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If there was a magic pill that can provide the benefits of intense exercise, but without any of the sweat, would you take it? Neuroscientists at the University of Houston have made a potentially ground-breaking discovery for human health. In a new study they showed for the first time that a very light and focused muscle exercise, dubbed the 'soleus push-up', can dramatically boost the body's metabolism and rate of oxygen consumption. Here we'll cover why this finding might just be one of the biggest ever breakthroughs in modern human biology.

What is the Soleus?

The soleus is a slim minor calf muscle that sits behind the main calf (gastrocnemius) and Achilles tendon, running from the heel to the back of the knee. The muscle is generally activated when the calf is stretched, that is, when the foot is raised above flat and pushing down. Walking or running up a steep hill (but not steps), is an example of when they come into play.

Muscles are the largest lean mass in our bodies, yet in terms of whole-body oxidative metabolism, they only burn 15% of glucose at rest. This lack of muscular metabolism when at rest is associated with the now well-established health risks of too much sitting too much. Surprising to most people, this risk is still high even for people who participate in regular exercise or do workouts, such as going to the gym or running.

What's So Special About the Soleus?

This muscle has a special in-built mechanism, unknown until now. The researchers showed that when this specific muscle is activated in a very specific way, whole body glucose metabolism is increased by 30-45%. This occurs with negligible energy expenditure of actually contracting the soleus, and also triggers the use of a previously undiscovered fuel mixture.

The exercise is a simple repetitive heel lift while keeping the ball of the foot on the floor, which can be done while seated on the floor or on a chair. Interestingly, this precise type of soleus contraction is deactivated while walking or running. Accordingly, lower limb energy muscle expenditure was also tested on a treadmill.

Burn More Energy Than Running - While Sitting?!

Remarkably, the soleus push-up burned more than twice as much oxygen across all the leg muscles than running. The same metabolic effects were also found to be ten times greater than walking. This huge boost in energy consumption was seen across adults aged 22–82 years of age.

The takeaway is that systemic metabolic regulation can be greatly improved by activating this minor calf muscle, and without resistance or added weights. These research findings reveal a widely accessible and practical way to counter the significant health risks of prolonged sitting, including for people who exercise regularly.

Here is an overview of the study findings by the lead research Marc Hamiliton.

There could also be many more benefits, such as preventing deep vein thrombosis (DBT) on long haul flights. This is caused by the build-up of blood clots due to restricted blood circulation in the legs, which in turn can travel around the cardiovascular system and can cause fatal heart attacks.

In particular, soleus push-ups could be ideal therapy for people who have limited movement, due to injuries, disease, or the physiological effects of natural aging. More research is needed to investigate such benefits.

Another Biohack?

Though the study findings seem hard to believe, there are similar biological mechanisms that have been discovered, which likewise initiate the body to go beyond normal human activity. One example that has been well established in sports science, is plyometric muscle contractions, where muscles are briefly eccentrically stretched beyond their normal range, then rapidly contracted. This causes a significant increase is muscle power. As such it is a training technique used in many sports to build up power.

Other examples are the release of energy reserves in completely fatigued endurance athletes when simply tasting sugars, and boosts in all sensory processing when receiving a very specific pattern of sensory stimulation termed 'stochastic resonance'.

It's tempting to label these phenomena as biohacks, but this is open to debate, as these natural responses are built into our fundamental biology through evolution. The soleus push-up breakthrough does however raise an important question - what else can be discovered about our bodies' hidden in-built abilities? Hopefully science will tell.

The open-access paper can be read here.

'A potent physiological method to magnify and sustain soleus oxidative metabolism improves glucose and lipid regulation'

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Natives in South Asian countries have talked about the healing wonders of Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa), a tropical evergreen tree in the coffee family, for years. They believe the tree leaves and leaf extracts have stimulant and sedative properties. It has reportedly been used to treat chronic pain, opium dependence withdrawal, and digestive problems.

Unfortunately, there aren't enough research and clinical trials available to back up these claims, and it hasn't been approved for medical use. But that's not to disclaim the health effects of Kratom. This article will review the potential health benefits that Kratom may offer and highlight the risk associated with using Kratom. Let's start by discussing why people use Kratom, the methods of usage, and the dosage.

Why And How Do People Use Kratom?

People use Kratom for different reasons. Kratom has been observed to function like a stimulant at low doses. Low-dose users usually report experiencing the feeling of being energized, alert, and friendly after using the drug. It's also reported euphoric effects and dulling emotions and sensations at larger doses.

Kratom is mainly used in the United States as a tea that can help relieve pain and narcotic withdrawal. As for the intake method, the plant's dark green leaves are usually dried and crushed or powdered. In addition, there are also paste, pill, and tablet forms of Kratom, whichever suits you best.

Health Benefits of Kratom

The physiological effects of Kratom are linked to the presence of two main alkaloids, mitragynine and 7-hydroxy mitragynine, that can be found in the leaves. There are various potential health benefits of using red vein kratom and other kratom strains, according to available research, which includes:

1.  Pain Relief and Anti-inflammatory Effects

A 2017 study on Kratom revealed some exciting details about its anti-inflammatory and immune system booster properties. This discovery backs up the stories of many kratom users that testified to its ability to relieve chronic pains and aches. In addition, Kratom's pain-relieving properties have been compared with HCG injections and reviewed as a natural remedy to comfort patients with fibromyalgia and chronic pain.

While there's a possibility that Kratom might present a more natural alternative to relieve pain and inflammation, there's still not enough evidence presented for the drug to be widely accepted — anecdotal evidence is growing daily.

2.  Can Provide Relief from Anxiety

Based on an ancient tradition among people from southern Asia, they usually chew a few of the plant's leaves before going to social gatherings or events. This is because Kratom would help them stay calmer, less worried, more at ease, and more outgoing.

This practice is still much alive today as people still use Kratom for its alleged ability to regulate mind flow and calm nerves. Some people say Kratom makes them feel friendlier and chattier.

3.  Can Help with Depression

The mechanism by which Kratom interacts with and affects the body is similar to that of opioids like morphine and codeine, even though it's not an opioid drug.

Mitragynine, an active alkaloid found in Kratom, attaches itself to opioid receptors to produce similar effects to antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. However, there's little scientific evidence to prove Kratom's effect on anxiety and mood.

Also, note that the proverbial anti-anxiety properties Kratom have are only present in specific kratom strains and product types. Users who want the anti-anxiety properties kratom offers would need to research to identify the correct strain and product. It's also crucial to establish a suitable personal dosage for optimal effects.

4.   Might Assist in Overcoming Certain Addictions

The International Journal of Drug Policy released a study in May 2019 to find answers to some frequently asked questions about Kratom and its use. An exciting find was Kratom's use in addiction recovery.

Many believe using Kratom can help reduce withdrawal symptoms from opioids and other addictive habits. A small-scale study was also conducted in Malaysia in 2009 to show how Kratom reduced withdrawal symptoms. Many researchers have also published papers, online reports, and data on the same topic.

However, regulatory agencies like the FDA still require more controlled clinical trials on the drug to ascertain it's a safe and reliable treatment for treating addiction.

5.   Can Act As an Energy Booster

As discussed above, there are different strains of Kratom, each with a peculiar attribute. While some can produce effects similar to coffee, others may make you feel dull. Some strains — White vein kratom, Maeng Da, and Thai Kratom — are believed to make the user feel more energized and determined to do daily tasks more quickly. This common knowledge makes many look towards a cup of kratom tea as an alternative to their morning brew.

Studies about Kratom's energy-boosting effects reveal that the drug affects specific metabolic systems to improve circulation and increase the amount of oxygenated blood, hence the pumped-up feeling effects.

6.   Libido Enhancement

Another possible benefit of kratom is that it can be a potential supplement for sexual enhancement. Some researchers have reviewed Kratom's aphrodisiac properties with several clinical trials and published data claiming it works well as a plant-based sexual enhancer.

Possible Side Effects

The most common side effects users of Kratom usually complain about are constipation and nausea. However, there are also harmful effects linked to Kratom use. They include:

● Sweating

● Itching

● Dizziness

● Dry mouth

● Hallucinations

● Seizures

● Liver damage

Long-Term Effects

Not much is known about the long-term effects of prolonged kratom use. However, a survey of some users shows that anorexia, recurrent weight loss, darker facial skin, dry lips, frequent urination, and constipation are the potential long-term effects of prolonged kratom use.

Bottom Line

Before using Kratom for any medical properties, consult your doctor first. As much as there are some benefits the drug offers, there is equally some risk involved, especially in cases of overdose or product quality issues.

There has been a lot of research that has proven that Kratom has medical uses, including pain relief, treating the symptoms of mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, stopping or reducing opioid or other substance use, and managing opioid withdrawal symptoms and cravings. Some drugs reported to react with Kratom include benzodiazepines, barbiturates, alcohol, opioids, antidepressants, anxiolytics, and other CNS-active medications. Further studies will also be needed to ascertain that Kratom offers more benefits than harm.

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The athletic brain is an efficient brain. Whether it is a last-minute game winner or a breakout performance, training athletes to enhance their ability to thrive in the moment is the difference between good and great. Here we’ll share our approach at NeuroAthletes, where we specialize in providing robust cognitive training using the latest neurotechnologies.

The Missing Link in Modern Performance Enhancement

We first created NeuroAthletes because we noticed something missing in the youth sports market while coaching our own children.  As previous athletes ourselves, we became aware of some of the challenges youth athletes face in the 21st century world competitive sports.

These include factors such as travelling with teams at much younger ages, an increase in general anxiety, and particularly less focus and attention and social confidence from growing up in the digital age.

Looking for solutions for these challenges, we researched and tried a variety of modern training options. We found that the domain that stood head and shoulders above the rest was cognitive training, and we loved the results we got. Although a relatively new approach, this makes perfect sense. Many experts claim that sports is 80% mental, yet traditionally, brain functions have rarely been trained under a sports science methodology. Instead, most training is dominantly physical fitness or skills based.

From discovering this missing link in athletic performance conditioning, we now specialize in combining physical and mental training to help athletes go from good to great.

Framing the Brains of Tomorrow’s Champions  

The difference between an average athlete and an elite athlete lies in their mental performance capacities. Research even shows that heighted cognitive abilities are likely the best predictive measure of world-class athletes, compared to sub-elite athletes.

The great news is that the brain is far more adaptable and responsive to focused training than what the body is. Through harnessing our in-built neuroplasticity, the brain can literally rewire itself overnight

So, the key takeaway is that mental performance is a skill set you can train and develop just like any other fundamental sports skill, and the benefits can be reaped surprisingly rapidly. For example, a soccer study showed that just a 3-hour intervention of distributed cognitive training reduced passing-decision making errors by a massive 40%.

Just like strength and conditioning or sports science revolutionized athletic performance, cognitive training will become the go-to tool for framing the brain of tomorrow’s champion.

The Mental Skills Athletes Need to Develop in Order to Excel

Most athletes and coaches underestimat just how much sports rely on high-level visual and cognitive skills. For instance, in team sports like hockey and soccer, players spend only a tiny fraction of game time actually in possession of the puck or ball. Most of their performance is dictated by having the situational awareness and rapid processing skills to know where to be, at the right moment. Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky summed up it perfectly.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

When we tie it all together specific to performance in a team sport, we know that player decisions rely heavily on rapidly changing scenes, and players must be able to process and recognize situations in order to find out the most effective play among all conceivable choices, often on extremely short timescales.

This ability can be broken down into a 4-stage process.

This perception-to-action loop requires mental muscle like working memory, planning, reasoning, and creativity. Additionally, this process needs to be flexible enough to be dynamic. Players will often need to make a rapid decision to cancel an intended play, to instead decide on a new play based on changing information and cues. This requires inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and problem solving.

Next we’ll cover some of the equipment and neurotechnologies we utilize to take this human performance domain to the next level.

Applied Cognitive Training Techniques

At NeuroAthletes our first step is always an extensive assessment of each individuals’ spectrum of visual capacities. Rather than asking the question will vision training work for a given individual, we ask ''how do we make it work the best for the individual?''

Just as the physical demands of different sports vary, likewise do the visual and cognitive demands (though most coaches rarely take this into account). For this reason, we give athletes complete insight into the visual and cognitive skills we assess, which allows us to optimize our performance programs according to very specific needs.

Although we are regularly scouting the latest innovations on the market, here are some tried and tested technologies we have had great success with.

NeuroTracker

NeuroTracker uses 3D multiple object tracking to rapidly train-up visual processing skills and situational awareness. In addition it provides scientific baselines to assess each player's on-going cognitive abilities.

Switchedon® Pro

A tool for Perceptual Cognitive Motor (PCM) training, Switchedon is designed to improve physical and cognitive performance simultaneously, in ways that transfer to competition.

SMARTfit® Strike Pods

This system of visual-cognitive-motor training helps athletes to compete in an elevated state of physical performance and mental concentration, which can be used to target sport specific hand-eye or foot-eye skills.

TRX RIP Trainer

The TRX system allows full body movement and strengthening using relative body weight to build-up core stability, balance, power and flexibility through rotational and asymmetrical movements.

KBands Training

This plyometric workout equipment effectively builds dynamic power to increase an athlete's verticals, explosiveness, and reaction time.

Of these tools, NeuroTracker has become core in all our training. Not only does it allow us to boost visual skills and train 3D depth perception, the cognitive metrics it delivers mean we can track how our athletes are developing at the level of the brain. As such it used by many elite performance teams such as Redbull F1, Boston Red Soxs, and Washington Capitols to name a few.  

The Benefits of Training the Neurophysical Dimension of Sports

We help train the brain, improve reaction time, improve focus, mental accuracy, sensory processing and other neurocognitive attributes. Here are some of the performance gains we see from our overall training programs.

