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Acclaimed sports scientist Dr. Leonard Zaichkowsky took some time out to talk with the NeuroTracker team about his upcoming book ‘The Playmaker’s Advantage’.  Here we’ll cover why this book, which was co-authored with Dan Peterson, is set to drive a new culture of mental performance training for pro and amateur athletes alike.

What is the ‘Playmaker’?

The Playmaker on any sports team possesses an elusive, intangible quality combining anticipation, perception, and decision-making skills. The playmaker can make a plan and make a play under pressure. This quality raises their game above the competition and allows them to pass when no one else can, anticipate the movement of opponents, and avoid costly mental mistakes.  

They are the decisive general on the court or field, and because of this, they also make everybody in the team better.  Sydney Crosby is an iconic example, someone Dr. Zaichkowsky spent a lot of time interviewing for the book, along with many other sports professionals.

The Goal of ‘The Playmaker’s Advantage’

Perceptual-cognitive training – the mental dimension of sports - is the next frontier in sports performance. However, this approach has been largely ignored in professional sports.  Dr. Zaichkowsky believes it’s important to get the message out to athletes and coaches about the fundamental value of this approach to performance conditioning,

“The million dollar question is can search, decide and execute skills be taught? The answer is yes they can be. The challenge is that most people just really don’t know how to train the thinking system, which is what we’re trying to teach. An advantage now is that technology is getting more and more accepted in the sports world, and this is facilitating training of the perceptual-cognitive system.”

Tapping into the Coach’s Knowledge

Dr. Zaichkowsky explained that some coaches don’t even know there’s something missing in their training regime. Others know the importance of the mental edge, but don’t know the training methods available, and aren’t even aware when they are structuring their training around thinking and decision-making skills.  

“When you ask coaches how they train mental performance they usually scratch their head, even though they commonly use tight play drills, which is mainly about training the cognitive system.  But rather than training by chance, this approach can be done much more deliberately and expansively.”

That said, coaches are slowly catching on, and there are sports leaders who are going out and preaching that what coaches need to know is how the brain works, how people learn, and how you can teach mental sports skills.

Leading the Way with NeuroTracker

As the first person in North America to use NeuroTracker, Dr. Zaichkowsky implemented cognitive training and assessment with the Vancouver Canucks in 2010, “When I look back this was way ahead of its time, and it certainly took a lot of work to get the team to understand the benefits of this fundamental approach”.  

He used the NeuroTracker for two years, leveraging the cognitive data to guide potential draft choices based on the speed of processing.  The aim was to identify smart players, and then to make the most of their skills on the ice.  Increasing the speed of perceptual-cognitive processing was important for improving response control for making accurate decisions, as well as managing mental pressure in order to execute plays without errors.

Dr. Zaichkowsky is also keen on measuring executive functions with tools such as the AIQ (Athletic Intelligence Quotient), replacing out-dated assessments like the Wonderlic Test. While standard personality or psychology tests don’t tell you much about who is a sharp or quick thinker, executive functions correlate with an athlete’s cognitive aptitude on the sports field or pitch. For example, it’s known from sports science studies that the genius soccer player Andre Iniesta has executive functions that are way above normal and that such measures can even be predictive of goal scoring rates for strikers.  

Beyond Decision-Making

In the book, the relevance of perceptual-cognitive training is covered for performance traits you wouldn’t automatically associate with mental training.   For instance, explaining that ‘grit’ is an attribute that can be learned through deliberate thinking and practice, in Dr. Zaichkowsky words,

“Grit is about the person who never gives up, they have the resilience, and they set the tone for the team.  Critically these individuals believe they can always keep getting better.  This was certainly true with Crosby”.

Even the limits of physiological fatigue can be potentially extended through the brain, for example, the book goes into the latest research on how a regulatory mechanism in the brain has a significant influence over an athlete’s VO2 Max.  As Dr. Zaichkowsky put it, “The brain is pretty damn powerful - it can push performance to another level.”

Even the concept of choking in high-pressure game moments can be something avoided with the right approach. Dr. Zaichkowsky explained that making mistakes is not always choking behavior, often it’s related to the standard of play by the opponent.  

“When players make unforced errors, these are often based on not being able to think quickly enough, and not being sufficiently prepared for planning and anticipating how an opponent is going to pressure them.   This is something coaches can teach in practice, which will lead to better performance on the field.”

Learning More

About Dr. Zaichkowsy - as a professor, researcher, and consultant, Leonard Zaichkowsky has pioneered sport psychology by bringing cognitive neuroscience and sport performance together as an interdisciplinary science. His books and research publications demonstrate the importance of an athlete’s brain in anticipating and acting on opportunities during competition. He has consulted with teams in the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, Australian Rules Football, the Spanish men’s national soccer team, and Olympic sports organizations around the world.

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

http://www.80percentmental.com/

‘The Playmaker’s Advantage’ will hit bookshelves and online stores June 12th, copies can be pre-ordered here,

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

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On a par with the NFL’s Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup (La Coupe Stanley in French) is the ultimate championship title in hockey. Named after Lord Stanley of Preston (then–Governor General of Canada), it’s the oldest existing trophy to be awarded to professional sports teams.  The teams vying to drink champagne out of the cup are the Washington Capitals and the Golden Knights.  

4 games in, the tally is now 3-1 to the Capitals, giving captain Alex Ovechkin and the team their first chance to hoist the Cup in Game 5 on Thursday night in Las Vegas.  They routed the Vegas Golden Knights 6-2 on Monday night to take a commanding lead, with the crowd chanting "We want the Cup! We want the Cup!", sensing the Capitals on the verge of capturing the title. Not since the Detroit Red Wings lost the Cup Final in 1942, has any team not won in a 3-1 position.  

Neither team has ever won the cup before, and just needing one more win is tantalizing, but as right wing Capitals player T J Oshie pointed out, vigilance is required, "It can be easy in a game where you can clinch to get a little bit ahead of ourselves, but we've got a good group of leaders in the room ... and we'll be focused at the start."

The NeuroTracker team is rooting for the Capitals because they are one of the NHL teams to use the technology to train up their mental focus, decision-making and vision skills.  

Capital’s goaltender Holtby puts a lot of emphasis on the vision component of hockey performance, "I do a lot of visual training in my pregame routine to warm up my eyes and keep them sharp. If you're not seeing it, nothing else matters. Your eyes are the basis of your whole game."

Holtby told NHL.com he'd already done NeuroTracker training with his old Western Hockey League goal-tending coach John Stevenson, owner of Zone Performance Psychology in Edmonton. With the advantage of results which are quantifiable and measurable, Stevenson has been using NeuroTracker to take performance to another level since 2015,

"You are literally training your brain to process information doing multiple object tracking in 3D, you are training your brain to see the playing surface at faster and faster rates. We can measure a person's processing speed or whether or not they are seeing a quadrant, it really is like weight training for the eyes and brain."

One player making great strides in his career with the Capitals is Tom Wilson, who concludes every morning skate on game days in Washington by slipping on 3D glasses and spending time on the team’s NeuroTracker system. Wilson is a big fan of the results he gets with neurovision training,

“I’ve noticed a big difference with batting pucks down, tracking stuff … If I’m looking down, my peripherals can see a red jersey, where it’s going. My dad always said, ‘If you’re going to lift a weight with your arm in the gym, why wouldn’t you go work your brain out with your eyes?’ It keeps me sharp."

With a star-studded offense in peak mental condition, we’re hoping for a great performance from the Capitals on Thursday.

If you like to learn more about how elite athletes raise their mental game, check out this recent blog.

The Anatomy of a NeuroTracker Athlete

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Once the domain of pure leisure, ‘gaming’ is fast becoming the sport of the future.   eSports stars now earn salaries on par with top athletes around the globe, with predictions for earnings set to escalate. In this first part of a two-part blog, we’ll see what the eSports hype is about and if the status of ‘cyber athletes’ being the sports stars of tomorrow is justified.

An Olympic Sport?

The IOC recently declared eSports as a possible Olympic sport by 2020.  One step ahead, the Asian Games have already announced that a range of eSports will be officially included in the 2022 games.  Just like with the definition of chess as a ‘sport’, the idea of playing computer games rivaling events like the marathon is seen as contentious, to say the least.  Largely it depends on whether you define sports as mental or physical.  That said, the undeniable rise of eSports popularity seems like an unstoppable tide, with major tournaments filling huge stadiums and attracting prize pools reaching into the tens of millions.  Believe it or not, there are now stadiums being built exclusively for eSports competitions.

Who Watches

Maybe you’re unfamiliar with the concept of gaming as an international class event, which is not surprising given that followers of gaming seem to fit well into the classification of ‘geeks’. This is mainly because to appreciate a game, you generally need to know how to play it. For that reason, it’s predominantly sports entertainment for young spectators.

That said, there is a hell of a lot of fans, particularly in Asia. The sheer amount of people watching eSports is clearly something to take seriously. For example, a recent ‘League of Legends’ tournament attracted over 100 million viewers in China alone.  Year after year the major eSports games pull larger and larger crowds - a demand the internet is more than ready and willing to cater for.  Improvements in software technology even allow many eSports to be watched freely from with the actual game engine in stunning 4K, something traditional sports simply cannot offer.

Turning Pro

Viewing numbers in line with the world’s biggest sports league certainly whet the appetite of sponsors and advertisers.  For this reason, eSports went professional many years ago, with teams of gamers living in shared housing managed by coaches becoming a norm. Things are moving on from that quickly. Now the biggest eSports teams are turning to sports science to raise their game, including using NeuroTracker to sharpen their minds.  This video gives a glimpse into how cyber athletes are conditioning their minds on the latest cognitive training technologies.  

Although cognitive training is seen as the new frontier in sport performance, if the trend continues, it will actually be a generation of cyber athletes who will be setting the standard for how to hone the mind for optimal performance.

• Processing speed – gamers have to react on superhuman timescales, just a tenth of second delay and its game over.  Cyber athletes are probably the fastest thinkers on the planet.
• Decision-making – most games are geared towards presenting multiple outcomes for every action, with each decision concatenating outcomes exponentially.  
• Strategic thinking – many games have sophisticated strategy elements at their core, with resource management, skill planning, and complex teamwork mechanics often deciding the outcomes of competitions.
• Working Memory – gaming is all about juggling vast amounts of incoming sensory information and turning it into actionable outcomes. Huge amounts of information needs to be managed on a moment by moment basis.
• Motor-skills – for fast-paced games like first-person shooters, the skills to manipulate a mouse have to be honed to within fractions of a millimeter.  Even keystrokes have to be hit precisely, and often in combination.
• Action execution – measured in ‘actions per minute’, the commands to control game elements have to reach god-like levels when competing on the pro circuit.  Top gamers are known to reach up to 600 hundred actions per minute (10 actions per second) – while performing all of the above!

Putting it All Together

A great example of the need to combine these mental skills is the real-time strategy game StarCraft II.  This is a game where a player must control hundreds of units: building defenses and gathering resources to produce soldiers, then mustering troops for battle, then attacking and defending across multiple fronts. It revolves around a rock-paper-scissors-style logic that makes every single lightning-fast decision high stakes.

Training their minds 10 hours or more a day, these pro-gamers take their sport extremely seriously.  Its now professional gamers, rather than fighter pilots, astronauts, or chess players, who are now setting new standards in mental performance.  

In our second part to this blog, we’ll be looking at the different types of eSports, as well as the companies behind them seeking to evolve the next generation cyber athletes.  And if you’d like to get your head around just how gamers can hone their minds to such high levels, then check out our recent blog on neuroplasticity.

Your Brain’s Remarkable Neuroplasticity‍

NeuroTracker scores have been found to reveal elite athletes, show the effects of age on cognitive functions, indicate injury status, and much more.  Here we’ll look at what NeuroTracker scores represent, and how they can be used to assess human performance.

The NeuroTracker Task

A NeuroTracker session takes about 6 minutes to complete.   It involves putting on 3D glasses and performing a series of 20 mini-tests, called ‘trials’.  In each trial, you distribute your mental focus on the red targets and track them all as they move among distractors.  Then you identify your targets by mouse click, or by entering numbers via a keyboard. Get them all correct and the next trial will go faster, get any wrong, and it slows down.

