training Next program run by the US Army.

Q5. It sounds like there are some cutting-edge applications being developed for pilots, will these be transferrable in any way to other military domains?

Absolutely, although there are some specific applications being developed, the fundamental methodologies driving these have been developed within the last decade. Pilot Training Next and Aviator Training Next programs are certainly leading the way from an industry applications perspective, but I can see these core assessment and training optimization methods being useful for most areas of military performance. For instance, NeuroTracker was recently a finalist for a NATO innovation competition to improve training outcomes for first responders. And we have been invited to present NeuroTracker to a NATO panel which is focused on optimizing warfighter performance at I/ITSEC 2019.

We’re very lucky to have Professor Jocelyn Faubert actively involved in all scientific developments of NeuroTracker applications. In fact, he founded the non-profit Faubert Applied Research Center so that collaborators in any domain can develop industry specific applications of NeuroTracker based on scientific principles, guided by solid research methods. We expect to see applied uses to keep on evolving, as well as translating well across human performance domains outside of the military.

About Scott Kozak

Scott Kozak (MBA), is President of NeuroTracker and Executive Liaison for the Faubert Applied Research Centre (ARC), a non-profit research center dedicated to developing and validating new applications to address unmet needs in human cognition, learning and performance. ARC researchers collaborate with experts and key opinion leaders from renowned academic, government and industry organizations to validate evidenced-based applications of NeuroTracker technologies.

Scott was also Deputy Chair of the National Defense Industry Association’s (NDIA) Human System Division and is an Adjunct Professor at Brown University in the Executive Master of Healthcare Leadership degree program. He has held senior management positions in multinational corporations, start-ups and public-sector organizations.

If you'd like to find out more NeuroTracker being used in Close Quarter Battle training, then check out this article published on Modern Military Training.

‍https://modernmilitarytraining.com/training-effectiveness/can-improve-outcomes-close-quarter-battle/

New research into the minds of eSports athletes has revealed that they encounter a wide range of psychological stressors when competing in professional tournaments. This puts performance in the cyber domain on par with the mental pressures experienced by pro soccer and rugby players. Adding to the new but fast-growing body of eSports science, this study adds another level of equivalency between eSports and traditional sports. Here we’ll dig into what the research revealed.

What Was Studied?

Published in the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, researchers at the University of Chichester focused on elite esports professionals competing in major Counter Strike contests. A hotbed of research, the University of Chichester actually has BA (Hons) eSports degree on the science of gaming.

The researchers investigated the stressors top-tier gamers face and the associated coping strategies they use to cope with them, something never-before studied. They used in-depth psychological based interviews with deductive analysis to delve into the minds of the cyber athletes, comparing the findings to similar research in pro sports.

What Was Found?

51 different types of psychological stressors from competitive play were uncovered. Some of the obvious stress factors included being on the big stage amid the roars of huge crowds or millions of online spectators, as well as all the ensuing media attention and interviews.

But rather than these external type of factors, internal sources of stress were more significant. In particular this included faces pressures within the team. For example, when up against the wall, breakdowns in communications could result in players becoming overly aggressive with each other, or simply shutting each other out. This effect was amplified when the team’s goals became divided through different opinions in strategy.

Just like in traditional sports, a single error in eSports games like DOTA 2, Counter-Strike or Starcraft 2, can have dramatically negative impacts. With today’s increasingly substantial prize pools, such mistakes can literally cost a player and their teammates tens of millions of dollars. The added pressure is that eSports stars tend to have high rates of burnout with extremely short career spans, typically retiring in their early twenties.

The takeaway is that eSports stars would have a lot to talk about if they met sports stars like Ronaldo, Steph Curry or Tom Brady.

Coping Strategies

For the first time eSports professionals discussed in detail their methods for coping with the pressures of the major competitions. These strategies fell into four categories.

Emotional regulation – using self-regulation techniques like breathing control and relaxation, through to positive affirmations like ‘we can win this’ when the going gets tough.
Problem management – using intra-team communications post-matches to debrief, review what happened, and resolve team issues.
Approach methods – clearly defining and delegating player roles and responsibilities, and getting the most out of team camps.
Avoidance strategies – consciously attempting to minimize the impact of stressors such as team communication problems during the heat of competition.

Member of the research team Dr Phil Birch, commented on the significance of the findings.

"We have discovered that gamers are exposed to significant stress when competing in top-flight contests. By isolating these stressors, we can help esports players develop effective coping strategies to deal with such stressors and optimize performance while playing at the highest level."

Stepping Up the Game

With eSports exploding in popularity in recent years, the pro gaming industry has taking many steps to professionalize performance to the level of elite sports. In particular this has included the physical demands of esports, including nutrition and fitness.

The next trend is doing this on the mental performance level, which is why eSports training camps are looking more and more like sports science facilities. As you can see here, this includes using NeuroTracker and other cognitive training tech.

This new research shows that the psychological domain is just as important, providing another parallel with traditional sports. Rob Black, Chief Operating Officer at ESL, the world's leading esports company, said,

"As an industry we've known for a long time that stressors on top level players can negatively affect their performance. This study proves this and reinforces what we have been saying for years. Further developments are needed in this area, and that will be key in ensuring the number of professional players continues to grow worldwide."

If you’re interested in learning more about the fresh phenomenon of eSports, then check out this blog compilation.

4 Blogs on Why eSports are Impressive

Study reference: Matthew J. Smith, Phil D.J. Birch, Dave Bright. Identifying Stressors and Coping Strategies of Elite Esports Competitors. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2019; 11 (2): 22 DOI: 10.4018/IJGCMS.2019040102

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Surgical skill is renowned for demands on fine motor-skill performance. The biggest challenge, however, is to function under high loads of cognitive stress and pressure. From observations in the clinical field, the thing that most impressed me is how surgeons have to control their attention very carefully over a refined skillset. This happens all while ignoring lots of distractions in the surgery environment.

Operation rooms are hectic places; time is critical, and there is the huge psychological pressure of holding the patient’s future in your hands. Abilities vary greatly from one person to another. When you train as a surgeon, it’s tough to acquire these essential cognitive skills.

Impact of Games on Surgical Skills

Traditionally speaking, most training is technical and knowledge-based. Cognitive aspects are underrepresented. A lot of literature suggests that video game performance is relevant to surgical skills. These games, however, are highly varied in what type of skills you train and they’re not clearly measured. So what kind of game should you play? How much time do you need to spend on it?

To address this challenge I worked with a clinical research team to investigate if NeuroTracker could be of value. In surgery it’s important to not just be quick, but also precise; efficiency of movement is key. We found that NeuroTracker baselines explained a significant amount of the variance in movement speed and efficiency with medical students performing a surgery simulation test. It’s promising to see a relationship between these two tasks, which suggests potential for future research.

The Potential of Surgeon Development

It would be interesting to see if training on NeuroTracker could help surgeons to focus on the job and perform better. Surgeons could benefit from tools that can be used in a practical way. In particular, they don’t have much time to spare, so there is a clear need for improving necessary skills quickly. The NeuroTracker task is an example of something which is simple enough so that a lot of people can understand it quickly, but complex enough to challenge everyone.

There is also a lot of promising directions we could take with cognitive interventions. Think about cardiac surgeons who sometimes have to perform over 24 hour shifts where serious cognitive fatigue sets in. I’d be interested to see if interventions like NeuroTracker could help sustain cognitive processing for longer. There could be many such applications for surgeon development if transfer from cognitive training can be established.

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Professor Faubert talks with the NeuroTracker team on how healthcare is being transformed, and how this neurotechnology is playing a front role through the innovative new partnership just signed with Bayer G4A.

What is actually meant by digital health?

Well, essentially it means leveraging new and evolving technologies that are not traditionally used in healthcare, yet have a lot to offer. Everyone is aware of how smart wearables are now becoming a bit like a personal doctor on your wrist or in your pocket, but it’s much broader than that. It can include everything from advances in AI to the latest in miniaturized robotics. The challenge is how to actually implement these innovations into existing healthcare infrastructure with appropriate medical regulation, which is not easy.

NeuroTracker recently won a G4A partnership with Bayer, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure. Large pharma companies like Bayer are now looking to expand their health services into the digital space, but it’s a very dynamic and fast-moving place to navigate. There were over 800 emerging technology companies that entered this competition, and the idea is that Bayer can help accelerate these companies into the market, while at the same time leveraging their innovation and expertise to expand their own position in digital health. NeuroTracker was the only company selected for oncology, with the goal of bringing neuroscience innovation into cancer care.

We’re well aware of NeuroTracker being used in human performance like with elite sports teams or military special forces. How does it fit with cancer care?

Generally speaking, cancer often comes with a lot of problems for the brain. This could involve the disease itself, side effects of treatments, or other factors associated with coping with cancer, such chronic stress and anxiety. Not much is understood in terms of these combined effects on brain function, so we’re hoping NeuroTracker will provide a new window into the brain that will be practical to use. It’s a new area for us, so we’re at the beginning and there is a lot to learn, but I’m genuinely pleased to be working with Bayer oncology experts and putting science first and foremost in this partnership.

How do you see NeuroTracker’s role in the overall picture of digital health?

You know we’ve been developing and evolving NeuroTracker in the commercial space for over a decade now, and before that there were years of research behind it in the lab. I think NeuroTracker provides a great role model in that it’s really grown out of a combination of pure science and professional experts who understand how it can be applied in the real-world. And from the beginning we’ve always had this nice feedback loop between neuroscience and applied use.

This is one of the reasons why there are so many independent researchers and institutes using NeuroTracker, and a key reason why we’ve been selected by Bayer and other major health companies to partner with. You ideally you want scientific expertise to be merged with industry-specific expertise, and I think when it comes to other companies in digital health, NeuroTracker sets the right standards to follow.

Are there any particular benefits to a neuroscience and pharma partnership?

There is a big benefit for sure, and that’s bringing expertise and resources into large scale clinical studies in the neuroscience domain. This is quite rare in neuroscience, as commercially speaking, it’s still a relatively young industry. Neuroscientists rarely get to access knowledge from the type of studies typical in big pharma, which are carried out on very large scales, both in the number of participants and the timescales. As a lifelong scientist, I see the Bayer partnership as a great opportunity to be involved in this type of new collaboration between the health and neuroscience.