• Processing information faster

• Recovering quickly from mistakes

• Improved situational awareness

• Increased attention span

• Maintaining composure under pressure

• Better motor accuracy skills

• Faster footwork, ball speed and control

• Heightened speed and agility

• Reduced reaction times

• More efficient action execution

• Enhanced core balance

In addition, the skills we improve are also a first line of defense against injury on the field. Athletes become more adept at recognizing and avoiding injury threats such as as aggressive tackles, particularly through expanded peripheral vision.

Takeaways

Just like you can train your body to develop the proper technique to dribble a basketball or throw a pitch, you can train your mind to become more focused, resilient, and confident. This won’t happen by accident, but as we’ve found at NeuroAthletes, training your mind intentionally with consistency and structure is a great recipe for success.

Applying neurotechnologies and equipment already on the market today, athletes can be empowered to become both physically and mentally ready to perform. Maximize training to think faster, react smarter and perform better under pressure is achievable with neurophysical conditioning.

If you’d like to learn more about our approach and the specific performance programs we offer, check out our website.

NeuroAthletes

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A fast-rising rehab tool used by physical therapists, athletic trainers and bodybuilders, blood flow restriction (BFR) training has been gaining increasing awareness over the past few years. It holds promise for building muscle strength without lifting heavy weights, and potentially even aiding rehabilitation while resting. Here we will cover the fundamentals of BFR and some science of how it works, to reveal why this technique might become the future of rehab.

What is BFR?

BFR was originally a novel training method developed in Japan by Dr. Yoshiaki Sato in 1966, dubbed as KAATSU (now a BFR product brand). Today BFR is also referred to more scientifically as Occlusion Training, referring to lack of blood flow. The core concept involves using a cuff or band tied tightly around the major arteries in the upper legs or arms. Some of the latest products on the market also embed cuffs into sports clothing for ease of use.

The goal is to temporarily restrict both incoming and outgoing blood flow to the muscle groups (or only outgoing blood flow with KAATSU), essentially to trick the body’s physiological systems into a heightened rehabilitation state. It depends on the protocol, but the typical timeframe for BFR is up to 20-minutes per session. Although it sounds potentially harmful, BFR has been studied extensively and deemed to be safe when used properly.

The most important effect of BFR is that it allows low levels of physical activity to have similar effects to high-intensity exercise. For this reason, low-level resistance exercise, aerobic exercise or physical therapy movements are performed while blood flow is minimized. For resistance exercise, 30% of a person’s maximum load at one rep is the upper limit for triggering the benefits of BFR.

Here is a short practical introduction.

How Does BFR Work?

Although the methodology is relatively straight-forward, the physiological mechanisms of how it works are multifaceted. This is because the body to reacts to the stimulus by kick-starting repairs at a cellular level.  

Here are three cellular response mechanisms which aid rehabilitation.

1. Recovery hormones

When the BFR straps are applied, blood begins to pool in the muscles causing them to swell and become stressed. This triggers the body to produce recovery hormones in the muscle, and when the straps are released, these hormones flood the whole body providing a systemic impact. Every muscle, organ, or structure in the body with a blood supply can potentially benefit from these recovery hormones.

2. Flushing

When the BFR straps are removed after a period of application, the build-up of pressure in the limbs is released, causing a relatively sudden flush that removes waste materials from the joints and muscles. This process is immediate and would typically take the body 48 hours or more to achieve unassisted.

3. Reperfusion

When the BFR straps are removed, fresh nutrient rich blood is driven into the muscles and structural tissues, helping them recover in a process called reperfusion.

Who Uses BFR and What For?

Traditionally the most common application of BFR is to accelerate rehab following severe injuries or operations. In these situations, muscle atrophy is a common problem which can make recovery difficult. When muscles are significantly weakened, biomechanical stress is transferred to the associated joints, which are very easily overloaded. This leads to high-risk of reinjury when trying to get back on the long road to normal activity.

By minimizing muscle loss when unable to deal with load, injury recovery can transition to the next stage of rehabilitation program earlier, from a position of greater strength. BFR can also be used passively (while resting) to harness some of the physiological benefits. This is particularly useful in the first few days following operations, when atrophy begins, but inflammation makes even light training loads infeasible.

Similarly, people who have compromised cardiovascular systems or weak hearts, can use BFR without the obvious risks of high-intensity exercise.

Body builders also find BFR appealing, due to extreme ratio of muscle mass compared to skeletal, joint and tendon mass. As such, performing at maximal loads presents a higher risk injury, with BFR offering a workaround.

Lastly, BFR has recently been making its way from professional sports rehab into performance enhancement of healthy athletes, for both strength and endurance conditioning. A couple of examples of recent adoption are English Premier League clubs and F1 teams.

Overall BFR has been seeing a trend of use growing from practicing physical therapists, orthopedic surgeons, and chiropractors, into the hands of trainers, coaches and elite athletes. Due to the need to control and monitor blood flow precisely, it’s recommended that this technique is used under the supervision of professionally trained personnel.

Takeaway

Although BFR is new to many people, this rehabilitation technique leverages natural biological responses and has been around for decades, with sound science behind it. It can be a valuable method for injury recovery, as well as an aid to performance training. Accordingly, the applied benefits found in clinical applications are now making their way into the human performance domain.

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Soybeans or soya beans (Glycine max) are a legume native to Eastern Asia. They have been eaten for thousands of years and are an essential part of the Asian diet. Most of them are grown in Asia, South America, and North America. Soybeans are often eaten whole in Asia, but heavily processed soy products are much more common in the West.

Soy products like soy flour, protein, tofu, soy milk, soy sauce, and soybean oil are all available. Soybeans contain potent antioxidants and phytonutrients that offer many health benefits.

This article will highlight five vital nutritional facts you should know about soybeans. Keep reading to discover more about this unique legume.

What is Soybean and its Uses?

Soybeans are part of the pea (legume) family of plants and have been a mainstay of Asian cuisines for thousands of years. Soy and soy foods are popular, especially among vegetarians and vegans, because of their high protein content and ability to be used as milk and meat replacements. Certain producers use us soy to manufacture protein powder and isoflavone supplements. Isoflavones are plant chemicals with an estrogen-like structure.

Soybeans contain phytoestrogens, which are hormone-like compounds that mimic the action of the hormone estrogen and have been linked to health benefits. Eating soybean-based foods may lower the risk of various health problems, including cardiovascular disease, stroke, and coronary heart disease (CHD). These legumes also enhance bone health.

Soy may also be helpful for perimenopausal and postmenopausal women, resulting in fewer and less severe hot flushes.

Soybeans are high-protein plant food that you can prepare and consume in numerous ways. They are from the pea family.

Soybeans come in a variety of colors, including:

• Green soybeans. Often known as edamame, these are young green soybeans. You can steam them and eat them as an appetizer right out of the pod. You can also find shelled edamame in salads, stir-fries, and soups.

• Yellow soybeans. Yellow soybeans are commonly used in producing soy milk, tofu, tempeh, and tamari. They also contribute to the manufacture of soy flour for baking.

• Black soybeans. In traditional Asian cuisines, black soybeans are boiled or fermented.

If you’d like to substitute dairy in your diet, consider soy milk and cheese as potential options.

Soybeans also provide soy oil, which can be used for cooking or as an ingredient. After extracting the oil from soybeans, the residual is used to make feed for farm animals and pets.

5 Key Nutrition Facts about Soy

Soybeans are mostly protein but also have a lot of carbohydrates and fat. Here are the key nutritional facts about soy.

1. Proteins

Soybeans are one of the most significant sources of plant-based protein.

They have a protein content of 36-56% by dry weight.

One cup (172 g) of cooked soybeans has approximately 31g of protein.

Soy protein has excellent nutritional value, although it is not as high in quality as other animal proteins.

Glycinin and conglycinin are the two primary forms of protein found in soybeans, accounting for around 80% of the total protein content. It’s important to note that some people may develop allergic responses to these proteins.

Soy protein consumption also leads to a slight reduction in a person’s cholesterol levels.

2. Fat

Soybeans are oilseeds that can be used to produce soybean oil.

Their fat content is around 18% of the dry weight – primarily polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids and traces of saturated fat.

Linoleic acid is soybean’s most common fat, accounting for around half of the total fat content.

3. Carbs

Whole soybeans are very low on the glycemic index (GI), which measures how meals impact blood sugar levels after meals.

Because of their low GI, soybeans are appropriate for people with diabetes.

4. Fiber

Soybeans are high in both soluble and insoluble fiber.

The insoluble fibers are mostly alpha-galactosidase, which might induce gas and diarrhea in people who are sensitive to them.

FODMAPs, which include alpha-galactosidase, is a kind of fiber that may aggravate the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Soybean soluble fibers are considered healthful, despite eliciting unpleasant side effects in some people.

They are fermented in your colon by bacteria, resulting in the synthesis of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which enhance gut health and lower the risk of colon cancer.

5. Minerals and vitamins

Soybeans are rich in several vitamins and minerals, including:

• Molybdenum. Molybdenum, an essential trace element mainly found in seeds, grains, and legumes, is abundant in soybeans.

• Vitamin K1. Phylloquinone is the type of vitamin K available in legumes. It aids in the formation of blood clots.

• Folate. Folate, often known as vitamin B9, serves several roles in your body and is especially crucial during pregnancy.

• Copper. Copper consumption is not prevalent in people from Western nations. Lacking this vital nutrient can negatively impact your heart health.

• Thiamine. Thiamine, often referred to as B1, is vital for multiple body activities.

The Bottom Line

Soybeans are rich in protein and an excellent source of fats and carbs. They are high in vitamins, minerals, and beneficial plant components, including isoflavones. Therefore, frequent soybean consumption can relieve menopausal symptoms and lower your risk of breast and prostate cancer. Use this guide to understand the nutritional facts of soy and what you can benefit from this legume.

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With breakthroughs coming faster than in any other field of science, a lot has been going on in neuroscience in recent years. Here are 22 genuinely mind-blowing neuroscience studies that challenge our preconceptions of who we are, or who we could be.

1. Live 3D Brain Function Mapping

Earlier this year MIT scientists developed a new technique to pair structural mapping (brain anatomy) with functional mapping (how the brain behaves) - the first time this has been properly achieved. In addition, this has been done in live mice, with the mapping performed across mouse brain regions in real-time. This video gives an idea of how fascinating it is to see the coupling of brain structures and live activity changing in response to a mouse being shown different images.

The vanguard technique combines third-harmonic generation (THG) three-photon microscopy with retinotopic mapping, allowing activity to be observed through deep brain tissue via electrical signatures.

It also delivers stunning resolution, allowing individual neurons and their substructures to be studied, as well as fine blood vessels and myelin – a kind of insulator known to be a critical factor in brain processing speed.  

This study focused on the visual centers of the brain, but the same method can be used to study other regions. It promises to be a powerful tool for understanding differences in healthy and diseased brain states, as well as how the brain responds to environmental stimulation.

2. Seeing Decisions Being Made in the Brain

Stanford University made a key breakthrough with a new bifocal microscopy technique called COSMOS. Their work captured movies of neural activity across the whole of the cerebral cortex of a mouse brain.

These signals were recorded by essentially filming the brain from three different angles, then computationally extracting signals to provide a live video of macroscopic activity over the left and right hemispheres. Here is a sample where you literally see the remarkable electrical storm of a real brain in action.

As the cortex handles complex higher-level cognitive functions, more mysterious behaviors like decision-making processes can now start to be unraveled in a global way. For example for understanding of the relationship of decisions dependent on sensory perception and motor function (think about what’s involved in deciding which way to dodge an oncoming car).

The researchers also expect COSMOS to be a low-cost method for screening the effects of psychiatric drugs, so that they can be developed to be more functionally effective.

3. Sleep Breakthrough for Artificial Brains

As we’ve covered in a previous blog, a major breakthrough for Google’s Deep Mind artificial intelligence program came through mimicking the neo-cortical columns of the human mind. This led to vastly increased intelligence using a fraction of the computing power. As a result this human-modelled AI has now surpassed the world’s best chess, Go and then eSports players at their own games.

Though not fully understood, sleep provides a critical function for mammalian and human brains, with serious problems occurring whenever sleep deprivation is endured. This year Los Alamos National Laboratory discovered that the spiking computational networks of AI systems also suffer a kind of sleep deprivation, becoming unstable when performing for long periods without rests. Yet, when put into a network state similar to the brainwaves we experience during sleep, optimal performance was restored.

This may not sound like such a big deal, but advancements in AI are likely to transform the way we all our lives. The findings also hint that the merging disciplines of neuroscience and AI field could yield a new era of super smart computers.

4. Tiny Implant Allows Paralyzed Patients to Control a Computer

A minuscule brain device has been used to improve quality of life patients with severe upper limb paralysis caused by motor neuron disease. Carried out at the University of Melbourne, this trial implanted the new micro technology inside the brains of the participants.

The device called Stentrode™ was inserted through keyhole surgery into the neck, and from there moved into the motor cortex via blood vessels. This minimally invasive method avoids the associated risks and recovery complications of open brain surgery.

The implant uses wireless technology to relay specific neuronal activity into a computer, where it is converted in actions based off the intentions of the patients. Amazingly, this tiny chip allowed the patients to perform actions like click and zoom, and write with 93% accuracy, helping them do things we take for granted like text, email and shop online.  

It's very early days still, but the minimally invasive nature of the treatment shows the great potential for micro neurotechnologies to help aid people with all kinds of cognitive impairments.

5. Neuroscientists Turn Normal Neurons Into Regenerating Ones

In 2018 we reported that scientists learned how to reprogram stem cells into specific neurons. This year researchers from four different US universities have taken a bigger step towards the holy grail of life extension. By identifying genes networks that regulate cellular regeneration, they have been able to manipulate normal cells to turn into progenitor cells, which can morph into any cell type to replace dying cells.

Their proof of concept was carried out with the glial cells of Zebra fish, effectively converting them into stem cells which then detected and restored damaged retinal cells to recover impaired vision.