Speed Thresholds

Speed is the critical element for adapting cognitive load to each individual optimal training level.  NeuroTracker quickly zones into what is called a ‘speed threshold’ – the level at which you can track all the targets successfully around 50% of the time.  The speed threshold calculations also provide the result for each NeuroTracker session, based on data from key trials.

For example, a NeuroTracker session score could be 1.5.  This means that when the targets reach that speed, the individual’s ability to maintain track of them will typically start to break down.  In effect, it represents an upper limit for 3D Multiple Object Tracking speed.

Although the task is a virtual simulation, the speed of the balls represents a real-world speed across the user’s field of view, measured as 68 centimeters-per-second at speed 1.0.  This requires viewing at a specific distance to the 3D display relative to its size so that a consistent field of view is experienced each time.

What the Score Represents

The NeuroTracker score itself is established in the neuroscience literature as a high-level measure of attentional capacity.  This means that the higher your score is, the better your attention.  It’s a high-level measure because performing NeuroTracker requires using and integrating several different types of attention.

• Distributed or Divided Attention – similar to multi-tasking, tracking several targets at the same time requires allocating attentional resources separately to each individual target.
• Selective Attention – because there are many decoys vying for your attention, selective attention is required to focus attention away from the ‘distractors’ and keep it fixed on the real targets.
• Sustained Attention – mental focus must be distributed continuously across time, a split second lapse and the targets will be lost.
• Attention Stamina – concentration must be maintained across twenty mini-tests per session, and across different sessions when performing them back-to-back.

As well as a direct measure of attention, NeuroTracker speed thresholds have been shown through many research studies to correlate with other high-level cognitive functions, including executive functions, working memory and processing speed.  They also correlate with many areas of human performance, for instance, one study showed that score predicted on-court performance statistics of NBA players across a season.

Finally, they are known to clearly differentiate certain populations, for example showing that older and younger people have lower scores than young-middle aged adults, that elite athletes have superior scores and learning rates to non-athletes, and that people who have cognitive conditions such as neurodevelopmental disorders have lower scores than healthy people.

Establishing a Baseline

Typically 3 sessions are used to establish a cognitive baseline, which requires around 20 minutes of NeuroTracker training.  If these are the first sessions an individual has performed, it provides an ‘Initial Baseline’ – a reference to cognitive condition but the effects of training kick in, and also a starting point from which learning rate can be measured with further training.

A ‘Current Baseline’ is based on the last three sessions an individual has completed, which can be used to show learning effects when compared to an initial baseline.   For example, improving from a baseline of 1.0, to 1.5, would represent a 50% improvement in learning.  Because the NeuroTracker task is almost devoid of practice or technique related effects, this improvement represents a raw improvement in brain functions for this task. Research shows that larger gains in learning provide increased transfer effects to high-level cognitive functions and human performance, such as improving passing decision-making skill in soccer competitions.

What ‘Learning Rate’ Reveals

15-30 sessions are typically used to evaluate an individual’s learning rate. Rather than how high or low and scores are, the key factor is how much relative improvement is achieved over the sessions. A high learning rate is associated with high levels of neuroplasticity, meaning that the brain better prepared to adapt in response to the mental demands placed on it.

A landmark NeuroTracker study published Nature Scientific Reports showed that elite athletes have brains with superior capacities for learning, which could be a critical factor as to why they can achieve such high levels of performance on the sports field. Professor Faubert, the inventor of NeuroTracker explained the meaning of this for world-class athletes,

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

Neuroplasticity is also known to be a key factor in brain health, with reduced plasticity being a related factor for increased risks of cognitive conditions such as dementia in older populations.

If you’d like to learn more about the concepts or science of NeuroTracker, you can listen to Professor Faubert introduce the technology here.

Professor Faubert Introduces the Concepts of NeuroTracker

Professor Faubert on the Science Behind NeuroTracker

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World-class sports starts in the NFL, NBA, NHL, EPL and MLB use NeuroTracker to raise their game.  But what exactly does an athlete get out of this type of cognitive training?   Here we’ll look at how NeuroTracker can be used to forge super-elite athletic abilities, as well as the performance advantages athletes get on the field.

Profiling the Cognitive Dimension of Performance

NeuroTracker produces scores in the form of ‘speed thresholds’, which means it measures the speed processing limits that a person can perform 3D multiple object tracking.   In and of itself this is known to be an important measure of attention – one of the key skills needed on the sports field.   So off the bat, NeuroTracker scores can be used to profile a key aspect of mental performance, which is one reason why NeuroTracker has been used by teams to scout upcoming talent in the NFL and NHL Combines.

Cognitive baselines can be achieved by performing 3 Core sessions (6 minutes each). These are used by teams as a measure of performance readiness – if an athlete’s score is down on game day, whether it be from lack of sleep, stress, diet or something else, they’re less likely to be as mentally focused as they need to be.  

Perhaps the most exciting form of profiling that NeuroTracker can yield comes from an athlete’s ‘Learning Rate’.  A landmark study published in Nature Scientific Reports showed that rate at which people improve over the first 15 NeuroTracker sessions can vary greatly, and that elite athletes have superior learning capacities to amateur athletes or non-athletes.  

This is theorized to be because their brains have greater levels of neuroplasticity, allowing them to cognitively adapt to new demands much faster than others. With this in mind, pro teams can potentially recognize elite athlete potential and use this data to guide their recruitment strategies.

Professor Faubert, the inventor of NeuroTracker and leader in the field of perceptual-cognitive neuroscience, explained in an interview the importance of this attribute for sports stars,

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

Boosting High-Level Cognitive Functions

Studies with NeuroTracker show that training rapidly and robustly boosts mental abilities in a top-down fashion.  Specifically, 3 hours of distributed training has been shown to transfer to improved executive functions, attention, processing speed, working memory, and response control.  It has also been found to sustainably speed up brainwave activity, associated with increased alertness, mental focus and heightened levels of neuroplasticity.

Sports science shows that these cognitive abilities are all critical in the mental dimension of performance.  In this way, NeuroTracker offers the possibility to quickly improve mental skills that apply to all areas of sports performance - whether it be reading the next move of an opponent, anticipating play opportunities, or making the right decisions at the right time.  To give an example, a recent study showed that NeuroTracker training improved the passing decision-making skills of soccer players by a whopping 15%.

Increasing Neurophysical Abilities

Once pro athletes have upped their NeuroTracker levels, they typically use the NeuroTracker Learning System to evolve training the next levels.  This involves adding specific sports motor-skills, such as basketball dribbling or soccer passing.  Here, we can see an example of how the complexity of dual-task training can progress for basketball players.

This approach increases the overall neurophysical loads athletes can handle, with research showing that gains in dual-task training happen very quickly.

Or alternatively, athletes who want to raise their playmaking skills use NeuroTracker Tactical Awareness to train-up their decision-making capacities under pressure.  This includes recognizing play opportunities as they happen in the background of the NeuroTracker exercise. Matt Ryan, the NFL record-breaking MVP quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons is an example of a sports star who has used this technique to reach new performance levels.

Enhancing Skills on the Field

So when an athlete has trained up on NeuroTracker to become a master of mental performance conditioning, how does this affect their abilities in competition?  On the left here we can see a range of cognitive traits that NeuroTracker is designed to enhance.  On the right are the on-field skills that these abilities improve.

As anyone can imagine, an athlete who can better react, read plays, anticipate opponents, focus under pressure, and have increased mental stamina, is an athlete with the potential to achieve super-elite performance.  With the growing emerging of new technologies combined with neuroscience, the way sports stars are made in modern sports is changing rapidly. The cognitive dimension is fast becoming the number one way for pro sports team to get a critical performance advantage on the competition.

That said, technologies like NeuroTracker aren’t only for the pros, anyone seeking to transcend their abilities can start training today!  If you’re interested in having a go at NeuroTracker for free, then check out our 2D demo.

If you liked this blog, you’ll probably like this too.

Ramping Up Performance with the NeuroTracker Learning System

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Modern neuroscience has discovered some effective ways you can remodel your brain through simple lifestyle changes. In part 1 of this blog, we covered the fascinating ways in which your brain is geared to adapt to the demands you place on it.  In this second part, we’ll cover some key concepts and takeaways that can help you harness your brain’s plasticity on a daily basis.

1. On the Ball

Changes in the brain are mainly limited to situations to when your mind is in the mood for it.

If you are feeling alert, engaged, or attentive, your brain releases neurochemicals to enable brain change. Think of priming your grey matter to be ready for action.  On the flip-side, when you are disengaged, distracted, or doing something you find boring, your neuroplasticity is dampened.

Take away – engage in activities you enjoy or find fun

2. Skin in the Game

Following on from this, motivation is a key factor for triggering more significant changes in your brain.  If you have an important reason for trying to master something or to take on a new challenge, the change in your neural networks will be greater.   The will to win in sport is a great example, and the fear of losing can also be a motivator, which is why any form of competing with others is an easy way to ramp up your brain activity.

Take away – embrace challenges

3. Novelty

Triggering neuroplasticity doesn’t actually mean that changes will stay.  Creating long-lasting changes depends on whether your experiences are stimulating or fascinating enough, or if the outcome is felt as significantly good, bad, or meaningful on reflection.  A key factor here is if experiences offer novelty or new challenges.  For example, learning to play an instrument or mastering a new language are both known to induce wide and positive changes in the brain.

Take away – take on new experiences

4. Optimal Arousal

An important concept in psychology is ‘optimal arousal’, which involves experiences which put your mind in a peak state.  Optimal is a keyword because under-stimulation isn’t good, but over-stimulation becomes stress, which can be unhealthy. For example, an overly stressful job can lead to negative brain changes – essentially your mind learning to be unnecessarily anxious. This floods the brain with chemicals which interfere with clear thinking and memory.  Achieving a ‘state of flow’ is the idea of being in the zone of peak experience - think of doing the things you love most.

Take away – seek out peak experiences

5. Practice Makes Perfect

The long-lasting effects of neuroplasticity involve boosting the strength of the connections between neurons that are working together over time.  A powerful way to boost these connections is repetition, in short - brain cells that fire together, wire together.  So the more something is practiced, the more becomes hard-wired, and even automatic – think of a martial arts master. This is a double-edged sword, however, because connections that aren’t used can be pruned, leading to the idea of ‘use it or lose it’.  This is known to be a key factor for older people keeping mentally healthy in their retirement years.

Take away – keep using important skills regularly

6. Virtual Practice

One of the most surprising findings in neuroscience is that mental rehearsal activates the brain and central nervous system in the same way as actually performing tasks in the real world.  In this sense, imagining doing something in as much detail as possible actually provides a form of practice or training.  This even includes dreaming.  Going one step further, just watching someone else perform a skill activates your mirror neurons to simulate the experience as if you were performing it yourself. This is known to trigger real learning, for example, one study showed that golf caddies have skills superior to their level of actual playing experience.

Take away – visualize or watch anything you want to do better at

7. Lifestyle Choices

There are a number of ways that lifestyle choices directly influence brain function and your mental health.  For example, the World Health Organization warns that smoking causes shrinkage of the brain and that high sugar consumption interferes with the absorption of nutrients essential for a healthy brain.  

On the positive side, there are a few key things which can help keep your brain in tip-top condition.  Firstly, countless studies show that regular exercise is great for your brain health and cognitive functions. Secondly, your brain is a glucose furnace, so keeping a steady and balanced level of carbohydrate intake throughout the day helps keep brain performing at its peak.  Lastly, good quality sleep is a wonderful way to not only help your brain rejuvenate itself on a daily basis but also to consolidate what you’ve learned each day.

Take away – do your best to live a healthy lifestyle

If you missed the first part to this blog, you can read it here.

Your Brain’s Remarkable Neuroplasticity

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The 3 pounds of grey matter between your ears is the most complex system in the known universe. The field of neuroscience has gone through a scientific golden age in recent decades, and this is largely due to amazing discoveries on your brain’s neuroplasticity. In this first of a two-part blog, we’ll learn why neuroplasticity is down-right amazing.