Where do you see digital health heading in the next 10 years?

It’s always hard to predict the future, but what we do see now is a clear emergence of technologies that have the potential to play a big role in both our daily and long-term health. The first challenge is qualifying which ones are genuinely going to have a positive impact, which is why scientific validation is crucial. The second challenge is getting them to market in the medical space. This is difficult right now, because whether or not somebody can benefit from taking a particular drug, is very different to whether or not they should be using technology in a certain way.

That said I think we’re on the cusp of overcoming these challenges in a big way. The Digital Therapeutics Alliance is a great example of this, helping to set new standards of healthcare, as well as working with the FDA to adapt medical approval processes. When you have this combined with cross-industry partnerships merging their expertise and commercial knowledge, I think we can expect to see healthcare dramatically redefined in the next 10 years. We’re going to see technology move a lot of healthcare services from clinics and hospitals into our homes, keeping us connected to the support that’s needed, when we need it.

Last question, what do you think will be the single most impactful influence on health in the next decade?

Well there’s a clear answer that comes to mind, but of course I’m clearly biased as a neuroscientist. That said, I really do think it will come from how we understand the truly pivotal role our brain plays in our in our total wellbeing. Even in 2019, we understand physical health pretty well, but when it comes to the brain there’s still lots to learn, and that is changing really fast. Within a decade I think we’ll discover the fundamental ways in which the brain and body are intimately connected, and this will spawn a new generation of healthcare solutions.

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About Professor Faubert

Professor Jocelyn Faubert is Director of the Faubert Lab and the Faubert Applied Research Center, as well as the mastermind behind NeuroTracker.  Deemed the ‘world’s most preeminent expert in the field of visual perception’, he has worked on the neuroscience underpinning NeuroTracker for over 25 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 both the complexity and relevance of neuroscience understandable.

To find out more about how NeuroTracker and G4A are set to change the health industry, read our recent blog below. And if you'd like hear Professor Faubert introduce and explain the concepts behind NeuroTracker, then also check out these video interviews.

NeuroTracker is Frontlining the Digital Health Revolution

As we covered in a recent blog, the Digital Revolution has transformed practically every modern industry, with one major exception. Healthcare. This is about to change, and the tour de force in the revolution of healthcare is coming from new partnerships between the health and tech industries, with NeuroTracker playing a frontline role. Here we will look at the exploding initiative called G4A, and see how it is leveraging both scientific and commercial collaborations across these two industries, to usher in a new era of digital healthcare that will change all our lives.

The Health Industry Challenge

On the one hand there are endless waves of emerging technology innovations promising to enhance the efficiency of traditional treatments, making them more personalized and precise.  This covers everything from wearable gadgets to embedded sensors, mobile health apps and AI or robotic care. Being able to efficiently collect health data at a personal level, to perform sophisticated assessments and evaluations, is the reason why all the major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple are investing heavily into AI driven digital therapeutics.

On the other hand, the huge healthcare and pharmaceutical industries that dominate the health space today, are in great need of expertise to navigate the rapidly emerging and complex digital space.  And yet without the expertise of big players in the traditional health industry, tech companies generally lack patient care know-how, as well as how to succeed with complex and expensive regulatory approval processes, like the FDA in the US and the EMA in Europe.

This escalating division between these major industries is the reason why healthcare has largely been stuck in the pre-digital age.

Forging New Digital Health Solutions

Out of the need to solve this deadlock the G4A was born. In their own words, ‘‘G4A is a global team of intra and entrepreneurs with presence in 35 countries enabling positive disruption in the digital health and care industry.’’

To achieve their mission they actively promote cross-industry commercial partnerships, provide healthcare technology funding, and setup mentorship programs to share expertise. Bayer, one of the largest players in big pharma, has committed to G4A in a big way. Earlier this year, in a bid to drive their healthcare services into the digital domain, they ran a G4A competition to invite emerging health-tech companies to partner with them. Around 800 companies participated, with just 11 finalists being awarded partnerships, each receiving 50-100K Euros initial funding.

NeuroTracker, a member of the Digital Therapeutics Alliance, was proud to be among the winners. As part of the celebrations, NeuroTracker was recently invited to present at the G4A partner signing-day at the Bayer headquarters in Berlin.

Being the only company to be selected for oncology, the neurotechnology used widely in human performance, will now be applied with scientific expertise to help improve outcomes for cancer patients around the globe. NeuroTracker’s Head of Strategic Partnerships, underlined the research drive behind the collaboration,

‘‘With our deep scientific capabilities, we will be able to ensure scientific rigor in how neuroscience can be applied in innovative ways for oncological care.  We expect that this NeuroTracker partnership with Bayer will lead to many more collaborations with global leaders in the health industry.’’

The Coming Digital Health Revolution

G4A, along with forward-thinking companies like Bayer and NeuroTracker, are leading the way as industry role models, bringing health solutions of the future, to the people of today. As Founder and Chief Science Office of NeuroTracker, Professor Faubert said, ‘

‘We are extremely enthusiastic about this opportunity to apply NeuroTracker in the medical space with such a major health company. We hope that the scientific approach to the partnership will provide a role model for the fast-growing digital health industry.’’

For this reason, NeuroTracker is also actively engaging in other major partnerships in the health industry. This includes an integrated cognitive and pharmacological treatment for depression, a condition which affects the lives of over 300 million people worldwide. It is hoped that on-going research will reveal improved long-term outcomes, as well as reduce the side-effect risks associated with conventional drug-based therapies.

This synergy between tech and health industries is promising to be a paradigm-changer for our medical wellbeing, on a scale like the transition from horses to cars. Jonathan Anderson, CEO of NeuroTracker and it’s parent company Nothing Artificial, explained,

‘‘The results of ground-breaking collaborations like our G4A partnership will be transformative, making healthcare safer, cheaper, more accessible, and more effective. This is a really exciting place to be right now.’’

Keep your eye on this space as we bring you updates on how the partnership progresses through 2020. And if you’d like to learn more about the broader topic, then check out our previous blog .

The Rise of Digital Health

To find out more about the G4A partnership  competition with Bayer, read the official press release here.

Bayer inks deals with eleven startups under G4A Digital Health Partnerships program

For media inquiries, please contact Armando Gomez (Chief Marketing Officer for NeuroTracker), at agomez@neurotracker.net

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Are you an avid gamer? If so, you’re not alone. In fact, these days it’s difficult finding someone who doesn’t play video games. Whether it’s during your lunch break or morning commute, it’s common to see individuals playing games on their smartphones.

Our increased exposure to gamified applications and new gaming habits are mainly due to the release of digital devices in recent years. With all this exposure, however, neurologists and psychologists are asking themselves: How do games affect our brains? Do they impact our overall behaviour? Here are three ways that video games impact our brains:

1. Attention

According to multiple studies, playing video games affects our attention. Gamers display, for example, enhanced performance in a range of top-down attentional control areas. These include selective, divided and sustained attention. Evidence shows that video game players are more efficient than non-players at maintaining laser focus during attentional demanding tasks.

In addition, gamers who have played action video games throughout their lifetime have superior decision-making skills that pertain to spatial selective attention. That being said, not all video games are created equal. Results reveal that action video games are better at improving selective attention than other slow-paced video games such as role-playing games or strategy games which require high planning skills.

2. Visuospatial Skills

Our visuospatial skills enable us to process and interpret visual information from our environment and the objects found within it. They are fundamental in helping us orient ourselves within a given space, accurately reach for objects in our visual field and shift our gaze to different focal points.

Some studies found that logic/puzzle and platform video games can increase the size and efficiency of brain regions related to visuospatial skills. For instance, the right hippocampus was enlarged in these long-term gamers.

On the other hand, action video games like Call of Duty and Super Mario were shown to negatively affect the hippocampus in gamers. The problem is that these players use the caudate nucleus, located in the striatum, to navigate through the game, which counterbalances the hippocampus. The more they use the caudate nucleus, the less they use the hippocampus, and as a result the hippocampus loses cells and atrophies.

Shaped like a seahorse, the hippocampus is the part of the brain that helps people orient themselves and remember past experiences. In general, more grey matter in the hippocampus means a healthier brain. The more depleted a hippocampus becomes, the more a person is at risk of developing brain illnesses and diseases such as schizophrenia, PTSD and Alzheimer’s. Consequently, it may be wise to exert caution when encouraging children, young adults and older adults to play action video games to improve their cognitive skills.

3. Cognitive Control

Different video game genres seem to affect which cognitive skills will be trained. During the course of a video game, a player may need to interrupt his or her strategy and implement a new one. He or she may also be forced to manipulate elements in a certain way to solve a puzzle and progress in the storyline. All these abilities can be characterized under the “umbrella” of cognitive control, which includes reactive and proactive inhibition, task switching, and working memory.

Nevertheless, transfer is a complicated issue when it comes to video game training programs. In general, transfer refers to a task’s ability to lead to improvement in other skills that are different from the task at hand. An example of near transfer would be learning how to drive a car, which then translates to knowing how to drive a bus. Far transfer involves a transfer of abilities that are completely unrelated to the task itself, e.g. learning how to play chess and then witnessing improvements in mathematical reasoning abilities.

While certain gaming studies showed structural and functional changes in the brain after playing games that involve our executive functions, they showed poor transfer effects when measured by other cognitive tasks. Even after 50 hours of training, researchers were unable to observe far transfer effects among participants.

On the other hand, another study showed that training older adults in strategy-oriented video games improved their verbal memory span. These games, however, did not improve their problem solving abilities or working memory.

Cognitive Training Program

It appears that much remains to be discovered when it comes to transfer and video games. Training periods found in scientific literature vary greatly and it’s difficult to determine if a lack of transferred skills is due to simple inefficacy or a short training period.

NeuroTracker, though not a video game, has been successful in demonstrating training transfer and efficacy. For instance, even with minimal training a lot of users experienced mental improvements within just 1.5 to 3 hours’ worth of training. In addition, certain individuals witnessed mental improvements in not only their training program but also non-related tasks e.g. passing accuracy in competitive play. With its gamified system and 3D glasses, NeuroTracker may seem like a video game. Positive results from multiple studies, however, suggest that it’s so much more!