Cell death, or apoptosis, is a plays a big role in the inevitably of natural aging in humans. The researchers believe that the process for regenerating neurons in the brain will be similar. If successful it will have vast implications for conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease, where large regions of the brain can be lost to the death of neurons. It may also play a role in preventing the many side-effects of natural aging in the brain, for longer and healthier living in peak shape into old age.

6. Preventing Neurodegeneration

Rather than replaced dying cells, scientists at Heidelberg University have identified key processes involved in the death of brain cells, called neurodegeneration. It involved uncovering the process by which cellular glutamate uptake prevents cell death in healthy people, yet becomes inactive in diseased state like stroke, where oxygen supply to brain cells becomes restricted.

In effect this leads to cell killing themselves off simply because they are not getting the correct chemical signals to tell them to stay alive. The researchers then developed a special class of inhibitors that can step in and deactivate the cellular ‘death complex’ before it occurs.

The inhibitors showed to be highly effective at protecting nerve cells, hopefully leading to a new class of treatments options for neurodegenerative diseases.

7. Parkinson’s Disease is One of Two Different Diseases

Aarhus University researchers have used advanced PET and MRI imaging techniques to reveal Parkinson’s disease to actually be either of two different variants of the disease.

In one variant the disease starts in the intestines, going on to spread to the brain through neural connections. In the other, it starts in the brain and then moves into the intestines and other organs. This video gives a great overview.

Though not curative, it’s a major step in the right direction for being able to identify early stage onset for preventative measures. For example, it may lead to treatments which prevent the disease from even making it into the brain altogether, where the effects then become debilitating over time. It is also another key piece in the puzzle of the powerful symbioses between our intestines and our mind, known scientifically as the gut-brain axis.

8. AI Advances the Challenging Diagnoses of Brain Injuries

Scientists at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London have developed a new type of AI algorithm that can detect, differentiate and identify different types of brain injuries from topographical CT scan data.

CT scans collect a huge amount of data which can take experts hours to analyze, and this needs to include the collective evaluation of multiple scans over time in order to track recovery trajectories or disease progression. This new AI tool appears to better than human experts at detecting such changes, as well as being far quicker and cheaper.

For example, their research showed the software to be highly effective at automatically quantifying the progression of multiple types of brain lesions, helping predict which lesions would get larger. The innovative application of this type of AI to assist human analysis is likely to be first of many that will transform medical diagnostics in cost-effective ways.

9. Secret of Super-Agers Discovered

Super-agers are individuals whose cognitive skills are way past their peers in old age, retaining youthful mental abilities well into their 70s and 80s. Until now the secret to retaining their peak shape has been little understood.

University Hospital Cologne and the Research Center Juelich have discovered a key difference in their biology. Using PET scans they revealed that super-agers have markedly increased resistance to tau and amyloid proteins. Until recent years these proteins have proven difficult to study.

Super-agers also have lower levels of tau and amyloid pathology, which in turns leads to various kinds of neurodegeneration in most people in their later years. It’s now been identified that reduced resistance to tau and amyloid accumulation is a primary biological factor for the loss of peak cognitive shape.

New research can be focused on these processes to find ways to possibly cure mental decline generally, as well as help develop therapeutics to protect against forms of dementia that are already occurring.

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10. Treating Severe Depression with Adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation

A research team at the University of California San Francisco have successfully developed a method using deep brain stimulation (DBS) to adaptively treat depressive symptoms only when they appear. Deep brain stimulation involves implanting electrodes within the brain to deliver electrical currents to alter brain activity.

Previous studies have had limited success for treating depression with DBS because devices could only deliver constant electrical stimulation in one area of the brain. However depression can affect various areas of the brain, and the neural signatures of depression can rise and fall unpredictably.

With the aim of essentially creating a pacemaker for the brain, the scientists decoded a new neural biomarker. This specific pattern of brain activity effectively predicts the onset of symptoms. With this knowledge the team customized a new DBS technology that only activates when and where it recognizes that pattern.

The type of automatic on-demand therapy is impressive because it's functional responses are unique to both the patient’s brain and the neural circuit causing the illness. In it’s first trial, this custom DBS method was tested with a patient suffering from severe depression and passed with flying colors.  Almost immediately, the patient’s symptoms were alleviated, and this continued to be the case long term.

In the COVID era, where anxiety and mental health problems are becoming rife, this approach could prove an invaluable drug-free therapy for hundreds of millions of people.

11. Beyond Human Hearing

Similar to light waves, humans can only perceive a relatively small spectrum of the sound waves that travel around us. Typically we can only pick up on frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, beyond this is considered ultrasonic. This is the frequency range that animals like bats operate in, and also what is put to use in ultra sound medical scans.

A new method utilizing sophisticated technology has been pioneered by scientists at Aalto University, and has led to a device that basically gives humans bat-level hearing. This includes not only the ability to hear frequencies well beyond 20,000 Hz, but also to discern the direction and distance of the sound sources. For biologists for example, it allows people to track otherwise stealthy bats in flight, and locate their positions.

It works by recording ultrasound via a spherical microphone array, which detects ultrasonic sounds and uses a computer to translate the pitch to audible frequencies. It then plays the converted sound waves through headphones in real-time. Being able to perceive normally inaudible sounds could have valuable industrial applications, for example being able to hear and locate otherwise silent gas leaks.

12. AI Independently Learns to Smell in the Same Way Humans Do

Although neuroscience is a relatively young and fast-growing domain of science, artificial intelligence (AI) is both much newer and growing faster. The potential of combining these two fields of science has been revealed by researchers at MIT.

Using machine learning, they have discovered that artificial neural networks can self-learn how to smell in just a few minutes, actually mimicking the olfactory circuits in mammalian brains. This is profound because the algorithm put to work had no knowledge of the millions of years evolution required to develop smell biologically.

Yet amazingly, the artificial neural network replicated the biological activity of smell so closely that it revealed the brain’s olfactory network is mathematically optimized for its function.

This precise mimicking of the natural structure of circuits in the brain by independent machine learning may herald a new era, whereby AI teaches us the inner secrets of biological evolution. Sense of smell is the starting point in 2021, but who knows where this could lead…

13. Neuroprosthesis Converts Thoughts into Sentences in Severely Paralyzed Patient

Researchers at UC San Francisco developed a new kind of a speech neuroprosthesis for patients with paralyses that prevents them for speaking. The method was demonstrated successfully on a man with a severely damaged brain stem, causing whole body paralysis.

Somewhat remarkably it works by detecting speech-related brain signals that control the vocal cords. When we speak, the vocal cords require complex motor-function instructions in order to articulate the wide variety of sounds we use when conversing. Even when unable to move, these signals can still get sent from the brain.

Using brain recordings from epilepsy patients, the scientists developed a method for real-time decoding of instructions to vocal muscles, into words. From these neural patterns, they were able to reliably discern 50 different common words whenever the patient was thinking them.  

All that was required was for the patient to wear a high-density electrode array to capture and record neural activity, which recorded signals from the speech motor cortex. This allowed up 18 words per minute to be translated with 93% accuracy. The advantage for the patient was that he simply had to act like he was really speaking and he could communicate hundreds of different sentences from the 50 words vocabulary.

Although this breakthrough seems limited to paralyzed patients, we undergo paralysis every night when we dream (unless we sleep walk). If evolved sufficiently, this approach could, for example, pave the way to translating our very thoughts while sleeping!

14. Human Mini-Brains Developed with Complex Neural Activity

Technically termed ‘brain organoids’, mini-brains can be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells. These stem cells can be taken from a person’s skin or blood, and the the potential to be morph into any type of cells. The benefit is that cell structures normally very difficult to access, can in principle, be grown and isolated for study. This is especially relevant for the brain, however previous mini-brains had limited functional structures.

This year’s breakthrough by scientists at UCLA has catapulted the structural complexity by growing aggregates of organoids to form complex three-dimensional brain structures. The researchers took stem cells from patients with Rett syndrome (a condition with seizures), and were able to grow mini-brains with functional activity similar to parts of human brains. This meant they were able to safely and successfully observe patterns of electrical activity that resemble the onset of seizures.

This research shows for the first time that some aspects of brain function can be isolated and studied in the lab down to the level of individual living cells. The key advantage is that these mini-brains can be grown to replicate aspects of both normal and diseased brain functions, as well as to test drugs and treatments with no risks to human or animals.

The scale of the human brain is enormous, so there are still clear limitations in terms of the complexity of brain structures that can be studied, but clearly this emerging neuroscience domain has sci-fi like potential.

15. ‘Neurograins’ Used to Develop Next-Generation Brain-Computer Interface

With the exponential growth in growth in computing power in recent decades, microchips have been getting increasingly smaller each year. Tech focused neuroscientists at Brown University have now developed a wireless computer so small it can be easily missed by the human eye. Dubbed ‘neurograins’ - because they are about the size of a grain of salt - they were developed to track and monitor brain activity.  

These ultra-tiny computers are able to record electrical activity from nearby neurons, and transmit their data wirelessly. The goal was to develop a new type of brain-computer interface (BCI) system, where a network of the mini-sensors can collectively track meaningful aspects of brain activity, and send the information to a nearby hub.

In a proof-of-concept experiment, the researchers deployed a network to successfully record a rodent’s neural activity with much greater accuracy than ever achieved before. This recording of brain signals in unprecedented detail it’s still in it’s early stages, but the technological breakthrough holds much promise for being able to convert brain waves into useful real-world actions without any physical effort.

16. Restoring Functional Vision for Completely Blind People

This year a new type of microelectrode array has been used to create a form of artificial vision via a visual prosthesis. University of Utah scientists at the John A. Moran Eye Center built the device to record and stimulate neuronal activity within the visual cortex.

Implanted within the eye, the array receives visual information through glasses containing a small video camera, with the data processed by specialized software. The device then activates retinal neurons to produce phosphenes, as if they are receiving points of light. In turn allowing basic images of lines and shapes to be percieved by the mind.

Trialed with a completely blind patient, this method proved to be effective, and involved no complications from the surgery or the neuronal stimulation. In this first test, only a single array was used. However, the next goal is to use 7 to 10 arrays to deliver more detailed images that will allow blind people to actually navigate the world visually.

17. New Injectable Molecular Therapy Repairs Severe Spinal Cord Injuries

A new class of ‘dancing molecules’ has been applied by researchers at Northwestern University to repair tissue in severe spinal cord injuries and successfully reverse paralysis. The dancing part involves manipulating the motion of these molecules to that they can wiggle their way into normally impossible to reach cellular receptors, in order to prompt them to get into gear repairing nerve tissues.

These seemingly magic molecules work by setting-off cascading signals, triggering axons to regenerate and helping neurons to survive after injury by encouraging a variety of new cell types to be born. This is in turn supports the regrowth of lost blood vessels necessary for cellular healing.

Tested in mice, just a single injection of the molecular therapy led to the paralyzed mice being able to walk again in under four weeks. Somewhat conveniently, 12 weeks later (well after recovery is complete), the materials biodegrade into nutrients for the cells without any side effects, effectively disappearing from the body naturally.

18. VR Delivers Therapy to Overcome Fear of Heights

Virtual Reality (VR) has been used by psychophysicists for decades to investigate how we perceive sensory information. This year researchers from the University of Basel, the oldest university in Switzerland, developed a virtual reality application to actually treat height phobias.

Called Easyheights, the smartphone compatible software provides exposure therapy using 360° images of real locations. Wearing a VR headset, users stand on a platform that starts one meter above the ground, and then progressively rises as the users acclimatizes to each stage of height. It works by increasing sensory exposure to height with without increasingly the level of fear.

A clinical trial demonstrated the efficacy of this immersive form of treatment, producing significant reductions in phobia in real height situations. The benefits were experienced with just four hours of home-based training. This discovery shows how combining neuroscience knowledge with today’s technologies, can clinically improve peoples’ quality of life in ways that are easily accessible.

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19. Reincarnating Neanderthal Brains

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

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

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

20. Zombie Pigs

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

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

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

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

22. Voice Telepathy

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

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

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

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

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

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Human vision is an amazing result of our evolutionary biology, as well as the most powerful way we can perceive the world around us. Here are our list of 7 top blogs covering the fundamentals of how our visual systems function, through to how vision can be trained to improve real-world performance in sports and beyond.

1. 5 Answers to the Speed Limits of Human Visual Perception

Discover why human visual performance is genuinely remarkable. From perceiving light photons in quadrillionths of a second, to identifying 75 different scenes in a single second, explore 5 different aspects of perception speed.

Read the blog here‍

2. How Good is Your Stereo Vision?

Pretty much every animal in nature has at least two eyes, which allows them to accurately perceive depth through binocular stereo vision. However, when it comes to modern humans, new research shows that our stereo vision capacities can vary significantly from one person to the next.

Read the blog here‍

3. 5 Ways mTBIs Disrupt Vision

Concussions can affect literally any brain function. However, because our dominant sense is vision, visual capacities are commonly impacted by head injuries. Learn about the 5 different ways in which mTBIs often impair our ability to perceive the visual world around us.

Read the blog here‍

The Rise of Sports Vision Training

Across pro sports, vision training is fast-becoming the latest way to get an edge over the competition. In the same way that an athlete improves sports performance by training the body for strength and endurance, visual skills can be improved and enhanced through a wide range of conditioning techniques. Learn how the latest vision trainers are putting this approach to use.

Read the blog here‍

Sports Vision for Situational Awareness - Part 1

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, discover why our preconceptions of vision can be illusory, and why that matters when it comes to performing on the field.

Read the blog here‍

Sports Vision for Situational Awareness - Part 2

Part 2 covers how peripheral vision techniques and training tools can be used to acquire greater situational awareness. In particular, learn how NeuroTracker 3D multiple object tracking training can be used to progressively overload the brain's situational awareness capacities, in the same way weight-training is used to build up strength.

Read the blog here‍

Sports Vision Training Isn’t Just for Athletes

Last but not least on our list, find out from a neurovision expert how sports vision training techniques can be applied across many different domains of human performance and wellness.