What is Neuroplasticity?

Neurons include many different cells which are all specialized for communicating what is going on in and around your body, with the command center being your mind. Plasticity is a reference for the flexibility to change, which is why some neuroscientists will state that ‘the brain is plastic’. Put simply, neuroplasticity means ‘your brain is adaptable’.

Brain Fitness?

Everyone is familiar with the idea that if you exercise your body, your muscles and cardiovascular system will adapt, making you fitter and better able to exercise. In a nutshell, this is what your brain does when it’s stimulated.

Whether you’re processing sensory information, focusing on tasks, thinking deeply, using your imagination, or even just dreaming - your brain is geared to constantly adapt to the demands placed on it. Believe it or not, there are lots of changes going on in your head while reading this blog.

How Neuroplasticity is Different from Physical Fitness

Comparing fitness gains from the brain and physical exercise is actually an oversimplification. Though the effects are similar in principle, there are some key ways they are very different. The biology of the brain and central nervous system are built to adapt in ways much more efficiently than muscle cells do. This happens in surprisingly sophisticated ways.

4 Remarkable Ways Your Brain Adapts

1. Not only can your brain grow new brain cells like muscles can – a process called neurogenesis – but your neurons can rewire structurally to generate new networks for greater connectivity. These networks are vast - there are around 100 trillion connections between your neurons!
2. Your brain cells can improve the speed at which they can communicate with each other through increasing myelin, a coating around neuron connections. This increases their electrical efficiency, allowing neuron signals to travel at greater speed across networks.  
3. Neurons which are not used over time can be trimmed back through a process called synaptic pruning, keeping your brain’s resources optimized. In the first years of our life, our brains go through massive amounts of pruning, a little like Michelangelo sculpting a masterpiece from a piece of marble. A recent discovery showed that this process occurs into old age.
4. The overall activity of your brain can adapt by speeding up or slowing down brainwaves, which are the frequencies by which large groups of your neurons fire in synchronous waves. For example, being mentally alert requires faster brainwaves. Research shows that brainwave changes can be sustained over time.

Why These Are a Big Deal

The net effect of all these systems is that your brain has the potential to adapt far more rapidly and robustly than the effects of exercise on your muscles and with much longer lasting changes. Compared to the effects of exercise, it’s a little like training on steroids. In fact, the latest neuroscience research is showing more and more that conditioning your brain can have transformative effects on human performance and quality of life.

Extreme Neuroplasticity

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

The brain essentially detects a catastrophic change and rapidly adapts, functionally rebuilding itself without any outside help. Remarkably, patients can make an almost complete recovery and lead a normal life. Just how this is possible is still a mystery, but it provides staggering proof of why neuroplasticity is a tour de force of human evolution.

Enjoyed this? Look out for the second part to this blog where you’ll find out life hacks for harnessing the power of your neuroplasticity. You can also check out this related blog:

7 Major Developments in Neuroscience of 2017

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In Part 1,  we covered the illusory nature of vision and why having efficient search strategies are a critical factor for elite sports performance. In this Part 2, we will look at how peripheral vision techniques and training can be used to acquire greater situational awareness.

The Peripheral Dimension of Situational Awareness

At any given moment, the visible area available to an athlete is very large. However, the centrally focused part of this view is actually tiny. This means most information lies in the visual periphery. An example of an effective search strategy is to centralize gaze to an important point, such as an opponent with the ball, and also to pay attention players moving in the surrounding field of view.  A key point here is that although the peripheral field of view is blurred, the brain can still detect and process motion well.  This includes being able to track multiple things moving at the same time and in different directions (including across depth).  Perhaps more importantly, the relative motion of our whole visual field is used by our brains to calculate own motion velocity, direction and changes in orientation (think of the beginning of Star Trek).

This means that although there is little of recognition of actual objects, there is a potentially very large amount of information flowing in regarding movement patterns going on around us, and our own movement in relation to our environment.   In fast and dynamic scenes common in team sports, this influx of visual data is huge and can provide a vast amount information if we are able to process it.

Looking Without Looking

There is a caveat here.  As we revealed in Part 1, when our focus point moves around vision becomes blurred and the visual centers of our brains actually shut down.  It means the more we looked around, the less we see.  This is why elite athletes learn to centralize their focus point to only what’s most critical and to move their focus point around less often.  They then spread their attention to keep track of what’s going on across their peripheral field of view.

The net effect is less blurring and vision blanks in the heat of action, and a greater awareness of how play is evolving from moment to moment.  When properly developed, this skill becomes an almost sixth sense level of awareness, allowing superior levels of tactical analysis and decision-making.  It is also known to be a skill requiring conscious practice to master, and sports science shows that use of a ‘visual pivot’ can provide an effective training method.

Visual Pivot Training

A visual pivot is a technique that been shown to help athletes improve their peripheral vision and visual search strategy.  It basically involves anchoring your focus to a specific point and then consciously paying attention to what’s going on around it. The idea is to centralize your gaze while spreading your mental attention.  By practicing this technique, athletes can learn to channel their mental resources into processing complex movement patterns going on around them, providing a new sense of situational awareness.

NeuroTracker is a classic example of a training method which uses a visual pivot – the dot at the center of the screen.  

In this case, the task of paying attention to the periphery is particularly challenging because it involves i) tracking multiple targets, ii) a wide field of view, iii) movement across depth (3D), and iv) the targets move at your speed threshold. This teaches you to spread your attention across the periphery even under intense mental demands.  You can try a free demo in 2D here.

Boosting Peripheral Vision Abilities

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

NeuroTracker 3D multiple object tracking training involves progressively overloading the brain's visual capacities in the same way weight-training is used to build up strength.  The difference is that neuroplasticity makes the brain much more responsive to training than our muscles.  This is why an athlete will typically experience an increase of more than 50% in their visual processing capacities within their first 1-2 hours of distributed NeuroTracker training.

These gains continue to grow with training over time, with some NeuroTracker veterans boosting their visual processing capacities by over 400%, after completing hundreds of training sessions.

With this combination of efficient visual strategy and boosted visual capacities, any athlete has the potential to acquire a sixth sense level of situational awareness like top pros have.

If you missed our first part of this blog, you can read it here.

Sports Vision for Situational Awareness - Part 1

Also if you’re interested in just how much NeuroTracker can boost your visual processing capacities, check out this Expert’s Corner blog by Rob Gronbeck.

Boosting Your Brain’s Processing Capacity

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As most athletes know, good situational awareness is critical for making game-winning decisions under pressure. In this first part of a two-part blog, we’ll explore why our preconceptions of vision can be illusory, and why that matters when it comes to performing on the field.

Believing is Seeing

A large part of the brain is devoted to the primary sense of vision, which is often tested to the max under the demands of sports like football, hockey, basketball, and soccer. At a fundamental level, processing sports scenes involves two visual demands for the brain: identifying objects (knowledge dependent), and identifying motion (position, speed, and trajectory).

Perceiving objects is more challenging than we take for granted. This is because of the surprising fact that we have a very limited amount of detailed vision that we actually receive through the eyes. 20/20 vision is only provided by the fovea – a tiny part of the eye devoted to perceiving detail. While humans have a horizontal field of view of 210 degrees, only the central 3 degrees of that field actually yields detailed vision. Outside this focal point, the rest of our field of sight is pretty much blurry. By jumping this detailed spot around, the visual centers of the brain can construct a general sense of detailed awareness from key snapshots of the most important points in our view.

The visual sense that our view is rich with details is purely a facet of conscious perception, even though this notion seems counter-intuitive to our subjective experience. This is because the brain is extremely good at extrapolating a few key pieces of visual information to build a model of the world around us that is good enough for us to function. It’s a little like figuring out what a jigsaw will look like when only 10% of the pieces are in place, but those pieces give us the best big clues for the overall picture. In this sense, ‘believing is seeing’.

Blinded By Sight

There are a couple of catches though. The first is that constructing such models of the external visual world taxes the brain with a substantial workload of perceptual-cognitive processing. We’re effectively predicting and building the world around us as we see it, chunk by chunk.

The second catch is that to do this efficiently, precise visual scanning is needed. This is because these perceptual models are typically built on very short timescales, and so pertinent points of focus must be scanned extremely rapidly (especially true for sports). To achieve this, the eyeballs have to scan scenes by darting from point to point, a form of rapid target switching known as saccades. The problem is that when the eyes dart around, vision becomes so blurred that it becomes devoid of useful information. For this reason, the visual centers of the brain temporarily shut down to save on mental resources.

According to some estimates, our brains are actually blind for up to 15% of the time our eyes are open. We aren’t aware of this because saccades are discounted from conscious awareness.  That said, by very quickly glancing from far left to far right, it is possible to perceive a brief blank flash – your visual brain turning off for a brief moment.

What It Means for Sports Vision

When it comes to sports vision, it’s critical to understand that a) most of what we see is blurred, and b) that darting our focus point around results in moments of blindness. With this in mind, we can see why visual search strategy is incredibly important when it comes to situational awareness in sports. It should come as no surprise that sports science research shows elite athletes have superior search strategies when compared to amateur athletes. When it comes to the chaotic and rapidly changes scenes of team sports, looking in the right place at the right time is paramount.

How the Pros See

Specifically, research has found that experts across a range of sports not only search more accurately but use fewer searches of the most informative points on display, combined with longer fixations. Contrastingly, novices are less informed, even though they scan more points.

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

In the second part of this blog we explore why peripheral vision is key for situational awareness, and take a look at methods to train this skill.

Sports Vision for Situational Awareness - Part 2

And if you want to learn more about vision from an optometry perspective, then here is an up-to-date glossary of terms you can reference.

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From titanic clashes between sporting giants to iconic stars who redefined their sports, here are 7 epic moments that scorched their way into sports history.

1. Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game

Wilt Chamberlain achieved his 100-point game in 1962. This was already an incredible season in which Chamberlain averaged a record 50.4 points per game, and had broken the NBA single-game scoring record with 78 points.

Going down in history as one of the greatest personal achievements in basketball, Chamberlain set the 100 point NBA record for the Philadelphia Warriors, against the New York Knicks, with a 169–147 win at Hershey Sports Arena, Pennsylvania. He also set five other league records that game, including most free throws. The teams broke the record for most combined points in a game (316).

2. Kerri Strug Becomes a National Hero

Kerri Strug was a member of the Magnificent Seven, the victorious all-around women's gymnastics team that represented the United States at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. It was there she performed the infamous ‘one-footed vault’ after she’d suffered severe damage to her ankle in her previous attempt.

Despite the injury, she pulled off the landing, collapsing almost immediately in agony from the pain. Perhaps partly due to her inspiring heroism, she earned enough points to take the Gold in front of the home crowd, instantly earning respect and admiration from viewers around the world. She was carried to the podium by her coach, Béla Károlyi.

3. Diego Maradona Scores the Greatest Goal of All Time

An enigmatic and skilled Argentinian player, Maradona is credited with taking his country to the top of the football world in the Mexico 1986 World Cup. In the semi-finals, they faced rivals England in a game which produced two of the most famous goals in football history, both scored by Maradona.

The wildly contentious ‘Hand of God’ goal came first, soon followed by a sublime goal in which Maradona single-handedly took on the England team, dribbling past five defenders and dummying the goal-keeper. The goal led to Argentina lifting the World Cup.

4. The Miracle on Ice

This legendary ice hockey game took place between the USSR and USA at the 1980 Winter Olympics final held in Lake Placid, New York. The veteran USSR team were clear favorites, having won the gold medal in five of the six previous Winter Olympic Games. However, they were handed a major upset by a young team of amateurs.

The victory became one of the most iconic moments in U.S. sports, it’s fame being cemented by sportscaster Al Michaels, who famously declared in the final seconds, "Do you believe in miracles?! YES!" The win was voted the greatest moment in 20th-century sports history by Sports Illustrated.

