Keep Your Eye on the Balls to Become a Better Athlete

The New York Times:

MONTREAL — The acid-yellow spheres on the screen don’t look anything like the linebackers that the Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan tries to avoid each week. Nor do they resemble an English Premier League soccer player streaking down the field, or a puck hurtling across the ice in a National Hockey League game. If anything, they look like finely sheared tennis balls.

The beauty in the design of NeuroTracker — the video game aimed at heightening cognitive agility the way lifting dumbbells develops muscles — is allegedly its simplicity. Just by asking the eyes to track spheres as they bound around a 3D screen, athletes can prepare their brains to perform in a way that no other film room could replicate.

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Williams is not alone in his skepticism. In an exhaustive review published in the October issue of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, researchers criticized the sweeping claims made throughout the $1.3 billion brain-gaming industry related to “cognitive improvement.” The researchers concluded that the evidence was “limited and inconsistent” that commercial brain-training software could enhance cognition outside the laboratory in the ways the companies described. (Last January, Lumos Labs, the maker of Lumosity, settled Federal Trade Commission charges of deceptive advertising for $2 million.)

Read the whole story: The New York Times