Read the blog here‍

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The speed of human visual perception is a surprisingly tricky subject, with no single answer. It depends on what type of speed you want to look at. Here we will break down 5 fascinating facets of vision and give answers to the current known speed limits of what we can see – enjoy!

1. What Is the Shortest Amount of Time in Which We Can Perceive a Flash of Light?

Like many interesting answers in science, this came incidentally and turned out to be way beyond what anyone would have imagined.

Multiple astronauts in outer space reported seeing unexplained anomalies of extremely brief spots and fleeting streaks of light, even with their eyes closed. These would occur every few minutes. It turned out they were seeing a recently discovered phenomena called high energy cosmic particles. These are by far the fastest moving mass in the known universe.

The exotic particles come from somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy, but can travel so close to the speed of light, that the energy required to accelerate them is beyond anything known in astrophysics – not even two super massive black holes colliding would get close! When they hit the earth’s atmosphere, their energy is transformed into myriads of new particles (E = mc²).

The point here is that at this extreme speed, the time needed to perceive such high energy particles via human vision is on the order of femtoseconds - literally quadrillionths of a second!

The brighter the flash the less time is needed to detect it. In outer space there is negligible light pollution, so contrast between light and dark is close to its possible maximum.

However currently there is no understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms of seeing high energy particles. It likely involves the fact that millions of different neurons can potentially pick up on a sensory input, but the less that do, the less accurate the perception is. Some research shows that our eyes can potentially detect a single photon, but this is a probabilistic event.

2. How Many ‘FPS’ Do We Need to Perceive Fluid Motion?

‘Frames per second’, commonly known as ‘FPS’, is the common benchmark for our visual technologies like computer screens, TVs and cameras. It turns out to be a useful measure for humans too.

The answer to this question was discovered at the end of the 19th century following the invention of cinema. Early cinema companies found that 16 FPS was the bare minimum that could trick the brain into seeing movement on-screen as continuous. Here we can get an idea of how of our brain glues together separate images into motion at the speeds of movies (24 FPS) and typical computer displays (60FPS).

This is surprisingly low, for example many animals, such as birds, require at least 75 FPS just to perceive motion. For them, looking at a TV is the same as seeing a sequence of separate static images.

This human ability actually represents something deep about how little visual information our brain needs to extrapolate sensory information. Here is an example from psychophysics study.

As you can see, we can build an internal model of motion from a surprisingly small amount of cues – our visual centers do the heavy lifting for us!

3. How Many Flashes of Light per Second Are Needed See Light as Continuous.

The answer here is called the Flicker Fusion Threshold, and also comes from early pioneers of cinema. Even though motion could be perceived at 16 FPS, the flashing of the screen at this rate was considered unbearable. Here is an example from the first film ever made.

To solve this problem new shutter technology was developed to actually flash each individual image frame multiple times in succession. The rate at which the flashing became comfortable and relatively unnoticeable, was around 46 flashes per second.

Therefore, our ability to consciously perceive pulses of light operates at roughly three times speed of our ability to motion in terms of FPS. In short, we are much more sensitive to luminance than motion.

4. How Quickly Can We Perceive an Absence of Light?

In others words, how fast can we detect a flash of black among continuous light? Research with younger and older people was done in this area to investigate the degeneration of vision with aging. Detection was found to be on the timescale of 18 milliseconds for younger adults, and 22 milliseconds for older adults.

This translates to between 45 and 55 FPS, when 1 dark frame becomes unnoticeable, or flicker free. The caveat here is that this was the average, but individual results varied significantly.

Even in a small study group, some participants were able to spot a single black flash among 500 FPS of light flashes (or 2 milliseconds). Again, this is extremely fast. In comparison it takes 100-400 milliseconds to blink, which is commonly discounted from conscious experience.

5. How Long Do We Need to See a Scene in Order to Be Able to Identify It?

Research from 2014 into rapid image recognition discovered that we can detect specific scenes on much shorter timescales than previously thought. In experiments where different randomized images (e.g. a house, a dog, a forest etc.) are flashed in rapid succession, subjects could recognize or recall a specific scene in as little time as 13 milliseconds.

This translates to being shown 75 different images in a single second, and being able to say with some reliability if a specific image was there, or not. You can see for yourself just how remarkably speedy this really is.

Interestingly this wasn’t found to be the limit, it was simply the fastest the researchers could display images at the time.

Well there we have it, hopefully you learned that human vision is deeper and more mysterious than you once thought, and that it is genuinely remarkable. If you’d like to delve deeper, then this great YouTube video by TechLaboratories goes into more depth.

Hormesis may be an unfamiliar term, but it influences our day-to-day wellbeing throughout our lives. Research is showing that it may be an effective way to boost our overall health and resilience, so let’s take a look how it works and how to tap into it.

What is Hormesis?

We generally think of stress on our bodies as a bad thing. However, if we want to be resilient to stress, we need to actually be exposed to stressors. Here the science of hormesis shows that dosage is a critical factor as to whether our biological systems adapt positively or negatively.

Hormetic type responses have been reported in diverse fields of study, including aging, exercise physiology, immunology, medicine, and nutrition. The general principle is that built into your biology is the ability to sense and respond to environmental stressors to be become stronger and healthier. Vice versa, a lack of stressors over time can actually make us weaker.

A well-researched practice of this effect is fasting. Even though starvation is usually harmful for the body, in short dosages it is now well-known to produce significant long term health benefits for both the body and brain.

Exercise and Hormesis

Intensive exercise actually damages the body through generating mild oxidative stress. However growing evidence suggests that oxidative stress is very important for upregulating the signaling pathways that are required to promote overall adaptations through increased physical fitness.

Furthermore, it appears to play a more general role in helping create a shield for the body to become more resilient to factors like illnesses and accelerated aging.

Understanding Stress Loads

Achieving a balance of healthy stressors has been dubbed eustress. The key point, is that it is not simply the type of stress that matters, but also the load and duration of how much stress we induce.

Chronic exposure to stress commonly results in negative effects, which may partly be because the effects of stress are cumulative over time, and also because our bodies are not getting enough breathing room to respond and adapt.

Achieving a balanced exposure is referred to as ‘stress inoculation’, leading to increased resilience. The strategy is to systematically expose ourselves to a controlled dose of the stressor.

Leveraging Hormesis Through HITT

HITT (High Intensity Interval Training) is an exercise technique which has garnered much sports science credibility in recent years. The principle is based on working out extremely intensely but in very short doses, in order to achieve the equivalent fitness benefits of much larger amounts of training.

One of the proposed mechanisms for this is a strong biphasic hormetic response on mitochondria - the powerhouses which drive energy release in every cell in our body. Consequently HITT training has also been found to be beneficial for cognitive functions.

Fortunately, the training loads to stimulate optimal hormesis responses via HITT have been well studied. Although it will vary depending on the individual, just 3 x 20 minutes per week of intensive cardio and/or resistance training will yield significant physiological benefits for most people.

Takeaways

Hormesis is our in-built biological ability to respond positively to physiological stressors, in order to become more resilient. Exposure to acute doses of exercise is one way to harness positive stress. HITT training is a well-established and effective way to promote overall health and wellbeing.

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Chiropractic care has long been stigmatized as simply a treatment for joint or muscular pain. However, the latest medical science and progressive applications of this practice tell a very different story. Here I will introduce why modern chiropractic treatments are effective at treating the body via the brain and central nervous system, and how this evolution ‘from pain to brain’ can yield transformative benefits in many aspects of healthcare.

The Birth of Chiropractic

The first school of chiropractic was opened in 1897, born out of the philosophy that the body can be thought of as a "machine". The founder, Daniel David Palmer, treated a man who had partially lost his hearing after a spinal dislocation, which with correction restored his ability to hear.

Ahead of its time, the concept was that joints and subluxations (dislocations) could be manipulated in sync with the central nervous system to treat a wide range of physical conditions. In contrast today, the overwhelming majority of the public believes that chiropractic care is only good for neck and/or low back pain. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Chiropractic in Modern Medicine

The dramatic rise of neuroscience and medical knowledge over the last several decades has revealed the intimate symbioses between brain and body, particularly through the complexity of the central nervous system. This has paved the way for a more holistic approach to healthcare, which goes beyond treating symptoms in an isolated fashion.

For example in sports medicine, research is now demonstrating that ACL injuries impair cognitive functions, which in turn impair motor-skills, significantly prolonging recovery time. Research has also shown that cognitive issues such as micro concussions, can also be the root cause of ACL injuries. This has led to some scientists to redefine ACL injuries as primarily brain injuries.

The latest science is showing that cognitive issues, or the brain’s inability to adapt to, and recover from, mental or physiological stresses, lies at the heart of the majority of chronic health problems.

Progressive chiropractic care today epitomizes this new paradigm. Research shows that chiropractic adjustments can directly and positively influence brain functions, for example boosting activity in the prefrontal cortex (the command centers of the brain). It is now recognized that there is a plethora of different types of medical conditions that can benefit from adjustments, and that these should be focused on influencing the brain and central nervous system.

Our ‘From Pain to Brain’ Approach at Truchiro

Ask anyone what controls every function in your entire body and they will surely answer…your brain! This begs an important question - if we know the brain controls and coordinates our entire body, why do so many medical treatments focus on aspects other than brain function?

Just over 7 years ago I transitioned my chiropractic services out of the narrow musculoskeletal paradigm into treating the brain and central nervous system. I founded Truchiro - committed to ‘true’ brain-based chiropractic treatment.

Exploding Practice with Brain-Based Chiropractic

The response was remarkable, leading to successful treatments of over 500 patients per week, with a need to rapidly expand Truchiro services. Today I help countless chiropractors transition their own services to the brain-based approach, including making use of the latest neurotechnologies like EEG and NeuroTracker.

The goal is to break out of the constricting neck/back pain mindset, to bring chiropractic care to a far broader range of people. This is why I phrased the term ‘from pain, to brain’, to move on from treating specific joint or muscle symptoms, to instead treating the person’s overall health.

Patient Success Stories With Truchiro

Using brain-based chiropractic corrective care we have successfully treated a diverse range of medical issues. There are countless success stories, but here are a three which highlight what this kind of approach can offer.

1. Libby with Anxiety and Depression

Libby had been suffering from headaches, low back pain, hip pain, shoulders spasms, anxiety, fatigue, depression and gastric reflux for years. During her initial assessment Libby was found to have severe stress on her brain and nervous system via a brain-based chiropractic examination.

Libby accepted a brain-based care plan and committed to it. She saw remarkable results. Following just 6 weeks of care she noticed marked improvement in all the above areas.

2. Michael with Acid Reflux and Sleep Problems

Michael came into the office with low back pain, acid reflux (GERD), trouble sleeping and high blood pressure. He had been treated by his primary care physician with prescription drugs, which hadn’t help him at all.

After starting brain-based chiropractic care his lower back was functioning properly again without pain.  He no longer needed his sleeping medication and found relief from his acid reflux. Michael followed our brain-based chiropractic corrective plan and never missed an appointment - he continues to maintain his progress and overall health with ongoing visits.

3. Lori with Fibromyalgia

Lori came into the office because she was suffering with severe pain in her neck, shoulders, back and legs. She had been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. On a scale of 1 to 10 that pain was a 10 when she first came into the office. She had been seeing a rheumatologist and was getting treated with anesthesia shots in her shoulders and low back every 4 months, as well as taking anti-inflammatories, but without relief.

After approximately 12 months of brain-based chiropractic care and getting her specific, scientific chiropractic adjustments, Lori hasn’t needed a shot or any drugs in over 8 months. Lori said, “The care is a gentle and less intrusive way to help my body feel and function better. It’s helped me more than any of my drugs did.”

Join the Truchiro Movement!

Here are some of the key benefits for chiropractic services when shifting from pain to brain.

- Chiropractic adjustments are much more effective, leading to better results.

- Patients learn that the chiropractic adjustment is about the brain and not just pain.

- Patient progress can be objectively measure and tracked from a brain-based standpoint.

If you are a chiropractor interested in integrating brain-based chiropractic care and the latest neurotechnologies into your services, you can find out how to become a Truchiro practitioner here.

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Perhaps the most fascinating domain of science, neuroscience is making breakthrough discoveries year-on-year at the speed of light. Here we bring you three remarkable facts about your brain which reveal just why it is so amazing - enjoy!

1. Your Brain Can Compete With the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

Information travels to through your brain at 268mph (431kmh) via electrically charged chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. Right now, your approximately 90 billion neurons are all active, even when we sleep, in order to keep your brain functioning.

Although it is impossible to know accurately, it is estimated that the human brain operates at 1 exaFLOP, which is the equivalent to a staggering quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.

The world’s fastest supercomputer at the time of writing is called ‘Frontier’, run by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Just recently it achieved the long awaited exaFLOP milestone, approximately matching the computational speed of the human mind. That said, go back just a year ago and your grey matter would have out-competed any supercomputer by a long, long way.

2. Your Brain is Hyper-Plastic

Unlike a computer, the brain is both hardware and software in one single system. Maintained by trillions of glial cells, neurons are extremely flexible in the roles they can carry out. This includes both restructuring the brain neuroanatomically, and redefining it's actual operating system in response to environmental stimulation.

Through a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, the human brain can essentially rewire itself. Though most people are aware of this, just how flexible your grey matter is at readapting itself is uncommon knowledge. Neurons are able to disconnect and reconnect with others, reform their basic structure, and transform to carry out completely new types of cognitive roles.

In young age this process is super active. Not only do human brains double in size by age one, at just three years old, our brains develop to 80 percent of their full adult size. They also undergo ‘neural pruning’, essentially deconstructing neural networks not being sufficiently activated.

Still baffling neuroscientists today, perhaps the most remarkable evidence of total neuroplasticity comes out of a type of surgery called a hemispherectomy. Only operable on children with life threatening brain conditions, this drastic procedure involves literally cutting out one half of the human brain.