5. Michael Phelps Becomes the Most Successful Olympian Ever

In 2008, Phelps stunned Beijing and the world by beating Mark Spitz’s 7 Olympic Gold medals record in one Games. Breaking multiple world records, Phelps took home 8 gold medals to become the most successful athlete in Olympic history, and perhaps one of the greatest athletes of all time.

Upon completing the event that awarded him his eighth gold medal and eighth Olympic record in as many events, Phelps stated "Records are always made to be broken no matter what they are...anybody can do anything that they set their mind to."

6. Dwight Clark’s ‘Legendary Catch’

A moment known by every fan of American Football is simply known as ‘The Catch’. It took place in the 1982 NFC Championship game where the 49er’s and the Cowboy’s were neck-to-neck. With just 58 seconds left in the game, wide receiver Dwight Clark made a leaping grab in the back of the end zone. With this he completed a 6-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Joe Montana, enabling the 49ers to defeat the Cowboys, 28–27.

A single brilliant catch by Clark meant that the 49ers had secured one of the most memorable wins in the sport’s history. The game also represented the end of the Cowboys' decade-long domination in the NFC, and marked the beginning of the 49ers' rise as an NFL dynasty in the 1980s.

7. The Rumble in the Jungle

This epic boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman has been called "arguably the greatest sporting event of the 20th century". This historic match saw the 32-year old Ali challenge the formidable Foreman for the Championship. The ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ took place in front of a crowd of 60,000 people, in Kinshasa, Zaire on October 30, 1974.

Foreman was world champion with a 40 match win-streak, Ali was a former heavyweight champion. The two giants of the sport clashed in the gruelling heat. Ali took the fight to the eighth round and managed to seal an epic win with his famous right arm. He won by knockout, putting Foreman down just before the end of the round. The fight sealed Ali’s reputation as a worldwide sports icon.

Enjoyed this? Then checkout our earlier blog:

6 Legends who Forged Athletics History

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New to NeuroTracker? Here's the lowdown on what it's all about!

Who Uses NeuroTracker

To date, NeuroTracker is used in over 700 hundred human performance, rehab and research centers around the globe. At the elite level, this includes top-flight teams in the NFL, NHL, NBA, EPL, and MLB, as well as US and Canadian elite Special Forces. An iconic example of a NeuroTracker star is Matt Ryan, who explained in an interview with the New York Times how NeuroTracker helped him become MVP of the NFL in 2017.

There are two different ways the NeuroTracker software is used, either in a training center or clinic under the guidance of professionals, or by individuals in the comfort of their own homes.  The center based version of the software is more advanced, and typically uses a large immersive display such as a 65inch 3DTV or a 3D projector. The personal version uses custom-engineered anaglyph glasses to deliver stereo 3D on normal TV, computer or tablet displays.

The Core Concept

In all cases, the essence of NeuroTracker is ‘3D multiple object tracking’, and this includes the studies and the science that have been built around that. The way that NeuroTracker exercises the brain, and the way that it’s really able to light it up cognitively, is achieved by tracking targets as they move around a virtual cube.  This happens for several seconds at a time, and then the task repeats. As you get better, the speed of those targets and the number of them can increase.

You watch a short video demo here.

Part of NeuroTracker’s ‘secret sauce’ is an algorithm that pushes you close to your personal limits, each and every time you train. People have good days, and people have bad days, so if you’re less able to focus, the system will account for that. Or if you’re hyper-focused and feeling good, then it pushes you much harder. Some people like to compare it to strength training - what you’re doing is progressively overloading the brain’s ability to pay attention, and progressively building up that capacity.

How NeuroTracker Fits In

The scores you get are a measure of your ability to track a certain amount of targets at speeds, where you will get all of them correct around 50% of the time - scientifically termed your 'speed threshold'. It’s a crucial measure and the main scientific metric that NeuroTracker delivers.

The sessions are designed to be delivered in bite-size intervals of intense focus training, and so a single workout will normally take around six minutes to complete. Really the idea is that NeuroTracker delivers a level of cognitive training that elicits the integrations of many different systems in the brain, in a way that other cognitive products rarely do.  And because it takes such little time, it’s very easy to fit into other larger therapies or training plans.

NeuroTracker is a very useful tool in that sense. Above and beyond what it delivers on its own, it will fit into any other training plan - whether it’s for performance, rehabilitation, or just people at home who want to work their brains within their daily schedules.

Who is NeuroTracker Useful For?

Essentially anyone who has basic vision capacities. The only prerequisite is to understand what’s asked of you to attempt to follow the targets moving on the screen. A recent study showed that even children with extremely low IQ could easily understand the task and independently complete a training with 100% compliance. It’s impressive how widely NeuroTracker has already been adopted.  We’ve seen it utilized very successfully in a performance setting, from professional athletes and military specialists, through to patients with cognitive impairments and clinical learning difficulties.

It has also been used very effectively in active aging, which is what one of the very first NeuroTracker studies showed it could be helpful for. This includes people that want to retain cognitive functions for everyday life - from crossing the street to driving a car.

Pretty much anybody who’s interested in improving their mental performance has the potential to benefit from NeuroTracker training.

Taking Things to the Next Level

One of the most exciting things about NeuroTracker, is that once you’re able to train up and get to a decent level, you can start to make the training more progressively challenging by adding in motor-tasks while NeuroTracking. For example, if you’re a sports person, you could dribble a basketball, so that the dual-task training load is tailored to your needs on the court.  This is a scientific methodology known as the NeuroTracker Learning System, and it allows training to be made infinitely more difficult because you can always keep adding more complex tasks.

This patented methodology has been validated in research studies, as well as applied widely in performance training.  Pretty much all the teams using NeuroTracker in the NFL, NHL, and EPL, train their athletes on NeuroTracker at four targets paired with complex motor or decision-making tasks. For athletes, this is kind of the Holy Grail of neurophysical conditioning, because competing in high-level sports involves managing lots of physical and mental demands simultaneously.

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A study just published reveals that cognitive training can successfully boost attention in students with learning difficulties.

The Challenges of Attention in Learning

Whether it's driving a car or making a game-winning pass in the NFL, attention is a critical skill in all domains of human performance.  For students, it's probably more important than for anyone - the ability to pay attention is known to be one of the best predictors of academic achievement. However, attentional capacities vary from one student to another, and these differences are huge for children learning difficulties. In fact, learning related conditions, such as ADD, ADHD, and Autism, are typically characterized by major problems in attention.

With the rise in diagnosis of such conditions in recent decades, there is a widely recognized need to improve attention capacities in the classroom. Most interventions researched to date have only focused on training working memory, instead of training attention directly.  They have also tended to lack an ability to adapt training tasks to the user's level of ability, leaving students with learning difficulties easily overwhelmed.

Breaking New Ground

To take on these challenges, a group of neuropsychological scientists conducted an ambitious large-scale study with NeuroTracker with children known to have learning difficulties.  The goal was to see if this form of adaptable cognitive training, could directly improve attention in children.  This was the first study of it's kind to look at cognitive training in a way that assessed intervention accuracy, adaptability, and accessibility.

What Was Studied

129 students aged 6–18 years old took part in the study across 3 different schools.  For the first phase of the research, the students were tasked with completing the Conners Continuous Performance Task (CPT-3). The CPT-3 is an industry standardised neuropsychological test shown to provide an accurate baseline measure of attention in children. The researchers also chose this assessment because it is a stable retest measure of attention, meaning that if scores improve, it is because attention capacity has improved.

The students were then randomly assigned to one of three groups.

1. A NeuroTracker intervention group.  These students had an initial assessment to check if they could understand the task, and then performed 15 sessions of NeuroTracker spread out over a 5 week period.

2. An active control group.  These students performed a visual strategy math-based game (called 2048) over the same 5 weeks.

3. A passive control group. These students simply carried out their normal daily school activities over the same 5 weeks.

Then after the 5 weeks training period, all of the children retook the CPT-3 test.

What Was Found

The NeuroTracker group started out with lower scores than would be expected for those without learning difficulties. However they responded well to the training over time, achieving a strong learning curve with over 60% improvement in NeuroTracker performance.  These gains occurred across approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes of total training time (over the 5 weeks).  In comparison, students in the active control group experienced minimal learning in the strategy math-based game, which was not an adaptive task.

The most important results were whether or not students improved their attention scores on the CPT-3 retests.  These revealed that post-training CPT-3 performance improved significantly from pre-training baselines, but only for participants in the NeuroTracker group.  The CPT-3 scores for the other groups remained almost the same.

This evidence shows that NeuroTracker training specifically increased the attention abilities of students with different levels of learning difficulties.

Insights for Improving Learning Outcomes

The NeuroTracker multiple object tracking task is established in the scientific literature to be a direct indication of a person's attention resource capacity.  It is also known to be an ecological measure of real-world attention abilities.  The fact that children with learning difficulties responded so well to NeuroTracker training is a very promising indicator for improving classroom performance. The researchers also noted that the simplicity of this non-verbal task, combined with the ability to perform training in bite-size chunks (6 minutes), made NeuroTracker a highly accessible intervention for this population.  The motivation associated with performing an adaptive task was also seen to be a major advantage, perhaps explaining the surprising 100% completion rate for those who took part in the study.

Domenico Tullo, a doctoral student, and member of the Perceptual Neuroscience Laboratory for Autism and Development (PNLab) led much of the hands-on research. Based on his insights at the schools involved he commented,

“NeuroTracker is a great task for really tapping into the direct mechanisms of attention that we see in the everyday classroom or everyday life.  We’re able to see how repeated practice can improve attention and learning. In the classroom, the teachers are really seeing differences in how students are more focused, more calm, more receptive to learning. It shows how powerful NeuroTracker is, and what it can do.”

The fact these gains were achieved in less than two hours of distributed NeuroTracker training, demonstrates just how useful attention-based cognitive interventions can be.  Dr. Bertone, one of the study researchers and Associate Professor in Applied Child Psychology at McGill University, underlined the importance of this type of training transfer.

“For the NeuroTracker groups…we saw an improvement in attention of between 6-10%.  This is significant.  This is bang for buck…it’s been incredibly uplifting to see just 20 minutes a week, and we’re getting some really, really positive results. We’re working with kids across a spectrum of conditions, so Autism, ADHD, kids with language difficulties…and we’re seeing improvements across the board. The ultimate goal is to help kids learn, and feel good about themselves.”

Dr. Bertone and Domenico Tullo kindly gave interviews on their research, discussing some of the aims and findings of the study, along with some of anecdotes of what it was like from the perspective of the children and teachers involved.

This landmark study opens up new possibilities for improving educational outcomes for students with learning difficulties and is being followed up with other studies by the same research team.

If you're keen to learn more on this topic, read our related Expert Corner blogs here.

How Can We Enhance Learning Outcomes?

Boosting Student Attention

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Here we get insights from high performers in football, ice hockey, hockey, rugby, golf, taekwondo, and Formula 1, about their experiences with NeuroTracker. Though NeuroTracker has been used for years by top teams in the NFL, NHL, EPL, NBA and rugby, most clubs like their athletes and coaches to keep training practices close to their chests. In a previous blog we heard from 5 top sports coaches, in this follow-up, it's 7 pro athletes who are giving their 2 cents on what NeuroTracker means to them.

1. Matt Ryan, Atlanta Falcons

Record breaking MVP quarterback Matt Ryan is an icon in the modern NFL game. In 2015 the Falcons player came to the NeuroTracker headquarters in Montreal to collaborate on an advanced version of NeuroTracker. This led to a tactical awareness mode which he used to help train his situational awareness and decision-making skills.

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

2. Joshua Dobbs

Former Tennessee standout and quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Josh Dobbs does advanced cognitive training at IMG Academy.

“Your brain is really what separates you. Tracking balls as distractions are coming at you…is very similar to the Quarter Back position. It’s all about training your mind to read, react quickly, to get the edge up on the competition”

3. Florian Cazenave

A leading scrum-half in French Top 14 Rugby, Florian Cazenave tragically lost an eye, and with a ruling by the French Federation of Rugby (FFR) that he would not be allowed to continue to play. With the determination of a true athlete, he looked for solutions and took up intensive NeuroTracker training and transitioned to Italy where he was allowed play in Rugby Reggio, Serie A. 3 years later the FFR changed their ruling to allow him back into French Top 14 Rugby, with Cazenave joining Brive.