Coming from the opposite direction, the domain of eSports is helping change the way we train human performance. To learn more, check out this blog.

eSports is Redefining What it Means to Train

And lastly, if you are interested in all things gaming then this knowledge portal is a great source for info and gaming statistics.

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For better and for worse, technology is changing our lives at light speed. Smartphones epitomize our rapidly changing relationship with technology. On the one hand we have almost unlimited connectivity to global life in the 21st century, combined with almost instant and omnipotent access to human knowledge. On the other hand, smartphones are like a black hole for our attention, in some ways closing us off to our real environment and inhibiting personal relationships with those around us. In this blog we’ll focus on two key ways that smartphones overload our attention, and why tools like NeuroTracker can provide a much welcome antidote.

What’s the Problem with Smartphone Use?

In a previous blog we covered why smartphone use can diminish our memory formation due to the ease of Google searches.  When focusing on the attentional costs of mobile devices, the first challenge is simply the urge of being drawn to our phones. This is softly confessed or accused as a form technology addiction. You may be surprised that a recent Deloitte survey found that Americans typically attend to their phones around 50 times a day. Such use has been associated with a rise in depression, particularly in teens, who are the most active cell phone users.

There are more surprising findings in some of the latest research, in that you don’t even have to look at your phone for it to be having an impact on your attention – just having it nearby saps your attention and cognitive abilities. One consumer research study explained these seemingly unnoticed effects,

‘’Even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence.”

Your Shrinking Window on the World

The second smartphone influence on our attention involves our perceptual-cognitive systems. When we see the world around us, whether it’s crossing a road or walking through a shopping mall, we are constantly using our peripheral vision. This helps us understand our place in the environment, pick-up and scan visual cues which alert us to anything important happening, as well as cognitively evaluate decisions and actions we need to take. This integrates our visual centers of the brain with our command center of the brain residing in the frontal lobes.

Visual demands which require us to focus in narrowly on a small area of our visual field also narrow our mental attention window, treating everything outside of the area as a distraction. This limits the amount of neurons being activated in the visual centers of the brain, as well as the amount of attentional resources we commit in any given moment.

Activities like watching TV or working on a PC have this effect, however due to the smallness of smartphone screens, the effect is much more amplified. In addition we often use smartphones when we are outside or travelling – the times when our neural networks usually get their biggest attentional workouts.

As our brains are so efficient at continuously adapting to demands placed on them, this extreme narrowing of our visual attention could be negatively changing our grey matter over the long term. A key factor is the amount exposure. Outside TV and computer time, we average 3-5 hours per day staring at pocket sized displays – about the amount of daily training time it takes be a professional soccer player!

There is a real conditioning risk that such a sustained focus of attention in the central view is causing us to perceive the wider world through a smaller and smaller window. In effect, the same process as what happens in healthy aging. Obviously a big concern is for teenagers - not only are they glued to their beloved phones - from a neurobiological perspective, their brains are very much still in development.

Harnessing Your Neuroplasticity

As we’ve covered in a previous blog, your brain’s neuroplasticity is quite remarkable. Although it can diminish your mental abilities when you don’t flex them, it can build them up to new levels in the same way that strength training boosts your muscle mass. When it comes to the two key ways in which our attentional systems take a hit from smartphones – distraction and narrowing of attention – the natural antidote is to train these specific systems.

NeuroTracker provides a great example of a practical cognitive training solution here, with a number of clear and validated advantages over contemporary brain training applications. These are three key reasons why this tool is ideal for countering the side effects of smartphone use.

1. Increasing Your Selective Attention – a key component of NeuroTracker is the way in which it trains you to pay attention to what matters most (your targets), while resisting constant distractions (your non-targets). This has been shown to boost selective attention, which allows us to flexibly allocate mental focus away from distractions, and onto what we need to pay attention to. This is important for staying in the moment and resisting the lure of a phone on the table, as well as remaining cognizant of the environment while using it.
2. Flexing Your Peripheral Vision – NeuroTracker is designed to activate visual attention across a wide field of view, and most importantly, in ways which are highly demanding. Not only is there a lot of information happening, attention has to be divided in order to simultaneously track targets moving very far apart (both width and depth). Compared to the collapsing in of visual attention while on a smartphone, NeuroTracker provides a power workout for your brain’s peripheral vision systems.
3. ‘Bang for Your Buck’ – there are of course other useful things you could do to protect your attention, such as playing sports. However, NeuroTracker is extremely efficient at boosting attention with a minimal amount of training. Many peer reviewed studies demonstrate significant gains in attention within just 3 hours of training time, usually performing less than 20 minutes per week. This means attention can be recovered and optimized very quickly, as well as easily maintained.

Striding Over 21st Century Challenges

Neuroscience is evolving quickly, bringing us new tools to improve our daily lives, career performance, and to harness our untapped potential. This is timely, because 21st technologies are impacting our lifestyles and working lives in exponentially increasingly ways.

Whether we crumble under these pressures, or rise to their advantages, all depends on how we can adapt our minds and cognitive abilities. Be it smartphone use, virtual reality applications, augmented reality tools like HoloLens 2, or revolutionary leaps in AI - we need neuroscience tools to prepare our brains for the challenges of 2020 and beyond.

Education strategist and visionary Dwayne Matthews recognizes just how important the inattention problem is for students now constantly immersed in a river of information.

''Technology is a tool. Today the challenge is teaching students how to think in a world with massive amounts of information, how to manage mastery of adaptive learning and creating thinking frameworks to guide personalized learning. Fundamentally it is about transformation. No matter what, we need to empower students to succeed in a world constantly trying to distract them.’’

The good news is that the very technologies impacting the way we navigate our world, are also the tools that neuroscience is evolving to help us adapt and better ourselves.

If you'd like to explore more of the topics covered in this blog, then also check out this article.

Technology Addiction – is it Real?

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Everyone is familiar with the idea of burnout, yet for decades it has taken a back seat when it comes to mental health in the workplace. This is because there have been more than four decades of academic debate on whether or not burnout is actually a real thing. Well the jury finally came in with a unanimous decision in the 11th edition of the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases, concluding that burnout is a chronic workplace stress syndrome that can be clinically diagnosed. Here we’ll run through facts on what burnout is, how much it is affecting 21st century work lives, and also why it’s on the rise.

Burnout Syndrome

For a long time even the idea of “burnout” was wrongly chided, as if it was some type of condition that’s been made-up by hippies and millennials who want more work-life balance. This couldn’t be further from the truth, for example when it comes to everyday full-time workers, a large US survey revealed that 23% of employees reported feeling burned out at work very often or always, and 63% of the participants stated they experience it sometimes. The reality is, it is becoming surprisingly common, so let’s dig into what it actually is.

Recognized for the first time as an official medical diagnosis, this career driven syndrome is characterized by three main symptoms, all specific to occupational contexts.

1) Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion – essentially chronic fatigue which does not go away until the issues causing burnout are resolved.

2) Increased negativity, dissonance or mental distance from one’s job – this could be a lack of meaning, questioning of purpose or general narkiness with work life on a daily basis.

3) Reduced professional efficacy – stress, fatigue and a growing sense of isolation can make it very difficult to focus on work, or to trigger a perpetual state of being overloaded by daily or weekly tasks and projects.

The key thing is that none of these symptom’s happen overnight, rather they are effects that accumulate over time, which stem from imbalanced work lives.

Who Does Burnout Affect?

Past these symptoms, the types of people most likely to succumb to burnout fall into two categories. The first group are people who work in service centered jobs, such as nurses, social workers, firefighters etc. These workers can experience burnout syndrome due to empathizing with the struggles of the people they serve, but in a way that feels like an on-going emotional overload – they are caring for others, yet tend to get left out for the support they need.

The second group are people who are in constantly demanding or high-pressure jobs, without enough time for proper physical or mental recovery.

This might sound like people who dislike their jobs simply because of hard work, however ‘purpose-driven work’ — that is work which people love and feel passionately about — is actually one of main causes of burnout.

According to a recent study, this type of labor can breed a form of obsessive passion, which leads to work and personal life conflicts. A Canadian study found that employees driven by purpose are actually more stressed and score lower for well-being and resilience than the rest of us. Professor in organizational behavior, David Whiteside, explained that “despite the clear benefits of feeling meaningfully connected to your work, our data suggests that there are often real and undisclosed complications of purpose-driven work on employees’ health that can be related to the experience of burnout long-term.”

This notion, that the type of people who confess to loving their jobs, are actually more susceptible to burnout, is a surprising one. And because we tend to believe the opposite to be true, people typically find it difficult to recognize who is really at risk of burnout, even when that person is oneself.

In all of the above cases, the key underlying factor causing burnout for pretty much everyone, is some level of gravity towards prolonged stress. Unfortunately, work stress in the 21st century has been going through a considerable increase – one factor why burnout is on the rise.

Burnout in the 21st Century

Numerous studies show that job stress in North America is easily the major source of stress in adults’ lives. More importantly, they further show that occupational stress has been increasing progressively over the past few decades.  One factor is simply the trend towards an ever-increasing number of hours worked - according to an International Labor Organization study, today Americans put in the equivalent of an extra three months more work per year than Germans do!

While job security has also steadily waned, the digital age has brought a new kind of 24/7 pressure through a constantly connected work culture.  Amy Blankson, founder and CEO of Positive Digital Culture explained this effect, “In our ‘always on’ culture, we struggle with digital boundaries. More than 50% of U.S. employees feel like they have to check their email after 11 pm to keep up with work. As a result, burnout is on the rise and engagement is decreasing.”

These following statistics provide a general representation of how significant the factors of stress are in the modern work environment.

• 40% of workers reported their job was very or extremely stressful
• 25% view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives
• 75% of employees believe that workers have more on-the-job stress than a generation ago
• 29% of workers extremely stressed at work
• 26% of workers said they were “often or very often burned out or stressed by their work’’
• Job stress is more strongly associated with health complaints than financial or family problems

It’s not just surveys either – these statistics have been correlated with an associated increase in rates of heart attack, hypertension, and other physiological disorders.  In testament to this, states like New York and Los Angeles now acknowledge that any police officer who suffers a coronary (at any time), is automatically assumed to have a work-related injury, and is compensated as so.

