Formula One neuroscience

When the English racing driver Lewis Hamilton finished third at Formula One's Australian Grand Prix in March, it made him the first rookie driver to reach the podium since Canada's Jacques Villeneuve managed it 11 years before. During the race, commentators praised Hamilton's finesse and confidence as he steered his silver McLaren Mercedes through the streets of the Albert Park circuit, south of Melbourne. A few, notably racing legend Jackie Stewart, mentioned the extensive training Hamilton had been doing with Kerry Spackman, a so-called mind-management guy.

Spackman didn't begin his career as a neuroscientist. His undergraduate degree at the University of Auckland was in applied mathematics, after which he and a colleague developed an electronic device for measuring the performance of race cars.

It was only years later, after going into business with Stewart to train test drivers, that he realized "nobody really seemed to know what goes on inside a driver's brain." To find the answers he went back to New Zealand and earned a psychology PhD, and stumbled upon his new career in athlete training. "My job is understanding how the brain builds a perception of motion," Spackman explains. "In any sporting event there is a level of detail in that perception available to the elite athlete. I help them perceive it, internalize it, and act on it."

Working with athletes such as golfers, Olympic canoeists, and tennis players, Spackman says he uses principles of neuroscience to enhance sensory perceptions, analytical capacity, and memory to improve performance. Spackman won't say what those exercises are, nor will he divulge much about the underlying neuroscientific principles on which they're based. "In any really competitive sport you try to keep these things secret for a while," he says. The aim is to use the power of the brain's plasticity to reinforce the relevant circuitry through exercises repeated over a period of days or weeks. "Normally you start to see a difference over a couple of weeks," he says.

Although the specific methods he uses vary from athlete to athlete, Spackman says the overarching principle is to isolate the different sensory components of any particular task, study the neurological processes involved, and develop training methods to increase capacity.

For a tennis player, for example, he might want to improve the ability to detect subtle differences in an opponents' service action. To do this Spackman might have the player focus on paired stimuli that are initially far apart, gradually bringing them closer together, to train the player's ability to distinguish between them. "You're building up the richness of their visual processing," he explains.

In Formula 1 racing, drivers might want to improve the way they steer around corners, Spackman says. The sensory components of that task would include subtle clues from vibrations in the car, a balance component from the inner ear, and visual information from the track speeding by outside.

Take the visual element. "There are specific neurons devoted to detecting visual flow fields in the peripheral vision that help you understand how you're moving through space," Spackman says. "What we do is first measure the driver's threshold for detecting their angle to motion ... and then develop exercises that will enhance that ability."

Giedo van der Garde, a 21-year-old Dutch driver, has been working with Spackman for a year now. Speaking on his cell phone en route to the Italian Grand Prix track at Monza, he says Spackman's techniques had helped him greatly. "The mental training, the visualizing, and coaching have improved my racing."

Sensory systems such as vision and touch, as well as the systems that control movement, are especially malleable in terms of neural plasticity, says Winston Byblow, director of the Movement Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Auckland's Department of Sport & Exercise Science in New Zealand.

Byblow has a passing familiarity with Spackman's work, and says it is consistent with research being done in rehabilitation after disease or injury using neuroplasticity to help patients learn mental and motor skills. "Harnessing the mechanisms underlying brain plasticity for elite performance is a very logical development," says Byblow, "and in many ways, a step ahead in terms of where neuroscientists are currently focusing their efforts."