Amazingly, the other half of the brain then completely rewires itself into a new left/right brain. Once recovered, patients of this surgery usually go on to live a normal life. This demonstrates that there is no single center of the brain in control of itself - it's ability to adapt is truly emergent!

3. Your Brain Could Exist as Two Different Minds

The two sides of the brain are connected by a narrow bundle of neurons called the corpus collosum. This is essentially a superhighway of communication, constantly relaying vast amounts of information between each of the two, otherwise physically separate, halves of the brain.

In rare medical cases it is necessary to completely sever the corpus callosum, disconnecting each half from directly talking with the other. Neuroscientists have confirmed through various experiments, that in this condition, there are two separate cognitions in the same individual - referred to as split-brain syndrome.

That said, it is not something you would want to experiment with. Somewhat scarily, it can actually lead to conflict with the self. As each side of the brain controls one side of the body, such conflict can result in a person physically fighting with themselves. In extreme cases, patients have even had to fight against self-strangulation!

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With the evolution of the latest science and technology-backed tips, there are new ways emerging to protect your physical body from stress, inflammation and injury. In this blog we will introduce the emerging sports performance concept of body tempering (aka fortifying techniques). It can also be referred to as soft tissue mobilization, using techniques such as placing heavy weight cylinders or foam rollers across the body's muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia. This technique is reputed to help in preparing muscle for activity and also to improve muscular recovery. Let's get into the details.

How Body Tempering Can Increase Your Body Strength

‍Donnie Thompson, record holding powerlifter and leading proponent, says that body tempering helps in reducing muscle soreness or discomfort, and assists in boosting overall body performance.

“Tempering is a method in which pressure is imposed to increase strength and toughness, and this essentially serves to bring out the intrinsic properties of the material under stress. When we apply this to human beings, especially athletes, the severe testing conditions may be rendered highly resilient to future challenges and stressors.”

Tempering can potentially increase your body strength, which in turn is known to reduce risk of injury. Tempering rethinks sports injuries through the 'antifragility' lens and the general notion of how sports injuries linger. With this comes the concept of making athletes 'future proof', in terms of being robust enough to withstand various physical sports risks and scenarios that are often difficult to foresee.

When athletes do body tempering before a workout, it can potentially help in reducing the risk of hernias, muscle rupture, ligament tear and other injuries related to strength training. This technique also reduces the risk of trauma that is caused by breaking tissue out of the adhesive state, and also increasing an athlete's range of motion.

One of the key points to remember while doing body tempering is that one always does the active movement after the passive movement technique. This aids in locking in mobility changes during stretching actions.

How does Body Tempering Work?

It has been observed that body tempering is beneficial for athletes by assisting in the improvement of muscle condition, and as an alternative for the traditional form of stretching. Body tempering techniques work by strengthening the body from inside out. For someone who seeks gains in strength, their body must work together in order to act like an efficient machine. For this one needs to condition the nervous system and the body to work in synchrony.

Tempering or fortifying your body can also be done via controlled exposure to cold, to bolster the immune system, build resilience, stimulate the CNS (Central Nervous System), and increase muscle tone.

As seven-time Mr. Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger noted, gaining an extra edge in muscle development makes all the difference.

The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion.

Body Tempering Routines

There are various muscular focal points and methods that coaches can work on using body tempering:

- Hamstrings: here the athlete needs to work on belly muscle by pushing back and forth.

- Frontside & Backside Work: the best posture for the body tempering is to start at the interior of the body and then work on the posterior of the body.

Targeted areas that are commonly treated with body tempering:

- Back

- Quads

- Hamstrings

- Calves

- Chest

- Abs

- Triceps

- Biceps

In the above-mentioned areas, body tempering techniques can be applied to increase resilience to muscle strains. When practiced over the the long term, it may offer a reliable way to sustainably increase overall body strength and physical robustness for high physical performance.

Consequently, this approach can play a significant role in injury prevention and in the rehabilitation of joint risks or movement range, such as with ankle strain or hamstring flexibility, to protect against the inevitable physical traumas that come with sports.

Takeaway

When we speak about the safeguarding measures and interventions to protect our body, body tempering appears promising. Adopting this perspective and general strategy for managing injury risk may offer of the best emerging methodologies to help athletes to overcome injuries, improve physical power, and enhance bodily kinaesthetic intelligence through stimulation of the nervous system.

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When we speak about athletic performance, it includes super concentration, as elite athletes have an uncanny ability to get into the transition zone quickly. The ability of super-elite athletes to believe they will win is shaped by a strong sense of motivation and optimism. Various personality traits and inbuilt talents assist in overcoming challenges during competition. Research analysis of various sorts of pressure and challenges were examined in super-elite athletes and how they overcome pessimism and negativity. Here we will cover insights on the characteristics of those who are destined to rise to the top of their game.

5 Key Traits of Super-Elite Athletes

Based on multidisciplinary skills that athletes develop during their careers, the first point is to recognize the pattern of performance of athletes who excel. Champions outperform not due to a single factor but due to a multitude of factors. It is the developed characteristics of the performer rather than what they are born with that matters most. For example, nurturing of self-confidence is a key factor for elite performance in the field. Elite athletes brim with self-confidence and this includes self-development of mental aspects of performance across many levels. Here are key traits which are consistently found in truly great performers.

1. Stress Management

A key factor is to manage stress during tough situations. Along with that, several characteristics differentiate athletes and elite athletes. For instance there is commonly a high level of perfectionism, dispositional optimism and the ability to manage high-stress situations.

During high-pressure situations, when one can see two different outcomes, initially athletes will struggle to withstand the pressure through fear of failure. Here, the optimistic approach steps-in for super elites, and eradicates such creeping doubts. To conquer such fear, many coaches push their athletes to perform in the spotlight under high pressure. This helps assist the athletes to develop and nurture their skills to the next level.

2. Teamwork

Another key component is teamwork, which also determines the athlete and coach relationship. Cooperation with co-athletes, friends and family support, and with support staff, is another aspect that yields high-value results for successful athletes.

This also extends to competition performance in team sports. In soccer for example, players need to utilize teamwork in several ways, such as highly orchestrated passing of the ball, cheering each other on, and achieving winning plays or goals in a tightly coordinated manner.

3. Aiming for Performance-Oriented Goals

Super elite athletes set both short and long-term performance goals that help in handling inevitable adversity. Performance goals are also more than winning competitions. Committed athletes set goals across multiple levels, including how they intend to perform in each individual training session, how they want to raise the mental side of their game, psychological development, and day-to-day elements such as diet management and recovery methods.

Coaches play a key role in helping set an athlete's goals, doing so with a challenging but realistic approach, as unrealistic goals tend to create disbelief in the athlete over time.

4. Quickness and Reflexes

Super elite athletes are accompanied by an infiniteness of quickness and a plethora of reflexes that make them stand apart from the crowd. Although most people think of speed and agility as physical abilities, athletes with superfast reflexes also need to develop their cognitive processing speed. The ability to interpret sensory cues, generate situational awareness, determine the best decisions, and then execute, is highly demanding on the brain.

This study with stars from the NFL, NHL and EPL showed that mental processing speed, and the ability to quickly adapt and improve cognitive resources, are a clear predictor of elite athlete potential. The takeaway is that great athletes develop both their bodies and brains in order to process, decide and execute at speeds beyond their lessor contemporaries.

5. Positive Personality

Every athlete has a hard day, but one needs can overcome it through sheer determination. On optimism, PGA golfer and coach Travis Howser underlines the importance of encouraging junior golfers, whenever they are a tough situation that would normally be negative. Instead helping them to laugh a things off and see the bigger picture.

No matter how great the athlete, no one can perform perfectly all the time, losing is an inevitable part of almost every sport. The key thing is being able to flip perspective on a situation to have a positive mindset on what follows.

Super focus and concentration is extremely important when it comes to winning against the odds. This helps to differentiate elite athletes from super-elite athletes. Through this method, they can easily get into the zone and see opportunities no matter how slim the odds.

The inner desire to succeed and to win also includes a high level of EI (Emotional Intelligence). This creates an innate desire not just to succeed and win, but also take pleasure in the process.

As per Micheal Phelps,

You can’t put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get

Take Away

Awareness and extreme concentration are a major factors in sports performance that help remove the limits to self-development. This can extend to usage of mental imaginary techniques like multi-sensory reproduction of actual sports plays, and can be a powerful mental tool for athletes in modern sports.

Determination or 'grit' go hand-in hand here, being determined enough to have faith in outperforming others despite the odds. As the saying goes, 'winners focus on winning and losers focus on winners'. Coping with stress, tapping into the support others can provide, and fostering positive expectations all go into the recipe that shapes exceptional sports performers.

Champions have the ability to concentrate and use all their attention in the most demanding moments. When everything is else is in place, it is these moments that will mark the highlights in your sports career. If you've competed before, you'll know that I'm talking about competition. In those instances of high pressure to perform, you need all your concentration and attention to succeed. Here we will cover why training your attention and concentration is key to a strategy of winning.

Training Concentration – the Missing Link

Most athletes have very defined strategies. They improve technique, tactics, strength, fitness and other specific aspects of performance. But when it comes down to it, the brain dominates all of these processes. Cognitively speaking, we can do much more to improve our performance. Attention and concentration can be increased with the right methods.

Since we all have the capacity to improve our performance, our brain can be stimulated and prepared for the different situations that await us in competition. This is how we leverage our brain’s remarkable neuroplasticity. If you are a coach or an athlete, think about where you could have gotten to with more attention and concentration. Toni Nadal says that his nephew Rafael Nadal accepted the demands of competition, and repeated to him over and over again: "If you are not able to beat your rival, at least don't help him to beat you."

Rafael leverages every ounce of his attention and concentration in every point, with the result of morally defeating opponents who face him through his relentless commitment. The incredible shots made with 100% focus in this video are for real.

Competition – a War of Focus

When you increase your focus you dominate the situation. Dominating the situation leads to success, because you are in control. This control stems from a solid focus and a committed approach. To control your competitors and out tempo them, you need to be in a zone of pure concentration without distraction. Making the best decisions under pressure is what differentiates the champions from the losers. As Sir Alex Ferguson said before the 2011 Champions League final: "Concentration will be the key to winning the final."

In the end they lost 3-1 against FC Barcelona. It is clear that they did not find the key to defeat their rival. As soon as the English pressure dropped half a point, Barcelona took control of the final and turned the tables because their focus didn’t lapse.  

Champions dominate the situation under pressure because their attention is at maximum level. Executing your technique perfectly in situations of maximum demand, where the pressure is extremely high, can only be achieved when you are able to sustain a high level of concentration.

Champions master these situations under pressure because they are able to find the best solutions, getting into a state of flow so they can channel every action with clear focus. All they need to do is log in with their username: ‘attention’, and password: ‘concentration’!

Total Concentration – Overcome the Odds

The prediction of competition results through data analysis is sometimes thrown off because of the complexities of emotional and mental factors that come into play under serious pressure. For example, if we look at the 2022 Champions League semi-final match between Real Madrid and Manchester City, Real Madrid reached the 87th minute of play with a 1% chance of going through to the final.

However, the pressure of the Bernabéu Stadium and the conviction of the white team to never give up, ended up reversing the pressure from Real Madrid onto Manchester City. This commitment in the face of adversity caused Manchester City players to buckle and lose their focus on winning, instead becoming distracted by the fear of losing. Real Madrid scored 2 goals within just 1 minute of play. The match would then go to extra time, with Real Madrid advancing to the final.

Train the Cognitive Dimension of Performance

To succeed in today’s hyper-competitive sports culture, you have to ask yourself ‘What do I want to achieve - success or failure?’

If it is success, then committing to training like a champion should be your goal. One of the most effective methods to increasing your overall performance is to maximize your focus and concentration as much as possible, as this will impact all aspects of your training. Become more competitive in your sport in this way, and it will help you to reach your next level: the level of the champions.

At the International Center we help athletes start competing like champions by training the cognitive dimension of performance. When our athletes train visually, perceptually and cognitively, they increase their performance at the attentional level, processing information more accurately and efficiently, to make faster and better decisions with high levels of concentration.

In the following video you will see an Olympic Shooting athlete (Alvaro G.) preparing for his Spanish Championship through one of our custom NeuroTracker programs.

We accompany the athlete to his training area to see what needs he has, in order to specifically adapt his training in the best ways to simulate performing under pressure. This training approach uses a dual-task with 1 ball tracking to generalize an increase in his attention and processing speed at the exit of the plate. We also add an additional passive perceptual load called Optic Flow (the black and white tunnel).

With these combined modes we significantly improved the athlete’s visual cognitive processes and balance. The result led to Alvaro outperforming his past abilities to win silver in the Spanish Championship.

You can read the first 4 parts of this 6-part blog series here.

‍The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 1 - Execution

The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 2 – Injuries

‍The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 3 – Pressure

The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 4 – Preparation

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One of the things that makes NeuroTracker unique is the diversity of ways in which it is applied across the whole human performance and wellness spectrum. In our Experts Corner, professionals and thought leaders in different fields regularly volunteer articles to share best practices and reveal new ways to apply this neurotechnology. Here are 6 of our favorite expert's blogs of 2022 so far - enjoy!

Neurofeedback and NeuroTracker – an Ideal Synergy

Brendan Parsons is the protégé of NeuroTracker inventor Professor Faubert. As a scientist with deep expertise in Neurofeedback paired with extensive experience as a clinical practitioner, he is an individual at the forefront of his field. In this in-depth blog Brendan shares the research journey that lead to the world's first 'closed-loop' NeuroTracker training directly integrated with EEG. This scientifically validated approach dramatically increased the efficiency of training, opening up new ways to combine Neurofeedback with functional cognitive training.

Read the blog here

Boosting Off-the-Block Reactions in Swimming – Cognitively!

