Practice Really Does Change An Athlete's Brain

As kids, once we have mastered the complex motor skill of riding a bicycle, we’re told that its a lifelong skill that we’ll never forget.  Getting all of the moving parts of human and machine in sync with each other becomes a collective memory that can be called on from age 6 to 60.

Which is surprising, knowing that names, numbers and recent locations of car keys can be so easily forgotten.  What makes motor skills stick in our brains, ready to be called on at anytime?  According to two teams of cognitive science researchers, we can thank a property called neuroplasticity which actually changes the structure of our brain as we learn.

Much like bike riding, mastering ice skating requires some advanced balance and coordination to stay upright.  Knowing when and how much to lean to one side or the other while arms and legs are swinging is the type of parallel processing computation that human brains can handle well.Tucked underneath the larger cerebral hemispheres in the brain, the cerebellum is known to play an active role in controlling movement by taking in messages from the spinal cord, combined with signals from other parts of the brain, and coordinating the precision and timing of complex motor skills.  Damage to the cerebellum causes a lack of coordination, much like being under the influence causes someone to stagger and lose their balance.

Neuro researcher Im Joo Rhyu, from the Korea University College of Medicine, knew from prior studies that intensive motor skill training, such as juggling or basketball, resulted in physical changes in the brain as measured by functional magnetic resolution imaging (fMRI).  Now, he wanted to find out if the ability of the brain to adapt itself over time, known as neuroplasticiy, was sport-specific.  Given that the cerebellum has a right and a left hemisphere, would the physical growth in neural connections be symmetric on both sides?

His research team chose the perfect sport to investigate, speed skating.  Being able to chase opponents around a tight oval at high speeds on ice is a showcase for the cerebellum’s functions.  The key difference is that skaters always turn counterclockwise or left around the track.  Years and years of practice to perfect movement in one direction may show a growth pattern in the brain different from other sports, Rhyu hyphothesized.

So, he compared the fMRI brain scans of 16 male, professional, short-track speed skaters with the scans of 18 male, non-skaters who didn’t even exercise.  As predicted, in the experienced skaters, the right hemisphere of their cerebellums were larger than the left side.  Since the skaters only turn to the left, they spend much more time balanced on their right foot with short steps on their left.  Standing on your right foot activates the right side of the cerebellum.  In addition, learning a motor skill that requires constant visual monitoring and adjustments is also thought to occur mainly in the cerebellum’s right half.

The study appears, appropriately, in the December 2012 issue of The Cerebellum.

Size is not all that changes in the cerebellum after repeated training.  The increased network of neuron connections between brain cells also increases to the point of being noticeable on a different type of brain scan, known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).  Using this technology, a  research team examined experts in a different sport, karate.

“Most research on how the brain controls movement has been based on examining how diseases can impair motor skills,” said Dr Ed Roberts, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, who led the study. “We took a different approach, by looking at what enables experts to perform better than novices in tests of physical skill.

They compared the punch strength of twelve karate fighters who had achieved black belt status and had an average of almost 14 years of experience with 12 control subjects who exercised regularly but had no karate training.  Karate punching is not simply a feat of raw muscular strength.  It is combination of speed and the coordination of wrist, shoulder and torso movement.

As expected, they found that the punch strength of the black belts was substantially greater than the novices.  But the DTI scan also showed something else very interesting.  The white matter of their cerebellums, which is made up of the tangled network of neuron connections carrying signals from one cell to another, was structurally different than in the beginner’s brains.

The results of the study are published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

“The karate black belts were able to repeatedly coordinate their punching action with a level of coordination that novices can’t produce,” said Roberts.  “We think that ability might be related to fine tuning of neural connections in the cerebellum, allowing them to synchronise their arm and trunk movements very accurately.”

It is reassuring for athletes to know that all of those hours devoted to training their skills are actually reshaping and rebuilding their brain architecture.  And for us bike riders, we can understand how the skinned knees and bruised elbows we endured when the training wheels came off were worth the effort to program a skill that will last a lifetime.

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Rookie Quarterbacks Need To Chunk

Last year, in a highly anticipated episode of Jon Gruden’s Quarterback Camp, the former NFL coach warned highly touted rookie prospect Cam Newton about one of the major adjustments facing him when he gets to the NFL. “You know, some of this verbiage in the NFL, I don’t know how it was at Auburn, but it’s — it’s long. You’ve got the shifts, the plays, the protections, the snap count, the alert, the check-with-me’s,” Gruden said. “I mean, flip right, double-X, Jet, 36 counter, naked waggle, X-7, X-quarter.”