Whether we like it or not, the bottom line is that 21st century work environments and lifestyles are becoming more and more conducive to burnout risk.

The Costs of Burnout

Due to increasing pressure in the modern workplace, stress-induced absenteeism has escalated at remarkable rates over the last two to three decades. For example, one study of 300 companies found that the number of workers calling in sick tripled from 1996 to 2000. Over half of the working days lost annually in the U.S. from absenteeism are stress related. The net effect is that an estimated 1 million workers are absent every day due to stress, causing losses for larger companies in excess of $3.5 million per company, per year.

A critical factor here is that when key employees are absent, it places stresses and strains on workers who struggle to fill their roles, either due to lack of skills or knowledge, or simply from the extra workload. This risks what is known as a domino effect, where burnout can have consequential knock-on effects throughout a company’s workforce over time.

That said, the main costs of staff suffering from burnout is undoubtedly their reduced effectiveness at their jobs. This is an effect which is very difficult to estimate, but a growing number of corporate wellness companies refer to this problem as ''presenteeism'' – the employee is at work, but their productivity is low, their risk of making errors is high, and they can be a morale drain on their fellow employees. It's a stealth-based cost, but one which can be huge, and accordingly, is feared by most large corporations.

Forbes summarized the net costs for US companies as follows.

• Burnout costs between $125 billion and $190 billion every year in healthcare costs. Researchers estimate that workplace stress accounts for 8% of national spending on healthcare.
• Burnout often leads to disengaged employees, who cost their employers 34% of their annual salary as a result.
• Burnout is responsible for a significant amount of employee turnover, between 20% and 50% or more, depending on the organization.

For a problem that’s on the rise, there’s no doubt that facing the challenge of managing and preventing burnout needs to be a major concern for any modern-day company.

If you believe you are personally experiencing career related stress, then you can take the American Institute of Stress ‘Workplace Stress Survey’ by clicking here. This was developed to provide a simple screening measure to determine further investigation with more comprehensive assessments is needed.

If you’d like to learn about how a new culture of employee wellness is stepping up to meet the challenges of burnout, then read this blog.

How Do You Improve Employee Wellness?

Or, if you’re simply looking to understand general stress and how to manage it, then also check out this recent Expert’s Corner blog,

Stress. What Is It and What Can We Do About It?

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We covered the dual-task approach to NeuroTracker training in an earlier blog ‘The multiple stages of NeuroTracker training – performance’. You can see in that blog how complexity can be amped-up with training over time. In this blog we will provide some guidance on how to utilize this patented training methodology to elevate soccer skills under pressure. Whether your already a male or female professional player, or an aspiring amateur at any age, get set to achieve your next level of performance!

Core Approach

The fundamental approach follows this basic process:

1. NeuroTracking
2. NeuroTracking with a basic motor-skill task such as standing or balancing on one foot
3. NeuroTracking with a more demanding performance specific task, such as dribbling a basketball

This video illustrates the central concept of progressing dual-task complexity over time and in skill-specific ways.

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It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but this was born out of sports science research, dubbed the ‘NeuroTracker Learning System’, there are a couple of principles to it which make it quite a powerful technique for advanced conditioning.

First, results with NHL, EPL and top Rugby athletes discovered that even adding a task as simple as standing (compared to sitting) can significantly lower both NeuroTracker scores and learning rates. This showed that getting overall cognitive load right is essential for maximizing conditioning effects. Second, a study with Spanish Olympic athletes found that after training up on just NeuroTracker, athletes could quickly adapt when harder and harder dual-tasks were added.

So in a nutshell, if cognitive load is adjusted in line with adaptation to NeuroTracker training effects, then athletes can rapidly learn to handle exceptionally high loads of cognitive and motor-skill complexity – a classic quality of great athletic performance. This is epitomized in soccer, where players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi have the prowess to thrive amidst pressure and chaos, making rapid but accurate decisions while executing sublime levels of physical skill.

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Giving it a Shot

So for soccer coaches and players looking to step up gameplay ability when it matters the most on the field, here is a tried and tested 5-stage program to take a shot at.

Sitting

Standing

Balancing (balance beam/board or bosu ball)

Passing

Headers

Practical pointers

The added skill tasks are only performed during the movement tracking phase of sessions, and the athlete should try to keep visual focus on the NeuroTracker screen, using peripheral visual awareness for the soccer ball as much as possible. The dual-task sessions can also incorporate non-Core sessions like Overload, Dynamic, Target or Tactical. It’s important that sessions 15/20/25/30/35/40 are just Core sitting, as these provide updated NeuroTracker baselines. These provide a valuable reference as to how well your dual-tasks skills are evolving - achieve a dual-task speed threshold close to your current Core baseline while just sitting, and you have truly mastered the skill under pressure.

Only progress to the next dual-task level when NeuroTracker scores are no less than below 30% of the sitting Core, this ensures cognitive load is optimized for on-going learning effects. If the last phase is mastered, then get in touch with the NeuroTracker team for tips EPL teams use to reach the next level.

Evolving Truly Elite Athletes

As we mentioned Cristiano Ronaldo earlier, Mick Clegg was the legendary coach behind his meteoric rise at Manchester United, from a inexperienced rookie all the way to FIFA player of the year. Mick was the visionary who discovered NeuroTracker at the Faubert Lab and immediately got Sir Alex Ferguson to adopt it into the club's assessment, rehabilitation and performance programs.

His experience at the club with a plethora of world class soccer players led to his realization that rapid cognition is what differentiates the best from the rest, and that this is trainable. In his own words,

“NeuroTracker is a fundamental tool for harnessing and developing any athlete’s performance potential. That’s why I’ve run over 15,000 NeuroTracker sessions for Manchester United’s best, pro athletes, and world champions in multiple sports.”

If you'd like to read more on Mick's unique insights into sculpting athletic prowess, then also read this great Expert Corner blog here.

Mastering Performance the Ronaldo Way

As modern technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) continue to advance in development, the military is utilizing technological advances and new equipment to provide more data and more information to the soldier. These tactics and procedures have been employed to create a strategic advantage; however, they also place complex demands on the information processing capabilities of the soldier. This transition to modern military operations is significant, because these demands render the soldier vulnerable to cognitive overload, and many battlefield errors (friendly fire incidents, collateral damage) have been linked to a Decline In Cognitive Operations.

Here we’ll discuss the role of executive functions and cognitive enhancement training in the Military, as it relates to providing soldiers with the mental skills necessary for managing multiple streams of information and complex decision making.

Current Landscape of Cognitive Enhancement Industry

The role of executive functions for maximizing performance potential has long been understood. The predictive validity of cognitive ability and personality traits was examined in large samples of US Air Force pilot trainees between 1995 and 2008 from four training bases across three training tracks. Results were consistent with previous research indicating that Cognitive Ability Is The Best Predictor Of Training Performance.

As awareness of human performance programs that meet occupational needs continues to grow, it has been forecasted that the cognitive assessment and training market size will grow from USD 1.98 Billion In 2016 To USD 8.06 Billion By 2021. This growth and rapid expansion of the industry has also been met with skepticism regarding the reliability of evidence for the transfer to real-world performance. This is partly because brain trainer companies have previously received fines for False Advertising and claims made regarding benefits. However, the main challenge is that there is a plethora of cognitive enhancement training applications now on the market. While some uphold gold standards of scientific evidence of efficacy, most do not.

Nevertheless, elite military organizations have a direct need for cognitive training practices that use a comprehensive and scientifically valid method of enhancing both executive functions, and perceptual-cognitive systems. Despite the on-going debate surrounding brain-training applications, technological advances and organizations like the Digital Therapeutic Alliance are now making promising strides in identifying cognitive enhancement and performance companies who meet New Industry Standards for validating cognitive enhancement and assessment solutions.

Transferring Learned Skills to Real World Applications

More military technology and intelligence available to the soldier also means more attention, focus, and awareness required to effectively interpret And Make Decisions Based On The Situation And Environment. Using Cognitive Enhancement Training has direct implications for equipping soldiers in deployment, active duty, and for those preparing to return following injury or trauma with the skills required to perform under high risk and high-pressure conditions.

For example, the ability to process relevant information, and make decisions about the environment is essential for critical military tasks. In a limited amount of time, military personnel must be able to interpret environmental details into a coherent, mental representation of the area of operations. At the same time, relaying target coordinates and making decisions on the best course of action via radio communications and computer-based technologies can place further demands on mental resources. These tasks not only rely heavily on the function of, but efficiency and stamina of, attention and working memory, inhibition, situational awareness, and cognitive flexibility.

Subcomponents of Cognitive Performance

Working memory is also required to remember incoming commands and coordinates, as well as the ability to relate new information to concurrent information. The feeling of being overwhelmed in the presence of a high stress environment has been linked to deficits in working memory, and working memory capacity has been demonstrated to predict many important phenomena that are important for performance in military occupations. These include multitasking, susceptibility to mind wandering, tactical decision making, abstract reasoning, and errors made while fatigued. It is also highly predictive of the ability to learn and adapt to new situations.

Inhibition is required to sustain attention and process only the most pertinent and relevant information about the environment in the face of many visual and other auditory distractions. Situational Awareness is relied on by the soldier for understanding the military technical system and technology, outside environment, the state of other actors (location of other aircraft, actions of enemies and civilians), and the state and status of teammates. As many military operations occur in unknown and stressful environments, situational awareness allows soldiers to make effective use of diverse information, when it is critical to reduce the demands placed on their cognitive load. In situations where new information is presented, cognitive flexibility is required to modify the planned course and “think outside the box” in the face of an unexpected threat or new information.

The ‘Fog of War’

As we have discussed, cognitive abilities are a strong predictor of military performance. However, one factor that is likely under-recognized is how the stress-related effects of warfare degrade a soldier’s cognitive capacities. For example, One study simulated warfare stress with elite US Rangers, and found that cognitive degradation was more severe than alcohol or drug intoxication, or clinical hypoglycemia, seriously compromising operational effectiveness.

This ‘fog of war’ represents a clear and direct need for training methods which increase a war fighter’s mental resilience and robustness, in order to remain functionally effective when mission performance is at it’s most critical.