Taylor Snowden is a PhD student at the University of Victoria whose research focuses on using NeuroTracker to assess perceptual-cognitive capacities. Here she shares the insights on a fascinating study to see if visual attention training can lead to far transfer effects on auditory attention. To put this to the test she focused on measuring off-the-block dive reactions of elite swimmers using the latest measurement technologies. The results are quire remarkable!

Read the blog here

Sports Vision Training Isn’t Just for Athletes

Richard Hoctin Boes O.D. is an experienced sports vision specialist from the Netherlands and the director of eye4vision Neuro Optometry centers. Through his centers he has worked extensively with NeuroTracker with great success across a plethora of different populations. In this blog he lays out the concepts why sports vision training can benefit almost anybody with the right kind of customized training.

Read the blog here

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The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 1 – Execution

Pedro Gormaz is a National Coach of the Royal Spanish Taekwondo Federation and an International Coach under the World Taekwondo Federation. As an experienced high-performance coach, he is also director of the International Mental Coaching Center based in Madrid. In this first part of a 6-part series on how to excel in sports, Pedro highlights how crucial mental skills like anticipation, decision-making and execution need to come together to reach peak performance.

Read the blog here

Why F1 eSports is Transforming Athletic Potential

Julien Southon is a specialist in visual, cognitive and motor performance based on his expertise in biology, human movement and psychology. Here Julien takes us down the rabbit hole into the emerging phenomenon of F1 eSports and why these cyber athletes train just as seriously as real F1 drivers. In particular, he shares insights on how he helped one of the newest teams in the field achieve remarkable success through neurovisual assessments and training.

Read the blog here

Can Children with Severe Cognitive Challenges Perform Cognitive Training?

Catherine Archambault is a PhD candidate in Applied Child Psychology at McGill University in Montreal. Her research specializes in cognitive and academic functioning, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Here Catherine gives an overview of the latest research with NeuroTracker investigating if children with extremely low IQ are capable of performing cognitive training, using NeuroTracker as the benchmark. The results are surprising and will hopefully lead to inclusion of cognitive enhancement programs for students who can benefit from them the most.

Read the blog here

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On first sight NeuroTracker may look like there’s not much more to it than tracking targets bouncing around in 3D, however expert users know there’s a lot to learn to get the most out of this unique cognitive trainer. With a bit of practical know-how your training can be transformed from good to great, as well as extending the learning benefits to extremely high levels of performance. Check out our selection of recommended guides to help you or the people you train on the path to improvement.

1. Your Guide to NeuroTracker Scores

The main result of a NeuroTracker session is a 'Speed Threshold Score', this is essentially a measure of your upper limit of visual tracking speed, sometimes referred to as 'VTS'.

This blog uncovers what this score represents, why Core baseline measures are important, as well as how the measure of NeuroTracker Learning Rate over multiple sessions provides a unique window in brain functions and neuroplasticity.

Read here.

2. Ramping Up Performance with the NeuroTracker Learning System

The NeuroTracker Learning System is a patented training methodology for achieving optimal benefits from each and every NeuroTracker session on the path to improvement.

Backed by scientific studies and data insights from elite sports teams, this methodology uncovers the innate connections between brain and body, along with the best methods for developing performance specific skills under high cognitive load.

Read here.

3. The Multiple Stages of NeuroTracker Training – Performance

Using video and photo examples, this blog illustrates different examples of how professionals apply NeuroTracker dual-task training methods across different human performance domains.

This follows the NeuroTracker Learning System, giving practical insights from basic balance tasks, through to integrating tactical awareness and decision-making drills.

Read here.

4. Tips for NeuroTracker Trainers - the First Session

Blogs 4, 5, and 6 on our list are a 3-part series written by Maxime Chevrier. Maxime is a professor of clinical psychology and a highly experienced sports performance coach. His expertise in applying NeuroTracker training across the human performance spectrum spans over a decade.

Giving invaluable advice and insights on how coaches and trainers can get the most out of training with their athletes or clients, this first blog introduces the basics and how to get your coaching optimized from the get-go.

Read here.

5. Tips for NeuroTracker Trainers - Managing Sessions

Maxime's second part in the series takes things up a notch. Here he goes into detail on practical pointers for managing training hands-on, with tips on how to both guide and observe sessions.

Following on this he shares advice for interpreting data results, and gives sound guidance on how to deliver qualitative feedback to boost training motivation.

Read here.

6. Tips for NeuroTracker Trainers - Advanced Programs

In this third part, Maxime dives a little into the science behind advanced training programs and how best to leverage the principals of the NeuroTracker Learning System to keep reaping the benefits of training over time.

He then goes on to gives pointers on how best to progress dual-task training techniques for different performance needs, along with some insider tips for optimizing neurocognitive training loads to each individual's needs.

Read here.

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Albert Einstein once said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results". If you want better results in competition, it’s important to train at a higher level and compete in line with your potential. The goal is to train the same way you compete. And, if you combine your sport training with competition level pressure, you are connecting mind and body. This is why training must incorporate the cognitive dimension of performance, in order to simulate mental pressure. In this 4th blog in the series, we will cover how you can take your training to another level by employing the same mental techniques you use in the actual competition.

Bring the Pressure of Competition into Training

When we train, we want to have the same demands and difficulties as in the competition itself. One factor that predominates and limits us when we compete is pressure, but this is really about lack of preparation. Training under real pressure helps us to be better prepared. When you are able to train with an added difficulty, the challenges of competition will actually start to feel normal.

When we train we seek a short term goal, which is to be better prepared for competition. Everyone is a champion when no one is watching. But, when pressure intervenes, our capabilities are limited, and affected. This happens perhaps because the actual method training is not powerful enough to get you properly into the state of competitive moments. A common phrase in sport is "compete like you train.” However, that may not be true if your training is not of high quality. Remember a time when you thought "I need something more" while training, or after a bad competition.

Take on Real Training Challenges

When you train with an added challenge, and that difficulty is lessened or disappears, everything flows. If every day you are training with increasingly adverse challenges, then you are achieving the closest thing to being in competition. If you put yourself a demand like in a COMPETITION you will see high stress as something normal – just familiar daily experience.

In those moments, actually competing as you train will become possible. Difficulties are part of the process. Those difficulties will take you to the next level. Robert Bowman, coach of the 23 times Olympic champion swimmer Michael Phelps, constantly repeated: "There is no growth without suffering."

Athletes you might like to watch while looking for inspiration are those who connect body and mind. For example the moment when Steph Curry scored 46 points and 6 assists, besides equaling what at that time was a record of 12 three pointers in a game. However, perhaps the greatest moment of when his mind and body were synchronized, was in the winning shot with 3 seconds left vs. Oklahoma City Thunder, where he decided, got up, and scored.

Integrate Brain and Body Training

Connecting body and mind is what athletes and coaches want most, especially when your goals are very high. When you get that connection, your performance is higher. Training your movement, your technical gesture, your blocking, your pass...while under high cognitive loads, you allow you to be able to connect body and mind.

This leads to the sports science principle of automaticity, where your movement skills  mastery of pressure becomes almost effortless. That is a what the greatest athletes tap into when they are in their true competitive zone, it comes from superior preparation with training over time. It is possible for anyone.

Here is an example of training with this integrated approach at the International Center. In the following video you can see how we prepare the kickboxing athlete of the Spanish national team for the Budapest open, incorporating elements that we know will be difficult challenges in competition performance. Through the yellow element we attack his body, looking for dodge and block and fist counterattack looking for the best solution.

All this is performed while tracking the NeuroTracker at speed threshold through a custom program created at the International Center. Specifically we’re combining the visual, perceptual and cognitive demands of NeuroTracker, while incorporating the complex skill work of dodging and hitting.

With this approach of 3D-multiple object tracking and sports specific skill training, we can successfully apply real mind-body training under pressure, simulating demands and difficulties equivalent to performing in the competition itself.

Takeaway

With every new competition season there is the challenge to rise to higher and higher levels professionalism. Every time the differences are smaller. That's why training with higher quality, and training cognitively under pressure will make you achieve that edge over your rivals. Training with higher quality methodologies and to evolve your performance levels is possible. At the International Center we can take you to your next level, to increase your performance by training under pressure - it’s time for others look at you for inspiration!

You can read the first 3 parts of this 6-part blog series here.

‍The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 1 - Execution

The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 2 – Injuries

‍The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 3 – Pressure

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Described in the UK press as Manchester United’s secret weapon, Mick Clegg was instrumental behind the scenes of the biggest sports club in the world from 2000 to 2011. The first power development coach in the English Premier League, he helped forge the team’s physical and mental strength throughout the club’s glory years, including completing the legendary treble. Here we’ll uncover why this fascinating book 'The Power and the Glory', sold out on Amazon the first day it was published.

What Is the Book About and Who Is It For?

As mentioned in the book’s preface, people’s attention is most likely to be focused on finding out what it is really like working with some of the best footballers ever to play the game, under arguably the greatest manager ever to occupy a dugout. And here Mick certainly delivers, giving more than a decade’s worth of raw first-person insights to the incredible struggles, overwhelming successes and deep relationships that he built with the players and with 'the boss', Sir Alex Ferguson.

However, The Power and the Glory is about so much more. In fact, coauthor Steve Bartram (Manchester United’s Features Editor), reveals that his initial intention was simply to interview Mick about his rehab work with players, but quickly realized that the big story in front of him was the man himself.

Over ten years in the writing, and spanning 31 chapters, Mick takes the reader on a multi-dimensional journey. Starting from the time he transitioned from working in a power station into owning his first gym, through to his eldest son taking over his role at Manchester United. He tells stories of his remarkable life with such honesty and character, it feels like you’re having a chat with him over a cup of tea.

The insights that emerge from the book are relevant for anyone interested in coaching elite sports performance, understanding the deep psychology and politics of playing and working in professional team sports, the challenges of parenting, and the life-changing personal development that comes with a wild roller coaster of a career.

The Development of Power-Development

Less well-known is the father of five children who developed his own specialized form of power development coaching, which he taught in colleges. This training methodology led to three of his offspring becoming international class Olympic Weightlifters, and two of his sons playing for Manchester United – the reason why the club initially hired him.

Mick’s unique approach evolved out of his Olympic Sports Gym in Manchester, where he coached national sports teams and mentored talent across numerous sports, one of which was boxing. This later turned out to be crucial in earning the respect and trust of many of the world’s best footballers, as well as Mick taking a massive right-hook to the face from Wayne Rooney - but that’s another story!

As a coach constantly looking to improve himself, his training techniques became more advanced under the pressure of training the Red Devils’ first team and reserve team players, as well as ‘Fergie’ himself. His work even included incorporating a scientific approach to conditioning ‘rapid cognition’ – the first bona fide cognitive training applied to professional soccer.

He also leveraged the psychology and explosive power of boxing to bond with the players and channel their athletic passion.

In combination this all had a huge influence on the team’s athletic performance, exemplified well by Cristiano Ronaldo, who once described his own physique as ‘Built by Cleggy’.

Mick worked with Ronaldo daily throughout his phenomenal 5-year ascension from a Premier League rookie to the best player in the world. In Ronaldo’s foreword to the book, he highlights how Mick played a pivotal role in his career development.

I put in a lot of work to keep in the best condition I can be in, and a lot of my success in that area stems from what I learnt with Mick. The work we did was very specific, very clever and along with the work I was doing on other aspects of my game, it helped me to improve massively.

Understanding the Human Side of ‘The Game’

Within the club Mick worked with a galaxy of star players, gleaning fascinating insights into their different talents. One example is club legend Ruud Van Nistelrooy - one of the world's most prolific goal-scorers inside the 18-yard box. Ruud shared with Mick how he would lose conscious perception in goal scoring moments - literally having no memory between getting into the box, and seeing the ball resting in the back of the net.

But at a much deeper level, Mick untangles the rich human side of soccer. Mick’s gym inside the club was purposely his office, open to any player, any time. And many of the world's most famous soccers stars would come frequently to chat over a cuppa. Not just about their athletic development, but also their worries or just other things going on in their life - from helping design Beckham’s famous VII tattoo, to teaching Gary Neville how to play the guitar. The process helped forge long-term personal bonds with many of the players.

Much of this stemmed from Mick's philosophy to truly understand what really made each player tick, in order to really get to grip with their different needs. In his own words,

When Paul Scholes or David Beckham or Gary Neville tell you that they need *this*, you have a collision of hearts where you work together from an emotional place. To really be creative with another person is to understand them, show them the knowledge that you have and see how they can match and be used together as a force.

This level of empathy led him to realize just how much professional football players are misunderstood, particularly in the media.  Mick gives a poignant example of how David Beckham was vilified in the press for apparently suing a company for misuse of his name. It was completely untrue and David knew nothing about it, yet had to defend himself, despite being the victim. And there are many other instances of the players being put unfairly through the wringer in the public eye.

There were also very emotional times too. Amid the celebrations of winning the 2007/08 Champions League final in Moscow, Mick recounts how his most important memory was actually of Wayne Rooney opening up and crying with his head on his shoulder because he’d been substituted during the match.

He was a huge part of the team and a big part of the success, but he just didn’t feel part of the night because he’d been taken off. It really touched him deeply inside and he needed to get that out. I felt so sorry for him.

Life After Manchester United

Mick covers how his departure from the club was a difficult decision embroiled with internal club politics. At the same time, it allowed him to focus once again on evolving his coaching practices, with the freedom to be creative and exploratory. Setting up Seed of Speed, he steadily built a new gym from the ground-up, specialized around his coaching goal of developing how the brain controls the body.

As well as plenty of Manchester United players training with Mick during the off-season, he also got back to working with athletes across many different sports, including mentoring Aaron Cook to world no.1 in Taekwondo.

In addition, Mick shifted his focus to nurturing athletic potential at a younger age, leading to his gym being dubbed in the media as the ‘Ronaldo Factory’.

The Clegg Legacy

The respect and admiration for Mick’s coaching shines through in the testimonials at the end of the book. Along with world and national champions in different sports, the following Manchester United players went out of their way to volunteer their personal insights into what they found so special about their years working with ‘Cleggy’.

• Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Manchester United 1996-2008

• Rio Ferdinand, Manchester United 2002-2014

• Ryan Giggs, Manchester United 1990-2014

• Ruud van Nistelrooy, Manchester United 2001-2006

• Edwin van der Sar, Manchester United 2005-2011

• Patrice Evra, Manchester United 2006-2014

• Darren Fletcher, Manchester United 1995-2015

• Nemanja Vidic, Manchester United 2006-2014

• Teddy Sheringham, Manchester United 1997-2001

• Andy Cole, Manchester United 1995-2002

• Louis Saha, Manchester United 2004-2008

• Alan Smith, Manchester United 2004-2007

• Jaap Stam, Manchester United 1998-2001

• Jesper Blomqvist, Manchester United 1998-2002

• John O'Shea, Manchester United 1999-2011

• Wes Brown, Manchester United 1998-2011

• Diego Forlan, Manchester United 2002-2004

When Ole Gunnar Solskjaer took over as the new United manager he sought to recruit Mick back into the fold. Ole had not only been coached by Mick personally, the pair had also worked together during Solskjaer’s two-year tenure as the club’s Reserves Team manager. Although honored, Mick’s journey with Seed of Speed was now too much to let go of. However, in a perhaps serendipitous twist of Clegg-United legacy, Ole instead hired Mick’s son, Mike Clegg, formerly the strength and conditioning coach for EPL club Sunderland AFC.

The day Ronaldo historically returned to Manchester United’s training grounds he immediately went looking for Mick, instead finding Clegg junior, with whom he fondly shared many stories of his time working with his dad.

Takeaway

For the first time, the Mick Clegg who has always been behind the scenes, wears his heart on his sleeve to bring to the foreground a truly fascinating concatenation of stories inside the real-world of coaching world-class professional football.

All-in-all The Power and the Glory is a tome of incredible life experiences through the eyes of a humble man, driven not only by success in sports, but also through connecting deeply with the athletes whose lives he touched.

The Power and the Glory can be purchased here.

If you’d like to learn more about Mick’s evolving work in sports performance development, check out his Seed of Speed website.

Since COVID Mick also offers remote Zoom consultancy and live training for soccer teams and individual athletes looking to progress their professional careers. Anyone interested can apply here.

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As cognitive abilities decline with age, there has been interest in identifying interventions that can slow or reverse these changes. One such intervention is cognitive training (CT), which aims to improve the acquisition and retention of skills involved in fluid intelligence, such as reasoning and problem-solving. CT programs have been shown to improve cognitive abilities in older adults, but only a few studies have examined the effects of CT in children or adolescents. This article discusses CT's short-term and long-term benefits on cognitive abilities in children and adolescents.

Short-term Effects

The effect of CT on cognitive abilities depends on the type of cognitive skills trained and the mode of administration. The effect may occur during training or after training and may last for a short time (i.e., hours) or for a longer duration (i.e., months). Here are the short-term effects:

1. Memory

It has been demonstrated that CT can improve memory by training and improving the efficiency of memory retrieval. In addition, CT focused on improving memory has also shown some evidence of transfer to gains in tests of attentional resources, reaction time, visual processing speed, episodic, semantic, subjective and working memory, as well as aspects of social cognition.

In one study, CT helped improve participants' verbal memory performance only after training and not immediately after (i.e. post-training effect). This post-training effect was found in children, adolescents, and young adults. However, other studies have not supported this finding, so the type of CT may be a key factor.

2. Executive functions

Executive function (EF), such as planning, working memory, attention, and inhibition, are positively affected by CT. EF play a significant role in intelligence and academic achievement. Research has shown that participants who completed a computerized CT program demonstrated improved performance on different types of EF tasks, requiring participants to process information while simultaneously inhibiting responses incompatible with that information. Another study reported that adolescents who completed an online CT program had better EF skills than a control group on expressive and receptive language measures after 2 weeks but not after 10 weeks.

3. Information processing speed

Children who showed improved processing speed during CT performed better on EFs and verbal ability measures after training. Therefore, if a child is improving their processing speed, they may gain a greater ability to communicate, learn new information, and solve complex problems.

4. Verbal intelligence

In a study with 120 children aged 11 to 13 years old, researchers found that verbal intelligence improved after six weeks of participation in CT training programs. This effect was more pronounced among participants in the experimental group than those in the control group.

Long-term Effects

The effect of CT on cognitive abilities may last for a long time. The long-term effects include:

1. Neural changes

CT training can result in neural changes that support certain cognitive processes. For example, CT has been shown to induce anatomical changes in the brain, such as the growth of new neurons and increased synaptic density. A CT program requires participants to practice certain skills for a period, which may lead to structural changes in the brain.

2. Generalization

CT generalizes to other cognitive tasks on the same or other domains. For example, researchers found that working memory and reasoning training could lead to improvements in an unfamiliar reasoning task. This finding suggests that CT training improves reasoning and memory, not only on the tasks trained, but also on other related tasks. This aspect of generalization has been called transfer-appropriate processing (TAP).

3. Broad transfer

CT can be applied to other cognitive domains. For example, CT aimed at improving academic achievement and reading comprehension can lead to improved academic performance in adolescents without changes in intelligence, executive functions, or verbal abilities. This finding suggests that CT can be effective in academic achievement without affecting other cognitive domains.

4. Retention

The effects of CT are more likely to last for a long time if it is physically and mentally demanding. Retention is believed to be related to physical and mental fatigue. If a child experiences high levels of physical and mental fatigue, retention may be longer.

5. Specificity

The effects of CT can be specific to the targeted cognitive processes. For example, CT may improve working memory components but not others (e.g., verbal knowledge). This suggests that CT is likely to be limited to specific cognitive abilities and not a universal intervention.

Conclusion

Although CT is beneficial for children and adolescents in improving cognitive skills, the type of training and the cognitive processes targeted are key factors. The effects may last for longer periods if the training is more stimulating, motivating or demanding. Interventions such as computerized brain training are widely used to improve cognitive ability, and have also been found to be safe and accessible to children.

It is important to understand that cognitive ability can be changed and improved at all ages, not only in old age. If interested, you can check-out nicelocal.com to find services like occupational, physical & speech therapists, and other clinical rehabilitation medicine specialists near you that offer CT programs.

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In the world of sports, soccer is unique because of the purposeful use of the unprotected head for controlling and advancing the ball. This skill obviously places the player at risk of head injury and the game does carry some risk. Head injury can be a result of contact of the head with another head (or other body parts), ground, goal post, other unknown objects, or even the ball. Such impacts can lead to contusions, fractures, eye injuries, concussions or even, in rare cases, death. Coaches, players, parents and physicians are rightly concerned about the risk of head injury in soccer.

Current research shows that selected soccer players have some degree of cognitive dysfunction. It is important to determine the reasons behind such deficits. Purposeful heading has been blamed, but a closer look at the studies that focus on heading has revealed methodological concerns that question the validity of blaming purposeful heading of the ball. In this article we will look at the some of the key factors involved in the potentially underrecognized importance of sub concussive impacts in soccer, as well as their implications for motor-impairments and associated injury risks.

Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) and Ball Heading

While it is likely that the sub concussive impact of purposeful heading is a doubtful factor in the noted deficits, it is unknown whether multiple sub concussive impacts might have some lingering effects. In addition, it is unknown whether the noted deficits have any affect on daily life.

Soccer accounts for a major number of sub-concussive episodes in sports: excessive heading of the ball (more than 1000 episodes per year) may cause subclinical brain injury, the effects of which are not as well defined as those of recognized for concussions generally. Although most published studies have focused on collegiate and professional players, most soccer players are amateur recreational league players.

Heading with the unprotected head to direct the ball during game play is increasingly recognized as a major source of exposure to concussive and sub-concussive repetitive head impacts. These impacts have been linked to changes in brain structure visible on neuroimaging, and decreased performance on cognitive tasks both with short term and long-term exposure.

Concussion involves several clinical domains: symptoms, physical signs, behavioral changes, cognitive impairment, and sleep disturbance. The physical signs of concussion can resolve quickly, but some players may manifest persistent impairments.

UEFA first published a call for research proposals in May 2017, in which potential researchers were asked to address two key topics.

• Determining the burden of heading in youth football; addressing differences in the way headers are taught in football training.

• Assessing differences in the incidence and characteristics of football headers in matches and training, and in different age and gender categories.

Sub-Concussion Effects in the Neuromuscular Control of the Knee

The ACL ruptures when the stresses to which it is exposed exceed its mechanical properties. However extreme knee loading scenarios may be potentiated through abnormal neuromuscular control in the lower limb, with gender differences in hip rotation and rear foot pronation in the transverse and frontal planes.

Concussion can also result in decreased postural stability from impairment on the afferent signals from the cervical spine, the vestibular-ocular system, and the visual systems. Persistent sensorimotor impairment after resolution of concussion symptoms would likely contribute to an increased injury risk, and further studies are warranted. These neurocognitive impairments are likely highly inter-twined with neuromuscular control, motor learning, and other aspects critical for the performance and safety of the athlete.

From a sports traumatology and rehabilitation perspective, we should try and produce intervention models first, which allow assessment of neurocognitive performance and identify athletes at risk for injury. Also, in the rehabilitation process, neuromuscular training tools should incorporate progressively more challenging tasks.

The benefits of using tasks such as dual-attention during clinical assessment are currently being explored when assessing and managing concussion. This strategy can be successfully translated to ACL injury risk screening, and neurocognitive strategies may be employed in ACL injury prevention and ACL injury rehabilitation. Sports activities demand initiating and maintaining appropriate performance of dynamic activities in a complex, rapidly changing environment. The success of each action is contingent on voluntary and in-voluntary motor commands modulated by sensory processing, attention, and motor planning.

Baseline Symptoms Matter

The assessment of concussion symptoms is a cornerstone to assessing individuals with this injury (P. McCrory et al., 2013). However, concussion symptoms are typically assessed only at post injury time intervals. In other words, clinicians usually do not know a patient’s pre injury or baseline level of symptoms.

Researchers have reported that baseline levels of concussion-related symptoms among healthy individuals vary considerably, with some individuals reporting no symptoms at baseline and others reporting high levels (Iverson & Lange, 2003). Several explanations have been posited for this variability in symptoms among healthy individuals, including the overlap between concussion-related symptoms and symptoms from other health conditions, including fatigue, orthopedic injuries, and physical illness (Piland, Ferrara, Macciocchi, Broglio, & Gould, 2010). Many different health conditions share symptoms such as headache, fatigue, dizziness, and sleeping problems, all of which are common following a concussion.”

NeuroTracker is one example of an excellent tool for baseline assessments of the neurocognitive sta-tus of an athlete. These types of neurotechnologies could provide a valuable rehab tool for monitoring concussion symptomatology and more subtle long-term consequences of head injuries.

Takeaways

Neuroscience will continue to help uncover how the brain and central nervous system influences and determines motor control, and the mechanistic errors in motor control resulting in non-contact lower limb injuries. Poor baseline neurocognitive performance or impairments in neuro-cognitive performance via sleep deprivation, psychological stress, or concussion injury can increase the risk for subsequent musculoskeletal injury. Head injury prevention programs span well beyond ACL injury, and their impact will extend to prevention of impairment of neural function and neurocognition.

If you’re interesting in exploring this topic further, you can read my recently published open-access paper here.

Ball heading and subclinical concussion in soccer as a risk factor for anterior cruciate ligament injury

Kakavas, G., Malliaropoulos, N., Blach, W. et al. Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research, Res 16, 566 (2021).

Or if you would like to learn more about the importance of cognitive dimension in sports performance, here is an earlier Experts Corner blog that I wrote.

3 Reasons Why the Brain Rules Everything in Sports

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Pressure interferes with our ability to concentrate, sometimes diminishing athletic abilities, developed over a lifetime, in just mere seconds. However, it’s often performing under pressure when the greatest accomplishments in sporting careers are achieved. In this 3rd blog of 6-part series we will discover why learning how to dominate competitors in situations when under pressure, will help you actualize your true athletic potential.

Training Under Pressure

Competition creates pressure. That pressure will cause you to lose focus; and without focus your technique and performance will be limited. In fact the latest neuroscience research shows that when mental focus is overloaded, injuries are more likely to be sustained due to impairments in motor-skills.

This is why it’s important to train with high intensity to increase concentration, as well as learn how to reduce or even block out distractions. When you train in this state, it’s more likely you can also achieve a state of flow – when everything in the brain and body just comes together perfectly in the moment.

Repeatedly conditioning yourself in this intense training state will allow you to learn how to refocus your attention at will. This is exactly what the greatest athletes of all-time have mastered, and it’s an essential skill for being able to succeed in any situation.

Concentration Under Pressure

We need concentration, especially in the moments when doubts of our abilities creep into our minds. However, when pressure is overwhelming, it deactivates our focus. So pressure is a direct threat to our concentration, yet concentration is also the solution to this threat.

Concentration helps us to connect with our most important goals in sports, and is naturally critical for situational awareness and accurate decision-making. If you have ever been really under pressure in a competition, it’s likely that you tell yourself "Concentrate!” But at the same time, your inner voice asks “How can I do that?”

Taking Control Over Distractions

We have a multitude of distractions when we compete. Most athletes are aware of external distractions, such as crowd noise, taunting by opponents, or something as simple as a shoelace coming undone.

However, the most significant distractions are usually internal. This can be conversations in your head, fluctuations in emotional states like nervousness, or most importantly fear of failing. High pressure situations magnify this mental noise, making even top athlete’s performances crumble in the moment. World Cup penalty shoot-outs are a great example of how challenging internal distractions can really be.

The ability to take control over distractions is known in neuroscience as selective attention. This allows you to consciously choose what to focus on, and what not to focus on. Few athletes or even coaches know that this is a very trainable cognitive skill. In fact it’s one of the reasons we use NeuroTracker at the International Center, which is very effective at rapidly building up the brain’s attentional muscles.