He went on to ask the Auburn quarterback if he’d ever heard a play call like that in college, to which Newton responded, “Our method is ‘simplistic equals fast.’ It’s so simple as far as, you look to the sideline, you see 36 on the board. And that’s a play. And we’re off.” Gruden did not seem impressed, “Let me make this point, though,” the Super Bowl winning coach continued. “The number one challenge you’re gonna have right away is the verbiage. And just getting comfortable with what we’re calling formations, what we’re calling routes. The alerts. The language. Speaking the language. You’re gonna move to France, and you’re gonna have to speak French, pretty quick.”



What’s difficult about this learning process is that it’s not just learning what the terms mean but then translating those terms into a complicated series of motor skills by each player. The “36 counter” portion of Gruden’s gruesome play call takes years of practice by itself, let alone the rest of the play modifiers.
In the cognitive science world, breaking down a complicated motor task into manageable pieces is known as “chunking.” Think of your favorite band in concert. They seem to fly through 15-20 songs without mistakes or stops to look at sheet music. However, what you don’t see is the hours of practice breaking down new songs into segments, fixing parts that don’t work, memorizing each verse and each chord until the entire song is fixed in their memory. "You can think about a chunk as a rhythm," said Nicholas Wymbs, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "On one level, the brain is going to try to divide up, or parse, long sequences of movement," he said. "This parsing process functions to group or cluster movements in the most efficient way possible."

Wymbs is the lead author of a new study recently published in the journal Neuron. While at first the brain needs to simplify the task sequence by breaking into parts, eventually a different cognitive process searches for the most efficient way to process the request by stringing the sub-tasks together. "The motor system in the brain wants to output movement in the most computationally, low-cost way as possible," Wymbs said. "With this integrative process, it's going to try to bind as many individual motor movements into a fluid, uniform movement as it possibly can."

In their experiment, they asked volunteers to lie in an MRI scanner while performing a sequence of motor tasks. On a screen above them, each person would see an image of a long sequence that they had to type out on a keypad in front of them, much like playing notes on a piano. After many trials of the sequence, they would begin to learn and adapt, which improved their performance.

"After practicing a sequence for 200 trials, they would get pretty good at it," Wymbs said. "After awhile, the note patterns become familiar. At the start of the training, it would take someone about four and a half seconds to complete each sequence of 12 button presses. By the end of the experiment, the average participant could produce the same sequence in under three seconds."

With the MRI data showing the active parts of the brain during this learning process, the researchers were able to observe this dual process of parsing and concatenation. During parsing or chunking, the cortical areas of the left hemisphere seemed to be doing the most work, while the putamen, an area of the brain linked to movement was responsible for putting the pieces back together after sufficient practice.

"These regions have been linked to the manipulation of motor information, which is something that we probably do more of when we just begin to learn the sequences as chunks," Wymbs said. "Initially, when you're doing one of these 12-element sequences, you want to pause. That would evoke more of the parsing mechanism. But then, over time, as you learn a sequence so that it becomes more automatic, and the concatenation process takes over and it wants to put all of these individual elements into a single fluid behavior."

So, what Gruden was trying to tell Newton was that learning an NFL playbook and all of the movements that underlie the terminology was simply a chunking drill. After Newton’s very successful rookie season, it seems he may have taken the coach’s advice.

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Is This How Barcelona's Xavi Makes Decisions?

When Xavi Hernandez receives the soccer ball in his offensive half of the field, the Barcelona maestro has a world of decisions waiting for him.  Hold the ball while his teammates arrive, make the quick through pass to a slicing Lionel Messi or move into position for a shot.

The question that decision researchers want to know is whether Xavi’s brain makes a choice based on the desired outcome (wait, pass or shoot) or the action necessary to achieve that goal.  Then, could his attitude towards improvement actually change his decision making ability?

Traditionally, the decision process was seen as consecutive steps; first choose what it is you want then choose an action to get you there.  However, a recent study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University tells us that the brain uses two separate regions for these choices and that they are independent of each other.

“In this study we wanted to understand how the brain uses value information to make decisions between different actions, and between different objects,” said the study’s lead investigator Dr. Lesley Fellows, neurologist and lead researcher. “The surprising and novel finding is that in fact these two mechanisms of choice are independent of one another. There are distinct processes in the brain by which value information guides decisions, depending on whether the choice is between objects or between actions.”