Practical Training Solutions

As an example of cognitive enhancement practices, the Pilot Training Next Program (PTN) has captured global attention and recognition for its dedication to providing innovative training solutions to the United States Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training program. A core component of the curriculum includes Holistic Human Performance training, led by a team of certified mental performance consultants, who utilize a systematic skills-based training program rooted in performance psychology to optimize student performance.

One piece of technology utilized by the Holistic Human Performance program is a perceptual-cognitive training tool, called NeuroTracker, which uses patented 3-D Multiple Object Tracking technology to elicit and strengthen Working Memory, Attention, Visual Information Processing Speed, And Executive Functions. The pilots train on the system daily to enhance the mental systems and cognitive load capacity needed for live flight training, as well as for helping to manage the demands of a condensed learning curriculum.

The same technology was used in a Collaborative Research Project by the Faubert Applied Research Centre, the University of Iowa’s Operator Performance Lab, the University of Montreal, and Collins Aerospace, which won the IITSEC 2017 Best Paper For Training. This novel study measured the saturation rates on spare cognitive capacity for various jet flight maneuvers, revealing the most efficient training loads for individual pilots.

Evolution and Adoption

Outside of these examples, the depth of scientific research of cognitive training and Assessment Solutions is spurring their adoption by elite military organizations such as USSOCOM and CANSOFCOM. Not only are such tools and methods being utilized for performance enhancement, but also to Profile Talent, and to determine Performance Or Return-To-Action Readiness.

Though the cognitive dimension of military performance is still a relatively new domain, it is evolving quickly, and this evolution is being accelerated by growing adoption for real-world military needs, along with new Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Technologies. In the next few years we can expect to see a wide range of new solutions driven by this synergy of research, technology and applied use by military experts.

You’re probably thinking: “Identifying a play before it happens? Impossible.” But if you study enough and know which cues to look for, yes, you just may be able to figure out what the offense is doing before they even snap the ball.

The Scenario

There are 10 minutes left in the 4th quarter. The opposing team is losing 10-7 and is currently on offense, about to face 3rd-and-8 from their own 25-yard line. The offense lines up in a Shotgun Doubles formation (2 wide receivers spread out to either side of the quarterback with a running back flanked next to the quarterback). You’re the linebacker. What are the steps you take in identifying the play coming your way in just a few seconds?

SHOTGUN DOUBLES FORMATION

Step 1: Reading the Situation

• Down and Distance: It’s 3rd-and-8 for the offense. On any given play, the offense has two options, run or pass. Defensively, you’re trying to analyze the situation and narrow down which option is more likely. The probability of gaining 8 yards on a run player is lower than on a pass play. You also want to take into consideration that it’s 3rd down, which means that if the opposing team fails to gain the 8 yards, they will have to consider punting.

• Score and Time: Although the offense is losing in the 4th quarter, there is still plenty of time remaining on the clock. It makes sense for the offense to punt on 4th down if they fail to convert on 3rd down.

Step 2: Analyzing the Formation

• Running Back: The depth of the running back can be an important clue. If the RB is deeper in the formation than the Quarterback, he might be preparing for a hand-off. Otherwise, he’s most likely to be utilized as a blocker in case of a blitz.

• Wide Receivers: Who is on the field and who isn’t? Wide receivers vary a lot but they usually fall into either the small and quick players category or the bigger, blocking type receivers. When smaller and quicker receivers are on the field it tends to mean a passing play is about to happen.

Step 3: Experience

• Body language: Intensively studying film can help in gaining knowledge of certain players. This is obviously easier to do at the professional level but this is where a person’s cognitive ability to pay attention and interpret visual cues becomes important. For example, minor details such as nervous body ticks can be a crucial indication. In the 2015 AFC Championship Game, the Broncos discovered that the Patriots’ center moves his head in a certain way immediately before every snap. This helped the defense time the snap perfectly – leading to a total of 4 sacks and 17 hits against Tom Brady.

• Statistics: Most of the time scouting reports and analytics can provide you with an additional edge. No matter who the coach or what the situation is, human beings tend to call plays that they’ve already had success with over a long-period of time. By simply using numbers, you can make an educated guess, with a good probability, of a play going one way or another. But it’s important not to over-rely on statistics.

Train Your Brain...Elevate Your Game

Good players have the physical attributes to compete and contribute to the team. Great players differentiate themselves by their hard work, dedication, and mental training. They spend hours studying film to pick up on the smallest cues that could give them an edge over their opponent. They are also able to mentally process a wealth of information in just fractions of a second so that they can make quick decisions under immense pressure.

Great players then take their game to the next level by doing cognitive training to achieve superior on-field awareness and mental stamina to make the 'clutch' play, when the other players have exhausted their mental capabilities.

If you enjoyed this blog, then also check out this.

Soccer Penalties – Gaining The Winning Edge (Part 1 – Goalies)

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The defining influence on modern times has been the Digital Revolution. Also known as the Third Industrial Revolution, it has shifted economies around the world from being primarily mechanical, to dominantly electronic. Computers, smartphones and connectivity have redefined almost every aspect of the way we live our lives, just think how managing finances has changed from pen and paper to online banking.  As a result, practically every modern industry has been transformed by a wave of digitization. There is however one glaring exception. Healthcare. Here we will see why that is about to change.

What is Digital Health?

Digital health is the convergence of digital technologies with healthcare and healthy living, as well as a drive to enhance the efficiency of traditional treatments, making them more personalized and precise.  It can cover everything from wearable gadgets to embedded sensors, mobile health apps and AI or robotic care. Some key advantages include being able to efficiently collect health data at a personal level, to perform sophisticated assessments and evaluations. Though perhaps most important, is the opportunity for new forms of treatments, dubbed digital therapeutics.

For these reasons digital health tools have, for a long time, shown promise to help identify new illnesses, more effectively monitor existing health conditions, predict the onset of diseases, and improve treatment outcomes. And surprisingly all this could come at a significantly lower cost and with greater accessibility than traditional healthcare. Which leaves the big question - why isn’t it already here?

There have been two key reasons. Firstly, the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are huge, with an equally weighty cultural inertia. The adoption of digital healthcare will be transformational, bringing new players into the market - something not seen advantageous by major players in the industry. Secondly, the healthcare space lives under understandably scrutinous government regulations, which have not been equipped to deal with the new standards and infrastructure needed to incorporate the complex and diverse digital health sector.

That said, things are set to change dramatically. Here are 4 reasons why.‍

1. New Regulatory Standards

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emits a global influence on healthcare standards. Recently it has been undergoing a major shift in its views on digital healthcare, with clear moves to embrace digital therapeutics. In the words of FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D. “The new technological paradigm of digital health tools will allow consumers and providers to supersede the traditional, physical constraints of health care delivery.”

The FDA now recognizes that regulatory approval processes which were designed primarily for pharmaceutical medicine, need to be expanded and become more flexible for digital health. This has included their issuing of the Digital Health Action Plan to support software and app-based treatments, as well as allowing the use of real-world evidence mining for clinical development. The FDA has also backed the founding of the Digital Therapeutics Alliance, a large group of digital health industry leaders committed to broadening the understanding, adoption, and integration of clinically-validated digital therapeutics into healthcare.

In terms of healthcare entering the third industrial revolution, the FDA is now taking some big steps.

2. Consumer-Level Disruptive Technologies

The digital health market is now seeing the transformation of medical technologies in the consumer domain, into fully-fledged medical-grade digital health tech. For instance Apple's latest Watch has the addition of an ECG function, which has the potential to identify previously undiagnosed heart conditions like atrial fibrillation.

Another example is the medical device company Medtronic, which has created an app that lets people with internet-enabled pacemakers share data via their smartphone, directly with their doctor. These are just cursory examples amidst a whole slew of wearables and smartphone-based solutions which the health industry is now being forced to get behind, simply because they are so powerful at such low cost.

3. New Players in the Industry

Large pharmaceutical corporations have traditionally dominated the private sector in healthcare. However today, pretty much every big tech player in the consumer market, is now either aggressively entering the health market, or they have plans to dominate it.

While Apple represents the former, Google exemplifies the latter. Although their position in the health-tracking wearables market with Google Wear and Fit is already known, Google recently created a unit called Health, and appointed a new CEO. Much less well-known, this initiative is seeing a huge amount of effort and resources go into artificial intelligence for healthcare through its DeepMind unit. Amazon has similar goals but from a completely different angle, with a version of Prime for healthcare - using its expertise and infrastructure to disrupt everything from the pharmaceutical supply chain to Medicare management.

It’s for these reasons that Transparency Market Research foresees a 2025 digital health market escalating to a value of $536.6bn. This may even be an underprediction, because exploding tech companies have unprecedented growth rates fused with an uncanny ability to successfully jump into completely new markets. We only have to look at Jeff Bezo’s move from home delivery, to launching consumers into space with Blue Origin.

The big tech companies time has come, and they now look set to roll into healthcare like a digital tsunami.

4. The Reinvention of Big Pharma

This threat of this competition from big tech is putting immense pressure on big pharma companies to switch-up their games and reinvent themselves in terms how they grow their markets. Initiatives like Bayer’s G4A are seeing the pharma industry partner with digital health tech innovators, with goal of creating new products that go way beyond the scope of just pharmaceuticals. Rather than invest all their R&D into the next improvement of a particular pill or drug, they are looking to diversify R&D into new treatment modalities, better ways to administer and monitors drugs, and to create synergistic interventions, for example combining cognitive drugs with cognitive therapies.

These synergistic interventions could be a game changer in themselves. NeuroTracker is a member of the Digital Therapeutics Alliance, and has already conducted a pilot study showing that cognitive training can sustainably enhance the effects of cognitive drugs. This combined approach of stimulating neuroplasticity both functionally and biologically shows great promise. For this reason, NeuroTracker is being used in several clinical research programs with partners in the pharma industry.

The Transformation of Healthcare

This combination of new regulatory standards, emerging technologies, major tech companies, and a reinvention of big pharma, is set to drive a truly revolutionary change in healthcare. The added fact that this transformation has been long overdue, means that it is going to happen extremely rapidly.