“I attribute the recuperation of my sports vision to NeuroTracker. The system also doubled my ability to concentrate on any exercise, allowing me to achieve better scores and remain precise, even when fatigue has set in.”

4. Romain Grosjean

After taking his place as a top driver for the Haas F1 Team, Romain Grosjean undertook advanced cognitive training programs with Neurovision Consultancy under Dr. Matter. Though there are other F1 teams using NeuroTracker, Romain is the first person to share his experience on what the training means to performance on the track.

“My environment first began to slow down, which allows me to better understand every detail around me, even at 300km/h in a Formula 1. Then my field of vision widened, it now helps me to take into account many more parameters than before. I can better anticipate and apprehend each element that constitutes the landscape without even realizing its existence. This can be decisive when starting the Grand Prix.

Today I am progressing more and more and that pushes me to go further because each new sensation makes me more powerful and more alert. This protocol really improved my performance and safety.”

5. Aaron Cook

Aaron Cook is world class Taekwondo athlete who has worked for many years with veteran NeuroTracker coach Mick Clegg, performing lots of intensive dual-task training programs. Since his partnership with Mick, Aaron has earned a slew of gold medals on the international stage.

“Taekwondo is a very fast sport so you have to be totally aware, a single lapse and it could be game over. NeuroTracker is simply a vital tool for me now. It's helped me see things quicker, process information faster and sustain my attention for longer, and this is what gives me the edge over my rivals”.

6. Declan Farmer

Two-time Paralympian gold medalist in the PyeongChang and Sochi Winter Olympic Games, Declan Farmer is an outstanding forward player in sled hockey. Playing the sport competitively since 2007, Decland sought to raise his game mentally in the seasons leading up to the 2018 games.

“The NeuroTracker has greatly improved the mental and visual aspects of my game. The 3-D tracking system specifically benefitted my peripheral vision and reaction time. I have seen a noticeable difference in those skills over the past two seasons using the NeuroTracker.”

7. Matt Fast

Matt Fast is a golfer who turned pro in 2009 and has achieved 5 top ten finishes in the PGA. In a 2017 interview with the New York Times, Matt emphasized the role of NeuroTracker training for increasing mental focus.

“Everything would be blacked out except for what your eyes were looking at. The times that I’ve putted the best were when I was using it. I totally believe in it.”

As NeuroTracker adoption in elite sports goes from strength to strength, we expect to hear more from the people who use it to raise their game to the next level. If you’re interested in what coaches and sports leaders have to say, also check out the first article in this 2 part blog.

5 Sports Performance Leaders Talk NeuroTracker

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The sporting greats of today all have at least one story to tell of legends who inspired them on their path to glory. These are a selection of truly iconic forces in the world of athletics, along with redefining moments in their careers.

Roger Bannister Breaks The 4-Minute Barrier

Bannister became the classic iconic sports legend not so much because of his athletic prowess, but because he took on what many experts thought to be impossible. This fascinating idea of the time was the breaking of ‘the barrier’. Many men have covered a mile in under 4 minutes since, but when Roger Bannister did it for the first time in 1954, it moved the boundaries for what was possible for humanity. The news sent shockwaves around the world, opening up future floodgates to inspire generations of athletes to conquer the unconquerable.

Jesse Owens Wins 4 Gold Medals

The Olympics conducted before World War II saw a lot of political agenda being played out on the field. Hitler famously used the 1936 games to try and showcase Aryan superiority and highlight the inferiority of the African race. Added to this, America was also deeply embroiled in racial tensions. Jesse Owens went to the Olympics facing political turmoil on all sides. Regardless, he sealed his destiny as an Olympic legend with his pace and determination, leaving Berlin with gold medals the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4 × 100-meter relay. The power of politics through a single athlete’s achievement would never be forgotten.

Emile Zatopek Conquers all the Distance Events

Having just won the 5,000m, the 10,000m in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Emil Zatopek was about to become a sporting legend in possibly the most daring way imaginable. With remarkable personality and a grueling training regime as his recipe for success, the Czech decided to take on the marathon, a distance of 42km - over than four times further than the 10,000m. The catch being that he had never run a marathon in his life! Naturally, he was considered a rank outsider. What’s more, he was also up against Jim Peters, a British runner who had shattered the world record just weeks earlier.

Zatopek caught up to Peters halfway through the race and asked him if the pace was too fast, Peters falsely replied that it was too slow to break his confidence. In a what would seem corny even in a movie, Zatopek immediately responded by accelerating away to coast to victory. It was probably the greatest ‘newbie’ sports victory ever, or since.

Bob Beamon Leaps Into The History Books

Setting a new world record in any sport requires a tremendous amount of hard work in order to just nudge past the previous record. Bob Beamon made history at the 1968 Olympics with a leap so epic, it happened like a bolt out of the blue. Soaring through the Mexico stadium his jump smashed the previous record by nearly two whole feet. He leapt so far that the Olympic measuring system could not cover it, and a new method had to be devised on the spot.

A testament to any great record, nobody could match Beamon’s jump for well over a decade, and it has barely been improved on half a century later. Listed in the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, Bob Beamon is the epitome of record breaker.

Michael Johnson Wins the 200m in Perfect Style

With an almost ungainly and lackadaisical running technique, Johnson defied stereotypes of a super athlete. Even though he gathered a slew of Olympic and world championship gold medals throughout his prolific career, it was his rise to legendary greatness on home soil at 1996 Atlanta Games which made his mark in history.

Johnson became the only man to win both the Olympic 400m and 200m in one Games. The crowning glory though was the stunning 19.32sec world record he set. Not only had he broken his own world record time, he had broken it by more than three-tenths of a second, the largest ever chunk taken off the 200m world record. As world records are rarely ever set in championship finals, Michael Johnson’s performance was a genesis moment for defining the ultimate performer.

Dick Fosbury Reinvents the High Jump

The phrase ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ couldn’t be any truer for Dick Fosbury. He’d spent years using the scissor jump method, then struggled trying to adapt to the newer and more preferred ‘western roll’ technique of jumping over the bar face first. Rather than go back to the scissor jump he innovated his own revolutionary technique. The effects were dramatic. In a single afternoon, he improved his personal best by half a foot.

The ‘Fosbury Flop’ came to fame in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, when he revealed his seemingly bizarre technique to the world and snatched gold in a nail-bitingly close final. The feat set the ultimate standard for what it means to be truly creative in the pursuit of victory.

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Enjoyed this blog? Look out for a follow-up going beyond athletics to tackle epic moments in basketball, football, soccer, ice hockey, swimming, and gymnastics!

Core training is just the beginning. When it comes to evolving performance, there are lots of ways to add dual-tasks that transform NeuroTracker training.  Let’s take a look at 5 ways to ramp up the neurophysical payload of each session.

1. Extensive Training

This is the tried and tested method of simply sticking at it.  Although NeuroTracker learning happens most rapidly in the first 15-30 sessions of training, results show that people keep improving with long term training, even after hundreds of sessions.

Performance Psychology Coach Rob Gronbeck is an example of a NeuroTracker veteran who has completed 600+ sessions, and in the process has quadrupled his processing power.

With NeuroTracker Pro, there are also a range of different session types to use in training programs, such as ‘Overload’, ‘Target’, and ‘Tactical’.  These still use the Core NeuroTracker method, but place extra demands on specific cognitive skills, such as sustained, selective and divided attention.

2.Physical Dual-Tasks

A study back in 2012 called ‘Perceptual-Cognitive Training of Athletes’ found that even just the difference between standing compared to sitting, adds cognitive loads that impact NeuroTracker performance.  Based on later research, the NeuroTracker Learning System was developed to harness the cognitive loads of physical tasks while NeuroTracking.

Essentially this involves two stages, firstly ‘consolidation’ training of just NeuroTracker while sitting.  This prepares the brain for learning.  Secondly, training with physical tasks, starting with simple activities such as basic balance tasks, progressing to increasingly difficult tasks over time.

The advantage here is that research shows the brain and body adapt to manage these combined neurophysical loads, providing larger gains than training on each task separately.  Physical dual-tasks can be based around motor-skills, where the focus is technically difficult movements such as balancing on a bosu ball. Or they can be exercise based, such as using an exercise bike for cardio load, or weight-lifting for strength load.  These can also be performed in a circuit training fashion, demonstrated here by ex-Manchester United coach Mick Clegg.

3. Skill Specific Dual-Tasks

Skill tasks are a refinement of physical dual-tasks, focusing on certain skills used in sports.  An example is basketball dribbling while NeuroTracking.

Ideally, the skills used should be based on sports demands that are difficult to perform under the pressure of competition.  They can also include physical tasks such as balance, as shown here for soccer.

A benefit here is that real-world skills can be tested under pressure, simulating the mental demands of competition.  If NeuroTracker scores drop drastically as a result, this reveals a lack of ability to maintain situational awareness.  Taking this concept to the extreme, a recent study even combined NeuroTracking with jet pilot flight, revealing that advanced maneuvers drained almost all of the pilots ‘spare cognitive capacity’.

4. Perceptual-Cognitive Dual-Tasks

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

A dedicated training option in NeuroTracker is ‘Agility’ mode, which fires beams at the person training as they try to dodge them (measured with motion tracking).  This tests 3D trajectory perception for predicting action responses - dodge left or right.  It’s surprisingly difficult, most people find their NeuroTracker scores initially drop to about one-third of their normal score.

Perceptual-cognitive tasks can also take the form of passive sensory stimulation.  A study to be published by Kim Dorsch at the University of Regina played crowd noise from a football stadium to stimulate auditory processing while NeuroTracking.  Another example is the NeuroTracker ‘Optic Flow’ mode, which delivers normal training but within a huge undulating tunnel. This adds the visual demands involved with processing backwards and forwards motion.  As it tests balance systems that depend on optic flow, it has been used to research the effects of concussions.

5. Tactical Awareness

Originally used by elite special forces such as the Navy Seals, NeuroTracker Tactical Awareness is designed to train situational awareness and decision-making capacities under pressure.  It involves perceiving tactical scenes displayed directly behind the NeuroTracker balls, interpreting them, and then making decisions on them – such as shoot or don’t shoot.

This training mode was actually developed for sports in collaboration with Atlanta Falcons quarter back star Matt Ryan, who wanted to be able to simulate the attentional demands of competition while recognizing play formations and pass opportunities. In an interview with the New York Times he stated NeuroTracker improved his spatial awareness and his ability “to be able to see things and how they relate to each other really quickly”.

Tactical Awareness is an advanced and performance specific mode of training.  As such, it’s geared towards professional team-sport athletes who need to deal with complex patterns of play.

Although these 5 ways to evolve NeuroTracker training vary a lot in their approach, they can actually be mixed and matched with each other to provide endless combinations of neurophysical training.

You can read more on dual-task training here.

Ramping Up Performance with the NeuroTracker Learning System

NeuroTracker is routinely put to use in over 700 performance centers around the world.  Here we’ll hear 5 topflight coaches and sports practitioners tell us what NeuroTracker means to them.

1. Mick Clegg

Mick Clegg was the first coach to discover and use NeuroTracker, implementing in Manchester United F.C. while he was their power development and strength and conditioning coach.  Mick runs Elite Lab, a high-performance training center using the latest technologies to train world-class athletes.

"At Manchester United, it became clear that abilities between the ears made the difference between top players and truly great ones. So I traveled to the University of Montreal to investigate NeuroTracker. I certainly haven’t looked back – it’s part of all the coaching I do.”

“To become great, players need to evolve through progressively advanced combinations of training exercises that integrate cognitive challenges. Training needs to condition mental focus at each athlete’s processing speed threshold…to keep on top of the action when it matters most. NeuroTracker is a great example of how this can be done. This is why I’ve now coached over 15,000 NeuroTracker sessions. When you’re always matching training with the neurophysical limits of performance, the learning curve is potentially endless.”