Great players succeed when their skills and attentional control are synchronized under pressure. With this, most distractors just seem to disappear, and the mental space it creates, gives the illusion that time slows down during the heat of action.

Using Dual-Tasks to Push Neurophysical Limits

A great example of training techniques that push an athlete to their performance thresholds is neurophysical dual-tasks. At the International Center we apply this with all our athletes, but only after they have sufficiently progressed their cognitive abilities.

We use the patented NeuroTracker Learning System, where we put an athlete’s attention under high-cognitive load, while simultaneously attempting skill specific tasks. With this methodology we are able to condition any athlete to adapt to situations of maximum difficulty. Here is an example applied to Olympic Shooting.

If we are able to prepare ourselves through situations of maximum difficulty as in the video, the athlete is working with a specific program of 1 ball, adapted to his sport, Olympic Shooting. With the dual-task, he's using 20 kilograms of weight to generate that pressure; that blockade and stress is an added difficulty so that the athlete only focuses on following the program.

Mastering Your Optimal State

Now it’s your time to master the ability to reach your optimal state in critical moments of performance. Lots of sports professionals talk about the importance of flow - feeling the moment and mastering the pressure. The state of flow is the moment when everything slows down and your mind processes only relevant information with high efficiency.  

Training in ways that push you to your threshold, not just physically, but more importantly mentally, will optimally condition your attention and concentration. In turn, this will unlock your hidden ability to handle pressure any situations. Mastering both body and mind in synchrony is how great athletes achieve consistent success.

Pressure in the world of sport is a daily occurrence. Sport has become a global industry with more people watching and higher standards of performance than ever before. Reaching your goal in modern sports depends on how you manage the pressure that comes with the territory. At the International Center we specialize in preparing athletes to increase their performance against the odds. If you are looking to train like a champion with us, find out more at the International Center website.

You can also read the first two blogs in this 6-part series here.

‍The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 1 - Execution

The Secrets to Dominating in Your Sport Part 2 – Injuries

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The difference between the gold and silver medal in the 100m Men’s Freestyle final of the Tokyo Games came down to just 0.06 seconds – less than one sixth of the time it takes to blink! Today’s world-class swimmers push the boundaries of human performance so close to their limits, that such marginal differences often decide positions on the podium. This makes professional swimming one of the most competitive events in the world of sports. Hence these athletes are constantly searching for any performance edge they can, no matter how seemingly small. Here I’ll cover a study revealing that the cognitive dimension of performance could provide a new edge in reaction times, allowing swimmers to get off-the-blocks and into the water faster.

What Was Studied

I worked with Professor Brian Christie and research colleagues to test the hypothesis that improved selective attention via visual training can transfer to improved reaction times to auditory cues. This is based on the theory that the visual and auditory centers of the brain are functionally coupled in terms of shared attentional resources.

To do this we conducted a study with 15 male and female swimmers on the University of Victoria Vikes Swim Team, comprised of high performance athletes and a world champion. The goal was to see if cognitive training to improve selective attention, would yield far transfer to faster off-the-block dive times

Off-the-block dives are defined as the time between the start gun firing and the swimmer’s front foot leaving the blocks. Here are the four stages of a race dive.

Dive reactions rely on auditory selective attention, which can be thought of as mentally filtering out all other sounds in order to listen acutely for the gun. Here is the methodology we used to investigate if auditory performance could be positively affected by improved visual selective attention.

Training Intervention - we chose NeuroTracker as a tool with a strong evidence base for effectively training selective attention. As you can see in this demo, the task requires visual attention to be focused onto prioritized moving targets, and away from distractors.

Multiple studies show that training on this task produces notable gains in selective attention within 3 hours of training. We assigned an active group to perform 30 x 6-minute NeuroTracker sessions alongside their normal weekly swim training, as well as a control group who did only swim training.

Dive Testing – we closely simulated a competitive race environment for the athletes, which included an audience of college students as active spectators. To measure dive performance on millisecond timescales, we used the Ares Omega Timing System.

Each participant conducted a series of 3 separate dive tests prior to NeuroTracker training, with rests in between each dive. Then another 3 dives test were conducted in the same way 7 weeks later, after the NeuroTracker training intervention had been completed.

What Was Found

The study took place early on in the competitive swim season, so as expected, the 7 weeks of swim training produced some improvements in the control group’s dive results. However, in contrast, the active group trained on NeuroTracker demonstrated significantly larger drops in reaction times off-the-blocks.

In comparison to the control group’s average improvement in reaction time of 0.034 seconds, the active group achieved their dives 0.081 seconds faster, demonstrating more than twice the gains from their additional cognitive intervention - a training advantage of 0.047 seconds.

This advantage was surprisingly consistent across the participants, suggesting a reliable far transfer effect. Anecdotal reports from the active group also included improved sustained attention and concentration levels in their academic study work. These findings support the hypothesis that training attention in one sensory modality (in this case vision), can positively affect other modalities (in this case auditory attention).

Sports vision research tends to focus exclusively on visually dominated sports like soccer, basketball, tennis and so on. However, visual training methodologies may well be relevant for the performance enhancement of non-visually dominated sports, particularly those which rely on auditory reactions, such as rowing, cycling, and running.

As this domain is relatively unstudied, it would be great to see more research investigating this area of sports performance.

The Competitive Advantage?

As we covered at the outset, professional swimmers seek marginal gains in race times because they have a relatively large impact on competition outcomes. To qualify the effects for these results I looked into race times at past Olympics, to see how much of a difference there would be in terms of who won medals.

A 0.1 second change in race results would have caused a total of 65 Olympic medals to have exchanged hands between the 1972 and 2004 Olympic Sprinting events (50 m – 200 m). Interestingly, as the standards of the sport progress over time, the differences become even more significant. For example, at just the Rio 2016 games, a total of 30 Olympic medals would have exchanged hands.

The Takeaway

Modern day professional swimmers and their coaches are constantly search for new ways to gain a marginal performance advantage. Visuo-cognitive training tools like NeuroTracker may offer a distinct performance edge with just a few hours of distributed training, and with no risks of injury or overloading existing training regimes.

View the full published study here (open access).

Effects of 3D-Multiple Object Tracking on Reaction Time Performance in High-Performance Varsity Swimmers

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Road trips are a fun and adventurous option to head from north to south and explore the hidden gems in the world that you will not be able to see if you fly. However, it requires a fair amount of planning when it comes to outings so that you can pack the things that are necessary to you. From the several things, you need for your personal use to must-have items, ensure to pack all of the essentials to save yourself from hassles. Here is our road trip packing guide to ensure you have the best and safest time.

1 Stock up Edibles and Water

Bringing along edibles and water for your road trip is a common rule that needs to be followed. After all, packing your own edibles on a long journey is a good idea for numerous reasons. You don’t have to find good quality food at every pit stop. Plus, you will eat nutritious food as well.

Make sure to pack a variety of edibles that are delicious, nutritious, and satisfying not specifically for you but for other passengers as well. After all, you cannot be sure about hunger.

Following are essential travel edibles for long trips: -

1 Eggs and bread slices.

2 Fresh fruits and Vegetables (exclude oranges, blueberries, carrots, tomatoes, etc., as they require chopping).

3 Tea bags, cans, juices, or other easy-to-mix beverages.

4 Chips and chocolates.

5 Canned foods like tuna, beans, bacon, etc.

2 Keep Gadgets Handy and Powered Up

Snapping pictures during the day or listening to music continuously will drain the battery. With a portable charger, it is essential to bring some additional batteries and a car charger to ensure your gadgets remain powered up, especially in those cases where you can't find a spot to charge the devices.

Moreover, before leaving, test out the car charger to confirm that each gadget is working correctly.

Suppose you plan to bring your bulky equipment from sporting goods to camping gear. In that case, try installing a roof rack. Or, if you are wondering how to use a roof rack, research more about it as it can be your savior in many cases.

3 Go for Comfy Outfits and Shoes

Comfortable clothes and shoes need to be on your priority list, considering you will be sitting for a prolonged period. Choose the outfits made up of cotton, as they are generally more comfortable and breathable. Meanwhile, a dry fit option is ideal for wet terrains.

In contrast, try to evade heavy pieces of denim since they can make you feel uncomfortable. Also, be ready for the weather changes and keep thermals if the temperature drops.  

It's recommendable to check the weather forecast for all the regions you are planning to visit at least before you leave so that you will pack accordingly.

4 Emergency Kit

It's advisable not to go on any long journey without an emergency kit as you don't know what can happen on the road. Just like you require your car to be checked before leaving, it’s the same with your emergency kit. Consequently, it's vital to carry an emergency kit to ensure safety.

Make sure the flashlight is working well, the jumper cables are there, or the first aid kid essentials are not expired. Except this, make sure to have a blanket, hand warmers, gloves, and ice scraper during the winters to save yourself from trouble.

5 Good Navigation Apps

Before heading on any journey, one of the significant road trips essentials is installing a navigation app—particularly the one with online features since you are driving in an uncommon area. Navigation apps help navigate nearby traffic, discover stops, and, most importantly, recalculates the track if you lose the route.

Additionally, it's not wise to rely entirely on these apps. It can be multifunctional, but sometimes it can offer incorrect information. So, it's better to research the route beforehand.

6 Entertainment to Keep Everyone Happy

Bringing along all of your entertainment items is the best way to go for a fun-filled road trip, from music to games and high-tech gear. A decent selection of playlists, audio   immediately doubles up the fun. Moreover, you can download the podcast to keep things interesting throughout the trip.

Similarly, it's always a brilliant idea to download content to a smartphone beforehand if you lose the connection during the road trip. In addition, if you are a fan of reading, do not forget to bring your favorite book or kindle if you want to save space.

Wrap Up

Before heading, it's vital to locate all of your necessary documents like your driving license registration documents, etc. So, make sure you do a quick check, at least before leaving. Additionally, several cities have highways with toll-booths, so make sure to keep the cash ready or indulge in research to locate the alternative route.

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CBD has gained a lot of attention in recent years, and understandably so. This great cannabinoid offers numerous benefits. You can use it to treat many conditions, including chronic pain, anxiety, and even cancer! Not to mention, it's a great alternative to traditional medications. But what most people don't know is this miracle molecule can also relieve joint pain. Here are six reasons you should use CBD for joint relief.

1. There are Numerous Ways to Consume CBD

One of the best things about CBD is that there are countless ways to consume it. Therefore, if you're looking for a natural treatment that fits effortlessly into your lifestyle, CBD is it. Some of the ways you can incorporate CBD into your lifestyle include the following.

CBD Gummies

CBD gummies are one of the most popular forms of CBD (for more information, consider this online option: https://cbdfx.com/collections/cbd-gummies/), and for a good reason. Everyone loves gummy bears, and CBD offers the same experience without the side effects of THC.

CBD Edibles

You also have the option of consuming CBD with a wide variety of edibles. You can eat it in the form of chocolates, beverages, and even baked goods. However, you need to be careful with dosing if you're making the edibles yourself since, excessive CBD can result in an unpleasant experience.

CBD Topicals

If you don't like edibles, consider using a topical application to get your daily dose of CBD. Topicals are an excellent way to target specific areas of pain.

CBD Vapes

Vaping CBD is a great way to get your daily dose quickly and easily. You can also customize your vape experience by choosing the flavor and potency that's right for you.

CBD Tinctures

Tinctures are another easy way to consume CBD, and they offer a longer-lasting effect than most other methods of intake. This form of consumption involves dropping a few drops of CBD oil under your tongue and allowing it to absorb over time.

CBD Capsules

Capsules are perfect for people who want to make sure they're getting an exact dose of CBD each time. They're also easy to carry with you on the go.

2. CBD Is Non-Psychoactive

People have frowned upon marijuana as a natural treatment for a long time because of its psychoactive effects. However, CBD is non-psychoactive, meaning it doesn't produce the "high" associated with marijuana.

3. It's a Great Alternative to Joint Medications

There are numerous prescription and over-the-counter medications available for joint pain relief. However, some of these can have harmful side effects, such as damage to your liver or kidneys, and they can be addictive.

CBD is an excellent alternative because it has no dangerous side effects and works just as effectively, if not better than those harsher options you might find on store shelves. Not to mention, it's also non-addictive, so you won't have to worry about developing a dependence on it. This cannabinoid also comes with a host of other benefits that we'll delve into below apart from joint pain relief, including:

• Improved sleep

• Decreased pain and inflammation

• Boosted immune system function

• Reduced stress and anxiety

4. CBD Reduces Inflammation and Swelling

Joint pain is usually caused by inflammation. CBD oil has been shown to be incredibly effective at reducing inflammation and swelling in both joints and other areas of the body.

You can use CBD oil to treat many different types of joint pain, including rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.

5. CBD Has Antifungal and Antibacterial Properties

Another reason to stock up on CBD oil for joint pain relief is its antifungal and antibacterial properties. These properties make CBD oil an excellent choice for treating any infection or inflammation in the joints.

6. CBD Is Easily Attainable

With more and more states legalizing cannabis, CBD oil is becoming more accessible and easier to find. You can find CBD oil online or at many local dispensaries.

The fact that it's popular in most countries also makes it easier to find people knowledgeable about CBD oil and its various benefits. This way, you'll be able to get all the information you need about CBD oil.

Wrapping Up

While CBD has gained worldwide popularity in recent years, many people still don't have all the facts about this natural remedy. Therefore, it's understandable why you may be on the fence about CBD oil. However, this article should have given you a good idea of what CBD is and whether or not it's the right choice for your specific needs.

The bottom line is that there are countless benefits to using CBD oil in place of traditional medicine. If you suffer from joint pain, anxiety disorders, chronic inflammation, or sleep disorders, talk to your doctor about CBD oil as a potential treatment option. You may be surprised at how well this natural remedy can work for you. I hope this article has helped you better understand CBD and how you can take advantage of its properties!

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