In just the next five years we will see healthcare evolving from a medicine-based approach, into a whole new intelligent and 24/7 patient-centric care. This late arrival to the digital age will happen on a scale like the transition from horses to cars. The result will be safer, cheaper, more accessible, and more effective healthcare. Look forward to it, because it will benefit us all.

Practically everyone is forced to experience some type of stress in a point of their lives. Having too much or prolonged stress can lead to many issues, including health problems. For this reason, it’s recommended to treat it as quickly as possible. Here we’ll help you become aware of what stress is really about, the problems associated with it, and most importantly, what you can do about it.

What is Stress?

Stress is defined as your body’s reaction to any type of change that requires your body to respond to or adjust to. This type of response can be emotional, mental, or even physical, and it typically comes from either the environment around you, your thoughts and mindset, or it can also come from a more physical aspect, like your body.

Stress is typically caused by factors called stressors, which can be pressures or certain situations that are responsible for the stress that you experience. These stressors can either be positive or negative, so you can actually be stressed from things that are technically supposed to have a more positive effect on your life.

More specifically, there can also be internal causes as well as external causes. Internal causes are classified as being more self-generated since they are caused by your inner, personal thoughts and your overall mindset. Internal causes of stress usually involve excessive worrying about something that could happen in your life or not. It also involves irrational or extremely negative thoughts. For example, internal stressors can be anywhere from rigid thinking, perfectionism, an all-or-nothing attitude, or talking negatively about yourself.

On the other hand, there can also be causes of stress that involve external factors. External factors are pressures or situations that take place outside of your thinking, and you cannot often change these stressors. For instance, external stressors may involve significant life changes, pressures from school or work, or even issues that you may be experiencing regarding relationships with the people that are close to you in life. In addition to these factors, external stressors may also involve financial problems, not having enough time to complete essential tasks in your life, and even pressures that come from your family, children, or other loved ones.

What Does Stress Look Like?

Stress is capable of either gradually coming into your life and affecting you little by little, or it also can come up all of a sudden. Either way, stress is capable of drastically changing your whole life, whether it changes your life over time or all at once. When it comes gradually, it can change little things at a time, so it’s difficult to notice that you’re experiencing stress at all.

Regardless of whether stress changes your life gradually or all at once, there are a variety of symptoms that are associated with someone that typically is experiencing stress. For instance, someone may experience symptoms of stress that affect their cognitive abilities. More specifically, these symptoms can range anywhere from problems with memory to experiencing poor judgment.

In addition, cognitive symptoms of stress may include an inability to concentrate, a tendency to view the negative side of situations, excessive and constant worrying, or it can even involve extremely negative thoughts.

Aside from these cognitive symptoms, someone may experience symptoms of stress that are more emotional, like depression, anxiety, irritability, or even feelings of extreme loneliness. Additionally, someone may also experience psychological symptoms that involve feeling overwhelmed about certain situations or pressures that they’ve been placed under. Significant stress levels also bring on physical symptoms, such as aches and pains in random areas throughout their body, nausea, chest pain, or illness.

Lastly, stress may also trigger symptoms that negatively affect their behavior. For instance, changes in eating patterns, like consuming too much food or too little, or disruption to sleeping patterns. Other types of behavioral symptoms may becoming distanced from others, neglecting responsibilities, and procrastination. In addition to that, when people are under enormous amounts of stress, they often look to other forms of coping mechanisms, such as turning to cigarettes, alcohol, or even drugs, to temporarily manage the negative way that they’re feeling.

Different Types of Stress

Everyone will experience some stress in their lifetime, but there are multiple different types of stress. Whether it’s physical, emotional, traumatic, acute, or chronic stress, they all can affect practically anyone in the world.

Physical Stress - Physical stress is usually the result of someone participating in physical activities that end up in them, negatively affecting their body in some way. This can be anywhere from sports or fitness training to more subtle things. For instance, travelling can put your body under stress, since you most likely travel through different times zones, and your body isn’t used to this.

In addition to that, physical stress may also come from your body either receiving too much or too little sleep. And it can also result in you putting your body under physical strain that it’s incapable of handling, like when you spend too long on your feet or work for long periods.

Emotional Stress - Emotional stress is probably the most common type of stress that anyone experiences throughout their life. It typically comes after you’ve undergone a major life event that had the ability to affect your emotions or your mindset drastically. The effects of emotional stress are similar to those that someone that’s depressed may experience.

More specifically, emotional stress may results from drastic changes to your life, like a breakup, a divorce, or the death of someone close to you. But you may also experience stress because of less severe events, like simply having a bad day, being too overwhelmed at work, or having too many responsibilities at home.

Traumatic Stress - This type of stress typically occurs because of some kind of trauma that was done to your body. Traumatic stress may involve severe pain, or it can even include a coma. Regardless of the type of effect, it has on your body, traumatic stress is capable of drastically changing some physical aspect of your body. It can even possibly occur after you’ve undergone an operation or some type of surgery.

Acute Stress - Acute stress is a type of stress that can happen almost instantly, typically only lasting for a short amount of time, and it’s less severe than chronic stress. However, it is palpably noticeable – think of a racing heart beat or sweating palms. Additionally, acute stress is generally only affected by certain types of factors in your environment.

Chronic Stress - As opposed to acute stress, chronic stress is a more stealthy and problematic form of stress, which can last for extended periods. It is capable of impacting you in your everyday tasks, and it can negatively impact your life for up to several years. Somewhat surprisingly chronic stress can be measured physiologically, but often goes unnoticed at a psychological level, due to adjusting to a new change in mind and body state over time.

Why Is Stress Bad?

The human body is technically designed to deal with specific amounts and types of stress since it has an autonomic nervous system that’s able to respond to stress. The autonomic nervous system that’s in our bodies contains built-in stress responses that cause physiological changes to your body, which allows your body to combat any type of stressful situation that you may be experiencing.

But this stress response can become chronically activated when it has been fired for long periods, which causes your body to experience damage both physically and mentally. Essentially, when you put your body under too much stress for too long, your stress response system malfunctions and is unable to react appropriately to stressful situations when it’s most required.

When you experience too much stress and don’t treat it properly, then a less severe form of stress can lead to distress, which is classified as an extremely adverse stress reaction. Distress is capable of disturbing your body’s internal balance, which then leads to symptoms that negatively affect your body. For instance, physical signs of distress may include headaches, an upset stomach, high blood pressure, chest pain, and even problems sleeping.

Other symptoms of distress may involve more emotional symptoms, like depression, panic attacks, anxiety, and even excessive worrying. When distress goes untreated, it is known to worsen the symptoms of some diseases and can also cause diseases. For instance, distress can worsen and is linked to diseases like heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, and even suicide.

Why Stress Is Dangerous

Aside from stress turning into distress when it’s gone untreated for so long, it’s also dangerous for a variety of other reasons. For instance, stress makes you unable to control your emotions, so you will often overreact during situations when it’s inappropriate to overreact. Even mild levels of stress impair your ability to use your cognitive skills.

In addition to your inability to control your emotions, stress is also dangerous because it can ruin your heart health. More specifically, stress hormones in your body increase your heart rate, and they constrict your blood vessels. This ultimately forces your heart to work harder, and you’ll end up with high blood pressure, which is extremely dangerous.

Stress can also cause you to gain weight since people are known to eat more when they’re under stressful situations. Lastly, stress weakens your immune system. It puts high demands onto your body, which gives no energy for your immune system to properly work.

Eliminate Stress

Given the dangerous effects of stress, you’re highly recommended to get rid of it. You can do this in multiple different ways, such as engaging in more exercise. Exercising decreases the number of stress hormones that you have in your body. You can also look for supplements that are known to promote stress reduction, like lemon balm, Ashwagandha, and even Kava Kava.

You should also surround yourself with supportive people. Social support gives you a sense of well-being and belonging. You can also seek professional help if nothing else is working and you’re feeling more severe stress. Mental health professionals are specially trained to treat victims of stress as you.

Here are 10 ways you can eliminate stress:

1. Listen To Music - Listening to music can relieve your mind of stress because it’s able to influence your brain wave activity. More specifically, when you listen to music, the delta waves in your brain increase your ability to fall asleep, which ultimately helps your body relax more. Since music increases the activity of these delta brain waves, it will help you relax more. Not only that, but listening to music at around 5 hertz can help your brain synchronize with your delta brain waves. This is also why listening to music can benefit a wide range of health issues, like depression, anxiety, and even help people cope with cognitive impairments.

2. Decompress - To release any tension that you may have as a result of being under too much stress, you should place a warm rag around your neck and shoulders for a few minutes. In addition to that, you’re also recommended to close your eyes and relax the muscles in your face, neck, and upper chest. After you’ve has the warm rag on your body for a few minutes, remove it and start to massage away any tension that you feel in those areas. By doing so, you’re essentially removing any anxious feelings that you may have because of stress. Furthermore, you’re also relaxing your muscles, so this technique prevents any stress from doing back again.

3. Exercise - Exercising, in general, provides your body with a variety of benefits, including the ability to promote your mental health as well as your physical well-being. In addition to that, engaging in exercise every day reduces your mental fatigue, and it also improves your concentration and focus. Given that, exercise can reduce the amount of stress that you have to experience because it helps you focus on working out. Furthermore, exercising to relieve stress is recommended because your body receives more endorphins when you’re engaging in physical activity, so it makes your body feel better and improves your well-being. Some regular exercises that you’re recommended to engage in include brisk walking, jogging, yoga, and even going to the gym.

4. Read A Book - Reading helps you disengage your mind from any stressful thoughts that you may have, and it instead engages your attention into the book that you’re reading. By focusing your attention on the material that’s inside the book, reading helps you relieve stress by preventing your mind from thinking about the things that are stressing you out. Moreover, reading a good book helps to put you into a different state of mind, so you’re able to forget about reality for a while when you’re reading a book.

5. Spend Time With Others - You most likely don’t want to be around other people when you’re stressed because your mindset might believe that hanging out with other people will lead to more stress. But surrounding yourself with others when you’re under a large amount of stress is recommended because it helps to eliminate any stressful thinking. Being with other people helps you to think about them instead of being stuck in your head thinking about everything that’s stressing you out. Additionally, having fun with other people releases more endorphins, making you feel better in general.