2. Leonard Zaichkowsky

Dr. Zaichkowsky is a widely known sport and performance scientist whose specialty is the psychophysiology of human performance. He has published 6 books and more than 100 scientific papers on sport psychology, sport science, biofeedback, and research methods and made more than 300 presentations worldwide.  As Director of Sports Science with the Vancouver Canucks, he implemented NeuroTracker into the team’s performance training.

“Elite athletes leverage huge advantages from their mental prowess on the field, and so finding a way to condition performance cognitively has always been a major challenge for sport science. I think NeuroTracker is a genuine breakthrough here. It’s a proven science technology that trains fundamental mental skills with rapid gains, and the results unlock a wealth of new performance data. Athletes can now develop important skills such as multiple object tracking, concentration/focus skills, skills to cope with distractions, visual processing speed, and high-speed decision making.”

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

3. Donald Teig

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

“The new technology that’s out there is really exemplified beautifully by NeuroTracker.  This is a piece of equipment that stimulates a variety of sensory items all at once.  There is decision-making demand that’s there. Think of a quarterback for example…he needs to be able to adjust appropriately and make the correct decision to hit the receiver that he’s trying to hit.  Rapid decision-making.  And that’s what NeuroTracker does so well.”  

''We love it.  We use it in all of the testing we need to do where this type of behavior is important.  Let’s face it, that’s true in almost every sport you can think of, if not life alone - driving a car, military, police work – it’s relevant, and through repetition, you get better and better at it.  And that’s the beauty of what NeuroTracker’s all about.”

4. Kate Allgood

Kate Allgood was recognized as one of the best female ice hockey players in Canada. With a double Masters degree specializing in sport psychology, Kate set up Quantum Performance – a high-performance coaching firm specializing in mental training. Kate is also the author of 2 books on mental conditioning for sports performance.

“There are a lot of technologies out there, but after extensive research, I find the best overall fit for my performance coaching is NeuroTracker.  I use NeuroTracker because it is a very effective tool for training all types of attention, and it also uses a visual pivot.  Through a scientific conditioning process, NeuroTracker builds up the raw tools for maintaining awareness and attention even in the highest pressure game situations.”

”There are several ways NeuroTracker training will help you develop your athletic abilities. Firstly, to make better decisions under pressure. Secondly, to anticipate actions earlier, and more accurately. Thirdly, to identify and focus on key opportunities more easily, improving your situational awareness.  And finally, to stay mentally sharp throughout a long season. With over 20 years of research behind it, NeuroTracker is one of the most advanced systems of its kind in the world.”

5. Keith Smithson

Dr. Smithson specializes in sports vision at Northern Virginia Doctors of Optometry.  He is the Director of Visual Performance for the Washington Nationals, the team Optometrist for the Washington Wizards, Spirit, Mystics and D.C. United, and Sports Vision Consultant for the Washington Redskins and Washington Capitals.

“The sports performance role for NeuroTracker was already well-known, and applying it for training NBA, NFL, MLS, and MLB athletes we made great strides. Once these athletes see the difference NeuroTracker is making on the field, they become completely devoted. It’s the biggest testimonial for a training tool when your clients say ‘Look, I can’t live without this’. NeuroTracker has quickly become a must-have tool in our practice.”

Look out for our follow-up blog where we will hear a range of elite athletes give their 2 cents on NeuroTracker.

We’re all aware that sports help to challenge our physical limits and our willpower. However, we typically don’t realize that our cognitive abilities are also pushed to their limits by the demands of competition.  Just like the physical demands of sports, these go way beyond what we experience in normal, everyday life, and with surprising frequency.

Albert Einstein once said, "One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts." Here we will reveal 3 ways that sports present the brain with opportunities to engage such efforts.

1. Processing Speed

In sports, things happen fast. This is one reason why we associate faster reactions with better performance on the field.  Although it sometimes seems like it, actions don’t just happen.  Before sports actions are executed, perceptual and cognitive processes must first absorb sensory information, interpret it, make predictions about future outcomes, and then formulate a decision on how to act.

In most day to day situations, there’s little time pressure involved, such as deciding whether to make a cup of coffee or a cup of tea.  In contrast, sports sometimes require critical decisions and action-responses to be processed in mere tenths of a second.  Classic examples here are returning a tennis serve or hitting a pitch in baseball.  For the dynamic play in team sports such as basketball, myriads of action-responses need to be made extremely quickly and continuously, or even simultaneously.

Sensing, perceiving, evaluating, and then acting at such high speeds, taxes the brain to its limits.  The advantage of reaction speed doesn’t come so much from how fast an athlete moves, but rather how fast their brain’s processing speed is.

2. Working Memory

To most people, 'working memory' conjures thoughts of holding a phone number in mind.  In fact, it’s much more than memory - the ‘working’ part is pivotal. Think of it as a kind of mental multitasking. Not only do we need to keep several pieces of information accessible in the forefront of our mind, we also need to perform cognitive operations on them - manipulating or transforming them in ways that produce something useful to us.

In sports, we need to do this for many things going on around us, both simultaneously and quickly. The demands depend on how many different things need to be held in mind, and how complex it is to meaningfully process them.

A simple example is a soccer goalkeeper who has to predict which player is most likely to shoot at their goal.

If there are two players, the goalie needs to look at both of them and figure out who is more likely to shoot, which would typically include evaluating the following.

1. Position - distance to the goal, whether there is a clear shot, and passing options
2. Defense – how likely a defender is able to tackle or intercept the shooting player
3. Behaviour – how likely each player is to take the shot, based on their reputation and the status of the current game

Within seconds, a professional level goalie will make these evaluations, then hold them in his mind to compare them against each other, work out the biggest threat, and then take action to be ready to stop that player’s shot.

Of course, it can get a lot more complicated than just anticipating two players. Predicting what opponents will do, or how a play will unfold, even just minutes into the future increases the loads placed on working memory exponentially.  Performing well in any sport where there is a lot happening and action is changing all the time, will involve huge demands on working memory.

3. Sustained Attention

There aren’t many situations in life where you have to concentrate intensively while performing complex actions and then do so repeatedly for an hour or more.  Driving is probably the closest contender. That said, to match the demands of sports competitions, it would have to be something like a movie style car chase.

Although the brain takes up only 2% of our body weight, it’s a glucose furnace, burning around 20% of our total energy and up to a third of our ATP.  In physically demanding sports, fatigue places strain on the body’s energy levels, as well as sending a slew of internal sensory noise into our brain.

This combined with the demands of repeated bouts of intense concentration is a key reason why competition errors often take place in the latter stages – one critical slip in attention and its game over.  Add to this the emotional rollercoaster that the psychological dimensions of competition can bring, and anyone’s ability to maintain mental focus is tested under real pressure.

A Recipe for Mental Workouts

There are other ways sports actively engage the brain. However, when you combine just processing speed, working memory and sustained attention, you already have a great recipe for working out mental capacities.  Not so surprisingly, research shows that sports activity can boost mental functions and lead to improved cognitive health outcomes.  So the next time you train or compete, think about the benefits between the ears!

Check out a related blog here.

3 Reasons Athletes Should Train their Minds‍

The human brain and central nervous system are remarkable. How they interpret and deal with the world through sensory systems is a deep and fascinating arena of science. But what’s perhaps more fascinating is how subtle variations in brain function can dramatically influence human performance from one person to another. In 2009, a partnership between the Faubert Lab and the technology transfer company behind NeuroTracker spawned sports science collaborations with world-class teams across different sports.

I was very excited to work with elite athletes, who exist on the very boundaries of human performance.  We all know that sports stars achieve incredible feats of skill and athleticism that seem beyond the reach of ordinary people. Most thinking on this focuses on their spectrum of physical abilities. However, as a neuroscientist, I always had the idea that the primary differentiator at the elite levels is not necessarily physical prowess.

The Elite Brain

Specifically, it could be their very high bandwidth to process complex and dynamic scenes that change rapidly and unpredictably. This allows sports stars to be in the right place at the right time, avoid errors, and crucially, make the best decisions to act on. There has been growing evidence in the field of sports science to support this.

However, it took several years of studying elite athletes from a neuroscience perspective to discover what makes them particularly special. Differences in what I term ‘perceptual-cognitive’ abilities, could have potent implications for determining any individual’s capacity to adapt to new levels of performance.

Studying Elite Athletes

In a Nature Scientific Reports Study I compared 102 elite athletes from NHL, EPL, and French Top 14 Rugby League, with 173 elite amateurs from NCAA and a European Olympic training program, and also 33 non-athlete university students.  All these participants performed a NeuroTracker training program comprising 15 sessions (6-8mins each), completed over several weeks.

Having hundreds of elite athletes in a single study was actually quite ground-breaking, making the NeuroTracker data tremendously useful from an analytical perspective. A meta-review of sports science research with elite athletes concluded that out of 1692 studies, this was the only one with an ideal sample size of athletes.

Although NeuroTracker is used to train-up high-level cognitive abilities for sports performance, the task itself a neutral and abstract one.  This makes it valid for comparing different populations, because it’s essentially the same training for everyone, with no inherent biases or advantages

More importantly, although the task is challenging, it is technically very simple to attempt – you can try it for yourself here.  This means that when you improve at it, you improve because your brain gets better at it, rather than from technique or practice related effects. This has been corroborated by qEEG measures of positive neurophysiological changes in the brain with training.

Discovering the Brain Power of Sports Stars

NeuroTracker data yields two types of measures of brain functions - baselines (existing perceptual-cognitive ability), and learning rate (ability to adapt cognitively). The results from the three groups showed that elite professional athletes had, on average, significantly higher baselines than both elite amateurs and university students.

Even though the task is purely cognitive, and despite the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype of athletes, it wasn’t a surprise that these athletes performed better than the university students. This is because the types of brain functions that NeuroTracker elicits are relevant to the mental skills athletes typically rely on at the highest levels of play.

In terms of the learning rate, the general expectation was that if professional elites started off at a much higher level, then the elite amateurs and university students would catch up during the training program. Most surprisingly, the reverse happened. In terms of the learning curves, the elite athletes accelerated away from the amateur athletes, who in turn accelerated away from the university students.

Revealing Human Performance Potential

The data revealed something profound about elite athletes: they appear to have a superior perceptual-cognitive capacity to improve and adapt to a new and neutral task. What’s more, the level of this capacity correlates strongly with the level of sports ability, suggesting it is a useful predictor of cognitive ability and learning potential in any domain of human performance.

In the case of these elite athletes, you would expect that their brains are already close to the highest competitive level, having reached their maximum potential.  However, what makes them special may be their ability to acquire new potential so much more rapidly and efficiently than other populations. This heightened neuroplasticity, shown through NeuroTracker learning rate, maybe a defining trait of top-level athletes.

Neuroscience for Human Performance Profiling

I can envision this kind of profiling being valuable in diverse human performance domains, not just in sports. Firstly for recruitment purposes, with the potential to more predictably select leaders for rapid career development. Or for jobs that are cognitively demanding, such as air traffic control operators and elite military or law enforcement roles.

Secondly, as a measure of learning rate, it could be used to qualify individuals for specialized or costly training programs. This would allow resources to be focused on those with high cognitive adaptability, who can benefit from them the most. This knowledge of the adaptability of each individual’s brain is an emerging area of neuroscience, but it may well redefine the dichotomy of nature versus nurture, as well as our understanding of human performance.

Fast reactions are one thing, but to stay one step ahead of your opponents, you need to anticipate their next move before it even happens.  Karate Kid, or Luke Skywalker using ‘the force’, may come to mind, but actually, neuroscientists and sports scientists have this skill nailed down to something called ‘Biological Motion Perception’ (BMP).  Let’s have a look at what it is, and find out whether it’s a skill you can train for better performance on the field.

What is Biological Motion Perception?

BMP involves perceiving and processing many separate human movements at the same time. This information allows us to understand what type of action or communication a person is engaging in, moment to moment.  This collective interpretation of body language nuances is something which feels almost automatic, such as intuiting someone’s mood as they walk into a room.  In reality though, drawing on all these visual cues, is actually pretty taxing on the brain’s resources.