6. Take A Hot Bath - Taking a hot bath while you’re under a large amount of stress is highly recommended because it can ease any tension that you may have in your muscles. Additionally, taking a hot bath helps your body relax, so you don’t have to feel stressed about thoughts inside of your head. To increase your feelings of relaxation while taking a bath, you’re advised to add some muscle to the water. Not only that, but adding certain essential oils that are responsible for combating stress is highly recommended, like Jasmine, Chamomile, Lavender, and even Holy Basil.

7. Watch A Funny Movie - Laughing can eliminate feelings of stress that you may have since laughing, and smiling are capable of boosting your mood and increasing your feelings of happiness. And watching funny movies is advised because they make you smile and laugh more. Not only that, but watching movies, in general, gives you the ability to take your mind away from reality, so you don’t have to think about the stressful thoughts in your head always.

8. Go Outside For A Walk - Walking is a beneficial form of exercise when you’re stressed because it doesn’t increase your heart rate too much, and it helps you unwind more. Not only that, but walking outside can release more endorphins in your body, so you will feel better overall. In addition to that, breathing in the fresh air and being in the sunlight outside helps to calm your nerves, eliminate any stressful thinking, and it improves your overall mood.

9. Learn CBT - CBT is classified as cognitive behavioral therapy, and it’s a form of psychotherapeutic intervention that is aimed at improving your overall mental health. It’s commonly used to treat depression, panic attacks, and even phobias. CBT involves the process of becoming aware of your mind and that you have the capability of changing your mindset. By learning CBT, you’re essentially training your mind to not think about certain thoughts that are responsible for stressing you out. You can ultimately turn off the negative thoughts and teach yourself how to handle the stress that you feel.

10. Meditate - Meditation is a process that’s known for its ability to relax your muscles, relieve tension, reduce anxiety, and increase your ability to rest inside of your own body. It’s responsible for altering your brain’s neural pathways, so it can help you eliminate any stress that you may be experiencing. To meditate correctly, it involves sitting straight up with both feet on the floor. You should close your eyes and focus your attention on your breathing. Become more consciously aware of your own body. This will help you further connect with your thoughts and give you the ability to think that you have control over your own body.

How To Prevent Stress

If you’ve experienced stress, you know how detrimental the effect can be on you. So you’re recommended to always refrain from stressful situations. You can do so by first realizing what makes you stressed in the first place. Find out which specific environments give you stress and then avoid those places and situations.

You should also frequently make time for relaxation so that stress doesn’t build-up. You should go for walks, spend time in nature, write in a journal, watch happy movies, and exercise regularly.

Overall, stress is bound to affect you at least once in your life. And when you experience it, you should do all that you can to get rid of it so that you don’t experience any of the adverse effects it can have on you if it goes untreated. Primarily, your methods of coping with stress should contribute to your overall greater emotional and physical health.

Here is a stress-busting infographic to help you remember what we covered and manage your wellbeing.

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About Rebecca Temsen

Rebecca is a wellbeing specialist blogger and editor at Self Development Secrets, and a professional marketer. If you'd like to read more great self-development blogs on everything from anger management to making yourself smarter, then check out the website.

Self Development Secrets

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New modes of rehabilitation are evolving all the time, however in recent years, some of the most promising therapy methods are being driven by neuroscience. If you aren’t familiar with NeuroTracker, this perceptual-cognitive tool is a training program which uses an immersive 3D environment and multiple object tracking to strengthen visual processing capacities and cognitive functions. The benefits of training include improvements in biological motion perception, visual information processing speed, attention, working memory, inhibition, and situational awareness, among other executive functions. Here we will cover why this neurotechnology provides some unique advantages for both physical and cognitive rehabilitation.

The Cognitive Effects of Injuries

Following injury or exposure to trauma, cognitive and visual processing systems can become affected. What most people find surprising is just how intimately the brain and body are connected.

For example, it is well known that problems or deficits with visual processing can dramatically impact balance. As such, these central cognitive systems are critical for achieving success in both physical and neurological rehabilitation programs. Here we will delve into the application of NeuroTracker, as an example of how cognitive programs can effectively assist individuals in their return to activities of daily living, and occupation.

Executive Function and Physical Rehabilitation

Physical rehabilitation programs that involve motor learning, such as learning to use a prosthesis following amputation, or gait training following spinal cord injury, place heavy demands on cognitive systems. For example, the loss of a limb has significant physical, psychological, and social impacts on a person's life. Ambulating with an above knee prosthesis requires significant cognitive effort, as the proprioceptive clues as to the position of the prosthetic limb in space are lost, and the loss of motor control at the ankle and knee affects balance strategies (Williams et al., 2006).

Activities during prosthetic rehabilitation, such as donning/doffing of the prosthesis and gait training, require both the physical skills of strength, balance, and coordination, but also the cognitive capacity to effectively learn these new skills and adapt them to complex environments. Several areas of cognition are thought to be involved in successful prosthetic use, including working memory, attention, and visuospatial function (Coffey et al., 2012). Likewise, executive control and inhibition are important for self-regulation and pain management. Executive control varies within people, and it is a non-constant resource that is prone to fatigue (Solberg et al, 2009).

Increased Cognitive Loads

Specific to spinal cord injury, spasticity, clonus, weakness, and postural instability may result in a more complex walking pattern, requiring far more information processing. These constraints prevent fluid and natural walking, and patients must generate adaptations that could affect the cognitive demands of the walking task. As attention is a limited resource, this increase in cognitive demand might be sufficient enough to decrease the patient's sense of security and ability to correctly integrate information from the environment. For motor skill in general, spinal cord injury patients have less control because of postural instability, lack of equilibrium, muscle weakness, and sensory loss.

To counterbalance those challenges, they must closely monitor their movements. As a result, more attentional resources are required to be given to sensory integration (visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive). This a key avenue where NeuroTracker fits in, providing an effective method to train executive functions to have increased stamina, as well as a higher resilience to fatigue during physical rehabilitation tasks that heavily tax cognitive systems.

NeuroTracker Training and Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is essentially the brain adapting its neural pathways and synapses to respond to changes in behavior, the environment, neural processes, and injury. It can also involve neurogenesis, which is the growth of new neurons in the brain. The brain is incredibly adaptable, and changes itself to better respond to environmental demands. As injury and exposure to trauma can affect the strength and function of cognitive systems, NeuroTracker boosts brainwaves that have been associated with an increased state of neuroplasticity. It improves learning by repeatedly strengthening attention and executive functions in a way that allows the brain to rewire itself to become more efficient in performance of tasks (Faubert & Sidebottom, 2012).

For example, injuries that cause damage to the spinal cord or the loss of a limb will undoubtedly cause psychological trauma. The patient may have also experienced neurological trauma such as mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion. The emotional experience of psychological trauma can have long-term cognitive effects. The hallmark symptoms of PTSD and concussion involve alterations to cognitive processes such as memory, attention, planning, and problem solving (Hayes et al., 2012).

Strengthening Connections through Repetition

Over the course of twenty trials and each session performed, NeuroTracker elicits these cognitive systems in a way that is controlled and at the individual threshold of each user. The patented speed algorithms have been designed in such a way that they are continuously challenging the user at the upper limits of their tracking capacity, without overloading them to a point that it becomes too difficult.

Staying within this zone of proximal development allows for optimal learning and neuroplasticity to occur. This adaptation to individualized capabilities occurs on a moment to moment basis, providing a training program that is efficient, effective, and tailored to the individual.

Dual-Task Training for Gait & Motor Skill Acquisition

Not only does NeuroTracker elicit the cognitive systems required for effectively learning and mastering motor skills, but it allows for physical skills to be integrated into the training sessions. Once a user has consolidated their learning in a seated position, the next phase of learning involves incorporating proprioceptive and physical skills that progress in complexity to match the demands of the environment. The goal is to increase cognitive load capacity, which effectively prepares the brain to be increasingly adaptable to new environments.

This process conditions users to be able to perform at optimal levels on both tasks, in situations where there will be both physical challenges and demands placed on attention and situational awareness. In a physical rehabilitation setting, this can include tasks that incorporate balance, gait, strength, and coordination, all while NeuroTracking.

Dealing with Real-Word Needs

In a physical rehabilitation program, dual-task ability is especially important for not only mastering new skills, but for safety in executing them in busy or demanding environments. For example, being successful walking requires situational awareness, the ability to appropriately control limb movements, and the ability to navigate within complex environments to successfully reach the desired location. A pilot study by NeuroTracker's Chief Scientist, Professor Jocelyn Faubert indicates that attentional demands significantly increase the risk of ACL injury through changes in motor-skill function. With higher cognitive load on the individual, the landing mechanics of the lower limb can change (Mejane et al., 2019).

Though this is injury specific, it's logical to infer that this influence is generic to other motor-skill based injury risks, especially in individuals who are participating in a rehabilitation program to strengthen and re-train physical and neurological function. Additionally, dual-tasking has been demonstrated to severely affect gait parameters associated with fall risk in populations prone to falls, and dual-task cost has been associated with poor performance in neuropsychological tests of attention and executive function (Yogey-Seligmann et al., 2008)

Intervention and Assessment

NeuroTracker can be used as an intervention to improve the capacity to perform dual-tasking, and it can also be used as an assessment to examine the safety of performing certain dual-tasks during rehabilitation and daily activity. Simultaneous performance on two attention-demanding tasks not only causes a competition for attention, but it challenges the brain to prioritize the two tasks.

Using dual-task training can serve as a predictor of potential fall risk and injury, and it may be able to reveal deficits not seen during single task motor skills performed on their own. Typically, an individual will be able to effectively perform the tasks separately with a sufficient degree of precision and stability. When the cognitive task is introduced, performance on one of the tasks becomes significantly reduced. This means that either situational awareness and attention will be reduced, or the quality of the motor-skill itself will become compromised.

Progressive Results

As NeuroTracker is performed in a controlled setting at the individual threshold of the user, it provides the ideal method to assess the ability to safely perform a motor skill under increasing cognitive load. At the same time, the multiple object tracking paradigm also trains biological motion perception (BMP). BMP involves the visual systems' capacity to recognize complex human movements, as well as to predict the actions and intentions of others.