Why Does it Matter?

BMP is known to be a key mental skill for most sports. For example, if a defender wants to stop an oncoming attacker passing by, or making a shot, then accurate reading of body language becomes critical for taking any action.  In boxing or martial arts, for instance, BMP is vital in knowing when, or when not to, throw a punch or dodge one.

BMP becomes all the more critical in fast-paced sports, where decision-making windows are often extremely short.  Tennis is a great example. With serve speeds reaching up to 150mph, reacting to the actual flight trajectory of the ball is pretty much useless – it will literally have passed by the time the central nervous system starts to initiate an action response.  This short video gives an idea of how fleeting the temporal dimension of sports can be.

Predicting the Future

Instead of reacting after the fact, body cues can hold tell-tale secrets of a play, before it even happens.  In the case of tennis, cues such as knee bend before a jump, head angle, hip rotation, arm swing, and foot orientation, cumulatively reveal the ball’s trajectory - before it is actually hit.  It’s the same thing for a baseball hitter judging a pitcher, or a soccer goalie facing down a penalty taker.  In these scenarios, rapid perceptual judgments are of paramount importance.

The power of these perceptual skills was famously demonstrated by Cristiano Ronaldo, through his ability to score goals from passing crosses - without even seeing the football move.

Nature Versus Nurture

Numerous sports science studies show that elite athletes possess superior perceptual-cognitive abilities.  One recent study specifically showed that athletes have better BMP skills than non-athletes, even for reading movements unrelated to sports.

It could be that to become an elite athlete, you just have to be naturally gifted in these types of mental skills in order to succeed. Or, it could be that these skills develop through years of exposure to playing high-level sports from a young age.  In either case, the 64 million dollar question remains - can we specifically train BMP ability?  This could be to develop elite skillsets in semi-elite or amateur athletes or to take elite athletes to the next level.

The Training Challenge

Virtual reality simulations are typically used by scientists to assess BMP ability. However, these simulations are not used for training.  Professor Faubert, an expert in BMP, decided to take on the training challenge.  Driven by his desire to discover ways to improve human performance, he came up with a hypothesis for using NeuroTracker.  Namely, that the training could directly enhance BMP skills because of the several parallels with the tasks.

1. Multiple object tracking
2. Depth processing of 3D stereoscopic cues
3. Selective attention demands
4. Perception across a wide field of view (close-distance BMP)

Rather than trying to train a person to recognize specific movement sequences, Professor Faubert’s idea was that it would be more effective to train the fundamental brain capacities involved in BMP.  If correct, this would lead to improved abilities for reading body language generally.

Close Range BMP

BMP cues literally come from head to toe. This means when you are near to someone, these visual angle needed to take all cues in at the same time becomes very wide, eliciting peripheral visual systems.  Detecting and tracking cues in the periphery is much more taxing on the brain.  Professor Faubert had conducted earlier research, showing that healthy older people have a significant drop in their ability to read BMP at distances of less than 4 meters.

As an example of a real-world consequence, this BMP deficit leaves elderly people susceptible to collisions when walking in busy places.  For this reason, Professor Faubert wanted to see if NeuroTracker could recover these BMP skills lost to the effects of natural aging.

Performance Transfer

Professor Faubert found that 15 NeuroTracker sessions performed over 5 weeks, dramatically improved older people’s close-range BMP. The effects of the training now allowed them to accurately judge a walking direction at different distances and angles, where before they could not.

The study revealed clear and positive transfer of perceptual-cognitive training onto the ability for older people to read and predict human movement at close distances.

Performance on the Field

Professor Faubert now wants to evolve the research to see if NeuroTracker can enhance athletes’ abilities for reading sports-related actions.  However, to show performance transfer, sophisticated sports-specific BMP simulations need to be created.  These need to be capable of pushing professional athletes past their current BMP limits – which are already high!  In order to be realistic, these simulations first require capturing the real movements of athletes and then converting them into 3D avatars.  Here you can see some of the preparatory work go into soccer, with players from Montreal Impact.

So, Can You Train to Read Your Opponent’s Mind?

The scientific evidence for athletes is not in yet.  However, what we do know, is that NeuroTracker training has shown clear transfer to BMP abilities and that many of the demands on the brain involved in reading human body movements are matched in the NeuroTracker task.  Furthermore, countless studies show that 1-3 hours of distributed NeuroTracker training produces large gains in ability. And that this transfers to boosts in high-level cognitive functions, and also to competitive sports performance.

So if you’re interested in getting the edge on your opponent’s moves, 3D multiple object tracking looks like the best bet!

Interested in finding out three of the hidden dimensions of elite sports performance? Then read our related blog here.

3 Reasons Athletes Should Train their Minds

The Game-Changing Role of Technology

The defining characteristic of the modern age is the exponential growth of technology. Rather than displacing the roles of humans, in certain ways technology has radically increased the value and importance of human performance skillsets.

A key reason is that the monetary value of technology systems operated by personnel can be tremendously high.  A pertinent case is the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, which had a total production cost of around 2 billion US dollars, per plane.  Not only do operators of expensive technology systems carry huge responsibilities, but they also have to develop extremely high standards of expertise, with high associated training costs.

The Training Industry Challenge

With these types of scenarios, the training industry has been daunted with the challenge of how to ensure the effectiveness of training programs for high priority personnel.  Jet pilots are a classic example.  Competency requires pushing the cognitive and physiological barriers of human performance. Alongside this, expert proficiency comes with a very high price tag, requiring thousands of hours of flight experience. Yet at the end of the day, and regardless of training investments, some pilots excel in training, while others fail. Traditionally there has been no way to properly understand or predict such outcomes.

Innovation in Human Performance Systems

To tackle this challenge, a multidisciplinary coalition of neuroscientists, experts in simulation training, and flight training specialists attempted to discover what actually goes on in the minds of jet pilots during training.  In a truly innovative setup, they took an L-29 jet plane and integrated the dashboard with a NeuroTracker system, and then hooked up pilots with eye tracking and ECG equipment.

The goal was to study the real-time impacts of flight in terms of actual neurophysical training loads – a world-first in aviation.

Determining Workload Limits

A key concept used was ‘spare cognitive capacity’, that is, the attentional resources still available when performing a task.  This is both relative to the complexity of the task, and to the capabilities of the individual.  For example, driving leaves some people enough spare cognitive capacity to talk on a cell phone, but for others, this is a dangerous distraction.

The aim was to use NeuroTracker to measure pilots’ spare cognitive capacity while actually performing 3 difficulty levels of flight maneuvers, and to replicate the tests in a simulator. This would then provide an objective assessment of the workload effects of specific flight tasks, revealing how these impact pilot performance and physiological metrics.

Flight Test Results

Flight performance was evaluated using the Cognitive Assessment Tool Set (CATS), and pilots were asked to subjectively evaluate the workloads experienced under each flight condition.

Overall, the findings showed that the more difficult the flight maneuver was, the less spare cognitive capacity was available for the NeuroTracker task. These effects were much greater for live flight versus simulated flight.

Reductions in spare cognitive capacity also correlated with lower flight technical performance.

Self-assessments revealed that pilots greatly underestimated the true cognitive workloads, as established by NeuroTracker, CATS, and physiological measures.  In effect, pilots were not aware when their workload capacities had become overloaded, lowering the effectiveness of their training.

Adaptive Training

This study shed new light on the direct relationships between mental and physiological workloads, and their combined influence on training performance.  The data could be of direct benefit for customizing training programs to fit individual needs.

For example, it could be used to restrict a weaker pilot to low difficulty live flights and medium difficulty simulated flights. Or alternatively, to set high difficulty flights for a highly proficient pilot.  This would tailor the demands of training through an on-going Goldilocks approach, ensuring every training session is optimized to each pilot’s training needs.

Training Industry Benefits

This study represents the first year of a multi-year research project, which will go on to include the dimension of expertise to investigate its influence on workload capacities. Although this research is specific to pilots, the assessment principles translate to training programs involving high-cost coupled with high-levels of expertise acquisition.

Fundamentally, this approach measures trainee workload capacities in real-time, in parallel with task performance metrics.  It can be used across both training and operational platforms, and across military and commercial domains. As such it paves the way to applications that will improve the effectiveness of training programs in the following areas:

Reduced attrition rates – assess trainee workload capabilities and filter trainees for program selection based on their training competency and completion expectations.

Customized training – adapt training to meet each trainee’s specific needs, such as modulating training tasks to specific workload strengths and weaknesses.

Accelerated learning – engineer training difficulty through a sweet spot approach, optimizing training stimulation to individual workload capacities.

Adaptive learning – real-time alteration of training content to each trainee’s skill level and cognitive state as their abilities adapt as a function of time spent in training.

Training device selection – by comparing variations in workload rates for one training system compared to another, individual trainees can be matched to devices based learning efficiency, lowering overall training costs.

Looking forward, it is easy to envisage this kind of scientific research leading to improved training outcomes across many industries.  In this case, those outcomes will likely be accelerated, due to the novel partnership between scientific laboratories and industry leaders in commercial training solutions.

About the Study

The Faubert Applied Research Centre, the University of Montreal, Rockwell Collins (avionics and simulation training company), and the University of Iowa’s Operator Performance Lab, partnered their fields of expertise to come up with an innovative way to assess the mental loads of flying. The paper was presented at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2017 and was awarded best paper for the Training Category.

Perceptual-Cognitive & Physiological Assessment of Training Effectiveness

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Here I will cover why attention is such a critical factor in elite sports performance, and how tools like NeuroTracker can be highly efficient methods to train attention to higher levels.

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Attention and Performance

In the world of athletics, things are moving so fast that we need to be efficient and effective in terms of what we pay attention to. The information our brains take in predominantly comes from our eyes. Elite athletes use efficient visual search strategies, being very selective about where they place their focus.

Approximately 2 billion pieces of information per second enter our brain through our eyes. That’s a lot of information! Our brains can’t meaningfully take all that information in, so it also has to be selective with which information it processes.  This is one of the things that separate elite athletes from the rest. However, selective attention is just one of six areas of attention that are critical to sports performance.

1. Selective attention – to filter out distractions and prioritize visual processing
2. Visual pivot strategies – to consciously make optimum use of peripheral vision
3. Distributed attention – to be able to process lots of information coming in at the same time
4. Dynamic attention – to keep on top of things moving or changing rapidly
5. Sustained attention – to be able maintain attention for an extended period of time
6. Attention stamina – to be able to focus in, and focus out, over long periods of time

Honing Attention as a Skill

Attention is everything in sports. It is also a skill, one that can be developed and trained. The more you strengthen attention, the better you become. Attention, along with other cognitive skills, has opened up a whole new area of sport psychology where we use technology to advance our cognitive abilities. I will cover my approach next, but no matter what method you decide to use, make sure to include attention training into your regime. This will be key for performing how you want to, when you need to the most - under pressure.

I use NeuroTracker because it is a very effective tool for training all these types of attention, and it also uses a visual pivot. Based on over 20 years of science, it is one of the most advanced systems of its kind in the world.

Cognitive Training with NeuroTracker

Previously, I have written about cognitive training and what to look for in terms of setting up a regimen.  There are a lot of technologies out there, but after extensive research I find the best overall fit for my performance coaching is NeuroTracker.  If you’re not familiar with how it works, NeuroTracker is a tool using 3D technology that is designed to enhance your athletic performance.

Building Up Athletic Skills

NeuroTracker isolates the basic mental elements of awareness and focus because it tests attention through multiple object tracking. NeuroTracker overloads athletes by asking them to mentally focus at high speeds repeatedly. Through a scientific conditioning process, NeuroTracker builds up the raw tools for maintaining awareness and attention even in the highest pressure game situations.

There are several ways NeuroTracker training will help you develop your athletic abilities. Firstly, to make better decisions under pressure. Secondly, to anticipate actions earlier, and more accurately. Thirdly, to identify and focus on key opportunities more easily, improving your situational awareness.  And finally, to stay mentally sharp throughout a long season

Evolving Training

Training can also progress over time with dual-tasks.  This is a method for achieving the best results over longer programs. It involves incorporating increasingly complex motor skill tasks while NeuroTracking. For example, a user will first begin their program in a seated position until they have consolidated the basic training. Then a basic secondary task can be added, such as balancing.  Later on, physical exercise or sport-specific skills can be performed, all while maintaining focus on the NeuroTracker task.

There is no limit to what type of dual-tasks can be combined, which can be used to push performance to extremely high levels.

If you’d like to hear more about NeuroTracker training, you can watch this video.

If you are interested, you can checkout my Quantum Performance Blog, and books I have written.

‘Get Into The Zone: The Essential Guide To High Performance Through Mental Training’

Fortitude: The Essential Guide to Building and Sustaining Mental Toughness

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Concussions can impact brain functions in many ways.  High-level cognitive functions are the most likely to be disrupted because they involve many brain regions. When just one part of the chain of mental processing is affected, our ability to function can be critically impaired.

Of all the sensory information our brains process from moment to moment, vision dominates.  In sports, for example, up to 90% of information coming in is processed by vision.  This is why large areas of the brain are devoted to visual processing. The latest neuroscience research also reveals that vision is integrated with the ‘command centers’ of the brain, in the frontal lobe regions.

Here we’ll cover 5 keys ways visual performance can be disrupted by Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI).

1. Eye Tracking

When following an object in motion, such as a puck, soccer ball or an opponent, your eyes need to maintain focus while moving smoothly to maintain tracking.  Concussions often affect the complex muscular system around the eyes.  The result is jittery movements instead of precise pursuit movements, which leads to loss of focus.  In turn, this creates visual noise making it much more difficult for the visual centers of the brain to interpret what is being seen.

For this reason, some vision assessments include eye-tracking tests, using a smooth pursuit task. If jittery eye movements are revealed, even if extremely subtle, it reveals a tell-tale sign that an individual is affected by mTBI, or a related cognitive impairment.

2. Peripheral Vision

Also known as side vision, peripheral vision is what is perceived around the outer edges of the visual field. Intuitively it seems simple to be aware of what’s going on around us, for example when driving a car or crossing a road.  However, processing information across the peripheral visual field comes with a heavy mental load, particularly when the environment or perceiver is in motion.

In fact, it requires the activation of much larger neural networks compared to perception in the central field of vision.  It’s also fundamental to balance, as the brain uses optic flow cues to understand it’s orientation in the world.  This is why some advanced concussion assessments integrate balance tasks with stimulation of the peripheral vision, revealing effects of mTBIs that otherwise go unnoticed.

3. Visual Acuity

Visual acuity relates to clearly seeing, inspecting, identifying and understanding objects viewed at a near or far distance.  It relies on accurate focus, requiring each eye to align precisely with an object being viewed. Dynamic visual acuity involves maintaining a clear focus on moving objects, including moving closer to, or further away from, the perceiver.  This means both eyes must not only have accurate alignment but also maintain that accuracy simultaneously while changing viewing angles.

Similar to eye tracking issues, visual acuity places demands on fine grain ocular motor skills. Small impairments can significantly impair a person’s ability to focus on things in front of them.  It’s a concern for athletes in post-concussion recovery phases.  Particularly in team sports, fast changing, dynamic scenes place a constant strain on visual acuity.  This stimulation can regress athletes back to being symptomatic after they had seemingly recovered.

4. Depth perception

Depth perception is the ability to see the world in three dimensions, coupled with the ability to judge the relative distances of objects – how far or near they are. There are many perceptual processes involved which utilize visual cues such as stereoscopy, perspective, texture, and tonal gradients. These cues are processed in separate regions of the visual centers of the brain, then pieced together by higher-order visual systems to generate a realistic sense of distance for everything in the environment.

Again, perceiving depth with absolute or relative motion will complexify demands on the brain. Depth perception is a critical factor in how we navigate the world safely, especially when driving.

If a concussion impacts any of the processes used to interpret depth, then the world around can become a very confusing place.  As depth perception is a high-level visual function, cognitive interventions can be used to stimulate recovery of lost function and to bring athletes back to Return-to-Play status.

5. Attention

It may not sound like a visual skill, but attention and vision actually go hand in hand.  The vast river of sensory data that flows into our brain far outweighs what we can actually process.  To be efficient, attentional systems are used to detect what information is critical to our needs, and what is not.  The visual centers of the brain then filter out what’s unnecessary, and prioritize mental resources onto what’s most important.

When this ability to selectively filter and process visual information is impaired by the effects of a concussion, even everyday activities like walking through a shopping center can become overwhelming.  This type of sensory overload can quickly trigger mTBI symptoms such as dizziness, nausea and headaches. Training the brain’s visual attentional systems through the concussion recovery process requires a Goldilocks approach.  Visual stimulation that’s not too little, or too much, can be used to build back attention over time, step-by-step.

As we’ve seen, vision is a complex system which can be affected in many ways by a concussion injury.  Vision care professionals, such as neuro-optometrists, can play an extremely important role in rehabilitating visual functions to aid recovery.  Furthermore, a great deal of neuroscience research is being devoted to discovering new ways to assess and regains visual functions impacted by mTBIs.

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Human performance spans a broad spectrum of abilities, that are not just used in professional pursuits, but in our everyday lives.  In the previous two blogs of this three-part series, we looked at NeuroTracker studies that revealed how sports performance can be assessed and enhanced.  In this third part, we’ll go beyond the domain of sports to see how NeuroTracker training can improve human performance in surprisingly diverse ways.  Let’s take a look at three studies which show that NeuroTracker makes a performance difference for older people, students with learning difficulties, and military personnel.

1. Enhancing Human Movement Perception

The natural process of aging typically involves a decline in some cognitive abilities.  Research has shown that one of these abilities is Biological Motion Perception (BMP).  This mental skill allows us to interpret body language by tracking multiple human movement cues at the same time.  For example, to avoid bumping others when crossing a busy road, your brain will dynamically process cues like a person’s gaze direction, foot angle, hand swing, and hip alignment.  Collectively these help you decide whether to pass a person on the left or on the right, to avoid a collision.

For older people, this type of cognitive processing is typically deficient, resulting in a lack of ability to read BMP at distances of 4 meters or less.  Researchers at the Faubert Lab hypothesized that 3D multiple object tracking could potentially train the mental resources used in BMP. For this reason, they put NeuroTracker to the test to see if training could transfer to a better perception of human movement.

What Was Studied

Healthy older adults (around 68 years old) were trained on 15 NeuroTracker sessions over 5 weeks.  Before and after training, they were assessed on a series of scientifically simulated 3D BMP tests.  These tests measured the participants’ ability to judge a person’s walking direction, both at different distances and perceptual angles.

What Was Found

A control group showed no change in the BMP assessments when retaken 5 weeks after initial testing. In contrast, the NeuroTracker trained group experienced dramatically improved processing of BMP at close distances (4m). The study revealed a clear and positive transfer of perceptual-cognitive training onto the ability for elderly people to read human movement at close distances.

What It Means

A lack of ability to read other people’s body language at close distances leaves older people vulnerable to collisions and physical injury.  The fear of such accidents can also inhibit the quality of life, for example, leading elderly people to avoid crossing busy streets or visiting shopping centers.  Furthermore, BMP is needed to interpret communication via body language, and so could affect social relationships.  This study showed that elderly people can regain lost cognitive abilities that are socially relevant in everyday life.  What’s more, these abilities can be recovered to normal levels with just a few hours of distributed NeuroTracker training.

Study: Training 3D-MOT improves biological motion perception in aging: evidence for transferability of training

2. Transforming Learning Abilities

All students are vulnerable to distractions that can affect their ability to attend to relevant information in the classroom. Attention directly influences the relationship between intelligence and academic performance.  For children with learning difficulties, the challenges of paying attention present major barriers throughout their school education.  A pair of researchers specialized in the field of learning, asked the question ‘Could fundamental attention capacities be enhanced with cognitive training?’  To find out, they undertook a large NeuroTracker study for students with a range of different learning abilities.

What Was Studied

A 15 session NeuroTracker training program was carried out over 5 weeks with 129 students. 5 weeks of placebo training was also given using a math-like puzzle game. Half of the students performed the placebo training before the NeuroTracker training, and the other half performed it after the NeuroTracker training.  The students carried out pre and post standardized neuropsychological assessments for each 5-week training program.  These tests allowed scientific measurements of the students’ core attention capacities.

What Was Found

For both groups, the placebo training had no impact on attention capacities.  For the actual NeuroTracker training, the students showed surprisingly strong learning abilities, with an average improvement on the task of 43%. When it came to the attention measures, the students in both groups experienced significant gains in scores, representing improvements in several core areas of attention. Additionally, initial NeuroTracker scores correlated significantly with the measures of the students’ IQ, suggesting that ability to perform NeuroTracker is linked to intelligence in this population.

What It Means

Overall the study showed that NeuroTracker training can be an effective way to train attention to improve educational outcomes for students with attention difficulties. The researchers also reported that a practical level, they found NeuroTracker to be an accessible and adaptable training method for children. It also improved outcomes in the classroom. Education strategist Dwayne Matthews summed up the implications of the research.

“NeuroTracker is a pertinent example of a technology with the potential to change the way we foster academic growth…it has demonstrated training transfer to significant gains in fundamental learning capacities.”

3. Expanding Working Memory

Working memory capacity has been widely linked to performance on high-level cognitive tasks.  As a cognitive ability that applies broadly to the demands of military service, the Canadian Armed Forces sought a way to build up the working memory capacities of military personnel.  Due to the need for a practical tool that could be implemented at scale, they enlisted a military psychologist to investigate if NeuroTracker could do the job with minimal intervention time.

What Was Studied

Soldiers in the Canadian Armed Forces were first tested on three working memory span tasks: verbal span, matrix span, and visual span, establishing a baseline measure for each test. Participants were then distributed into three groups.

• Experimental group: performed 10 NeuroTracker Core sessions over a 2-week period
• Active control group: performed an adaptive dual task over a 2-week period
• Passive control group: No activity over a 2-week period

At the end of the two weeks, the same working memory tests were retaken.

What Was Found

For the NeuroTracker trained group, their speeds thresholds increased considerably over the 10 sessions.  This delivered clear transfer to improvements in working memory word span, matrix span, and visual span, with medium to large effect sizes.  In contrast, the control groups’ working memory measures remained the same across both sets of testing.

What It Means

The lead researcher concluded that a short amount of NeuroTracker training can increase the working memory capacities of military personnel.  This was a dramatic result considering that the training time for each soldier was a mere sixty minutes in total.  Furthermore, because working memory improved consistently across all of the tests, it was suggested that NeuroTracker training boosted working memory capacities at a fundamental level.

In terms of practical implementation, NeuroTracker passed with flying colors, primarily due to the facts that it,

• automatically optimizes training for any individual’s needs
• can be carried it out in small six minutes sessions, over time
• can be performed by soldiers independently

For these reasons, a larger study is now being conducted using NeuroTracker Remote. This time Canadian soldiers will train remotely using, the browser-based version of NeuroTracker.  This could lead to a highly cost-effective way to train soldier performance.

Study: 3D Multiple Object Tracking Boosts Working Memory Span: Implications for Cognitive Training in Military Populations

These studies represent 3 specific examples of NeuroTracker transfer to human performance. However, other published and on-going studies show benefits across different populations.  If you are interested in NeuroTracker research, you can find study summaries here.

Performance

Wellness

Learning

And if you missed them, you can read the previous blogs in this series here:

3 Ways NeuroTracker Assesses Sports Performance

3 Ways NeuroTracker Transfers to Sports Performance

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

1. Boosting Brain Functions

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

What Was Studied

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

What Was Found

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

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

What It Means

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

Study: Enhancing Cognitive Function Using Perceptual-Cognitive Training

2. Enhancing Decision-Making on the Field

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

What Was Studied

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

What Was Found

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

What It Means

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

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

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

3. Improving Olympic Athlete Performance

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

What Was Studied

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

What Was Found

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

What It Means

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

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

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

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

Performance

Wellness

Learning

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