The relevance of biological motion perception can be seen in navigating a busy sidewalk or grocery store, competing in sport, as well as driving. This has implications for pain management and loading on the joints, soft tissue, and musculature of individuals recovering from injury. With time and training, users can develop both the cognitive and motor skills required to successfully return to day to day activities.

This matching of complex therapy needs with NeuroTracker’s flexible assessment and training allows clinicians to take their treatments to a much more advanced level. In fact, some leading neurovision specialists use NeuroTracker data to guide their whole intervention approach, utilizing insights from the results to gauge the effectiveness of other interventions, as well as to customize treatment to the individual’s needs every step of the way.

If you’re interested in learning more about the wider neurovision training approach, then also check out this blog.

What is Neurovision Training?

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References

Coffey, L., O'Keeffe, F., Gallagher, P., Desmond, D., & Lombard-Vance, R. (2012). Cognitive Functioning in Persons with Lower Limb Amputations: A Review. Journal of Disability and Rehabilitation, 34(23), 1950-1964. doi:10.3109/09638288.2012.667190

Faubert J, Sidebottom L. Perceptual-cognitive training in sports. J Clin Sports Psychol2012; 6:85–102.

Hayes, J., VanElzakker, M., & Shin, L. (2012). Emotion and cognition interactions in PTSD: a review of neurocognitive and neuroimaging studies. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6(89), 1-14. doi:10.3389/fnint.2012.00089

Lajoie, Y., Barbeau, H., & Hamelin, M. (1999). Attentional Requirements of Walking in Spinal Cord Injured Patients Compared to Normal Subjects. Spinal Cord, 37, 245-250. doi:10.1038/sj.sc.3100810

Mejane, J., Faubert, J., Romeas, T., & Labbe, D. (2019). The combined impact of a perceptual–cognitive task and neuromuscular fatigue on knee biomechanics during landing. The Knee, 26(1), 52-60. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knee.2018.10.017

Nudo, R. (2013). Recovery after brain injury: mechanisms and principles. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7(887), 1-14. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00887

Nudo, R., Plautz, E., & Frost, S. (2001). Role of Adaptive Plasticity in Recovery of Function After Damage to Motor Cortex. Muscle and Nerve, 24, 1000-1019.

Phelps, L., Williams, R., Raichle, K., Turner, A., & Ehde, D. (2008). The importance of cognitive processing to adjustment in the 1st year following amputation. Journal of Rehabilitation Psychology, 53(1), 28-38. doi:10.1037/0090-5550.53.1.28

Solberg, L., Roach, A., & Segerstrom, S. (2009). Executive Functions, Self-Regulation, and Chronic Pain: A Review. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 37, 173-183. doi:10.1007/s12160-009-9096-5

Williams, R., Turner, A., Segal, A., Klute, G., Pecoraro, J., & Czerniecki, J. (2006). Does Having a Computerized Prosthetic Knee Influence Cognitive Performance During Amputee Walking? Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 87(7), 989-994. doi:10.1016/j.apmr.2006.03.006

Yogev-Seligmann, G., Hausdorff, J., & Giladi, N. (2008). The Role of Executive Function and Attention in Gait. Movement Disorder Society, 23(3), 329-342. doi:10.1002/mds.21720

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“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” – Benjamin Franklin

“One key to success is to have lunch at the time of day most people have breakfast.” – Robert Brault

There are many famous quotes by famous and influential people about rising early in the morning.  But is there any strength to these quotes? This article talks about 8 benefits of being an early riser. Early mornings for some can be a drag, and let’s be honest here, there will always be morning’s especially when it’s dark outside that all you will want to do is pull the covers over your head for an extra 5 minutes.

With so many benefits to waking up early, from enhancing your productivity in school or work, to being better able to stick to a diet plan to having more energy levels and better mood, it’s easy to see why many famous people swear by it attributing to their success, Richard Branson for example says he wakes at 5 am each morning.

Knowing this it is hard not to adopt this way of life to your daily routine. So let’s talk about some of these benefits and how to become an early riser.

1. Positive Outlook

According to studies early risers often tend to go to bed early as well, which means they are more likely to get the 7-9 hours recommended sleep for adults.

Sleeping the full amount regularly is said to help lead towards a healthier body and mind,  which in turn has its own benefits, so it is easy to see why early risers may be less stressed and have more positivity in their lives.

2. More Energy

More rest equals more energy, plain and simple . If you get into the routine of rising early and retiring to bed early you are more likely to have a better sleeping pattern which leads to being more energetic throughout the day, helping you accomplish your goals and tasks in a faster and more productive manner.

3. Body System Reboot

Regular sleep is important for your general health.  Not only does a full night sleep help to drop your blood pressure, helps your muscles to relax and repair, your breathing to slow and your body temperature to drop, but studies show that T-cells, which are the white blood cells that help to fight infection, tend to drop when you get a full night’s sleep. This is your immune system rebooting itself while you rest.

4. More Time to Exercise

After a busy day’s work, you can be both mentally and physically exhausted and the last thing you want to do is head to the gym or go out for a run. You make promises to yourself you’ll go tomorrow, only to have the same thing happen.  Early risers have the benefit of being able to fit their workout in, before the madness of the day takes over. This also helps to kickstart the body and mind which will energize you for the day.

5. Become more Organised

Sometimes the saying “Not enough hours in the day” springs to mind.

We fall asleep thinking about all the things we are going to get done the following day, whether that be at work or at home, or both. Then something throws us off, we sleep in, forgot something on the way to work, or get delayed in traffic and our day seems to spiral after that.

Being an early riser means you can get a head start on the day and helps to kickstart your day off to a good start.

By planning and laying out some goals and tasks to accomplish the previous day can help you be more organised and make use of that early start.

6. Healthier Eating

No time for breakfast? Grabbing something quick and easy on the go while you

run out the door? Sound familiar? Rising later doesn’t give you the much needed time to break the fast from the night before and prepare a sustainable breakfast that will set you up for the day.

Recent research has found that late sleepers generally consume approximately 248 more calories than those who rise early. They tend to only eat half as much fruit and vegetables and twice as much fast food as their early riser counterparts.

7. More Productive

Your brain tends to be the most alert in the morning, so why not use that time wisely to focus on important tasks un-interrupted while the rest of your house and world sleep.

You tend to make better decisions and think more clearly in the morning, then at any other time of day.

Starting the day early also improves your concentration which means you can accomplish those goals and tasks that you set out the night before. It also means that by the time you get to work, you are fully awake and properly acclimatized to the day meaning you will be more alert during those peak hours.

8. Helps your Skin Look Healthy

Our skin tends to look its best in the morning after a full night’s restful sleep. And being an early riser means you can take advantage and take your time to make sure your skin looks its best.

People who wake up early also tend to have regular sleeping habits which help to ensure that your skin gets the proper time to rejuvenate itself.

Getting into the Routine

Ok, so we’ve outlined some tips on how to be an early riser, but how do we start getting into the routine, while also getting enough sleep. Here are a few tips to get you started.

• Start slowly.
• Try waking just 15-30 minutes earlier than usual at the start. Get used to this for a few days, then cut back another 15 minutes. Keep doing this gradually until you get to your goal time.
• Allow yourself to go to sleep earlier. You might be used to staying up late, but if you continue to do this while trying to get up earlier, sooner or later one is going to give. And if it is the early rising that gives, then you will crash and sleep late and have to start all over again. Try going to bed earlier, even if you don’t think you’ll sleep and read while in bed or mediate for a few minutes to help relax your mind. If you’re really tired, you just might fall asleep much sooner than you think.
• Don’t have your alarm clock next to your bed
• This is an important one, if it is within arms reach, the temptation is there to just reach out and hit the snooze button or worse still you could end up just turning it off.
• By having your alarm clock far from your bed, you will have to get up out of bed to shut it off. Then, you’re up. Now you just have to stay up.
• Open the blinds or curtains and get out of the room as soon as you turn off the alarm
• By doing this you are less likely to talk yourself into getting back into bed, even if it is just for a few minutes.
• Do not rationalize. If you allow your brain to talk you out of getting up early, you’ll never do it. Don’t make getting back in bed an option.
• Have a good reason for setting that alarm:
• Set something to do early in the morning that’s important. This will help motivate you to get up and do it. Once it is done, you’ll be awake and ready to take on the day.

Take advantage of all that extra time

Have a nice hot cup of coffee or tea. Read a book, Watch the sunrise or meditate. Don’t wake up early, to wander around and not make the most of your time. Find something that’s pleasurable for you, and allow yourself to do it as part of your morning routine.

Getting up early has many benefits for both your body and your mind. The hardest part is convincing yourself to do it, and then getting into a routine of getting up early every morning. If you start implementing these tips you will soon see that it gets easier and eventually you will find that your body starts to get used to it, and you end up waking even before your alarm goes off.

About Ciaran Robinson

Ciaran Robinson is a passionate personal trainer based in Galway, Ireland. He is the owner and founder of CR Fitness.

With over 12+ years professional experience personal training, Ciaran works very closely with clients of all fitness levels to help them achieve long lasting results.  He is also a dedicated men's physique athlete and has competed and ranked within the top five at the RIBBF National Championship.

References

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/11/richard-branson-wakes-up-at-5-a-m-each-morning-heres-his-routine.html

https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/adult-sleep-needs-and-habits#1

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/what-happens-when-you-sleep

https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/news/20170104/immune-system-reboots-during-sleep

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/people-who-eat-and-sleep-late-may-gain-weight

If you're interested in reading more about sleep quality, then also check out a previous blog.

Simple Life Hacks for Great Sleep

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

The Mental Advantage is Critical

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

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

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

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

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

Cognitive Overload is Key

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

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

Training Needs to be Right in the Zone

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

Vision is All About Knowing Where to Look

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

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

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

Train Vision Early

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

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

Perception is the Key

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

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

About Mick Clegg

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

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

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

The Science Behind Elite Penalty Kicks

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

Types of Dual-Tasks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Progressive Overload

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

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

Mixing it Up

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

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

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

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Training Attentional Switching

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

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

Extended Uses of Dual-Task Training

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

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

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

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

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

5 Ways to Take NeuroTracker to the Next Level

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