Fellows’ team asked two groups of patients to play games where they chose between either two actions (moving a joystick) or two objects (decks of cards).  Each group had previous damage to different areas of the frontal lobes of their brains.  They could win or lose money based on the success of their choices.

Those that had damage to the orbitofrontal cortex could make correct decisions between different actions but struggled with choices about different objects.  Conversely, the other group, having sustained injury to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, had difficulty with action choices but excelled with object choices.

Dr. Fellows hopes this is just the beginning of more neuro-based studies of decision making. “Despite the ubiquity and importance of decision making, we have had, until now, a limited understanding of its basis in the brain,” said Fellows. “Psychologists, economists, and ecologists have studied decision making for decades, but it has only recently become a focus for neuroscientists.”

So, back to Xavi, it seems his decision-making may be a multi-tasking mission by his brain.  Of course, we may never be able to judge the accuracy of any soccer player’s decisions since the actual execution of the motor skills required has an critical effect on the outcome.  In other words, the decision to thread a pass through defenders may be an excellent choice but a number of variables could spoil it, including a mis-kick by Xavi, a sudden last movement by Messi or an alert defender intercepting the pass.

As rare as this may be, Xavi may actually consider his decision a mistake.  How he reacts to that mistake depends on his opinion of neuroplasticity, according to Jason S. Moser, assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University.  ”One big difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how they respond to mistakes,” claims Moser.

He hypothesized that those people, including athletes, who think that their intelligence is fixed often don’t make the extra effort required to learn from their mistakes as they think its futile.  However, if you believe your brain continues to evolve and change over your lifetime, then you will bounce back sooner from a mistake and work harder to improve.

To prove this, his team gave volunteers a memory task to remember the middle letter of a five letter sequence, like “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.”  The participants also wore an EEG skull cap that measured brain signals.  After we make a mistake, our brain sends two signals within a quarter second of each other; the first alerts us that we made a mistake while the second signal that indicates we’re aware of the mistake and are working on a solution.

For those in the test group that thought their brains could be improved, they not only did better on successive tests but the second signal from their brain was significantly bigger, indicating their brains were working harder to correct the mistake.  If Xavi feels he can only get better, he will process any mistake at a fundamentally different neuro level than other players.  ”This might help us understand why exactly the two types of individuals show different behaviors after mistakes,” concluded Moser.

Facing a player like Xavi who not only multitasks decisions but also believes he can learn from any mistakes must be a depressing thought for Barcelona’s opponents.

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Apolo Ohno Trains His Legs And His Mind For The NYC Marathon

Of the roughly 45,000 brave souls who will line up for the start of the New York City Marathon in less than two weeks, there’s a good chance that at least a few will have doubts of crossing the finish line.  They have put in the training miles, eaten the right foods and picked out their playlist.

Yet, the biggest obstacle to a finisher’s medal is not their legs, but their brain.  Like an overprotective mother, the brain not only runs the show but also decides when enough is enough.  However, exercise science researchers now believe that it is possible to fool mother nature and tap into a reserve store of energy for better performance.

Somewhere in the New York masses on November 6th will be a short but determined first time marathoner who happens to have eight Olympic medals.  Apolo Ohno, world champion speed skater, will be racing not only in an upright position but for a little longer than his usual 1500 meters.  During his training, he has noticed the difference between the short thirty second repetitions on the ice and the long runs required for marathon endurance.

In a recent interview, he commented that after a 20 mile training run, “I was like a zombie. I couldn’t function. It was crazy.  I was like, ‘What is wrong with me?’”  One thing that all of his Olympic training has taught him is the power of the mind.  Last week, he tweeted, “The MIND is the most undertrained asset of any athlete. It is the biggest difference between separating those who r GREAT or inconsistent.”

Matt Fitzgerald, long-time running columnist and author, agrees with Ohno.  In his 2007 book Brain Training for Runners, he detailed the role of the brain in controlling our physical endurance.  Traditionally, fatigue used to be considered a breakdown of biochemical balances with the build-up of lactic acid or depletion of glycogen for fuel.  However, research in the 1980s showed that this breakdown did not always occur and that athletes were still able to push through at the end of a race even though they should have been physically exhausted.

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Little Old Ladies May Want Athletes To Help Them Cross The Road

Photo credit: Beckman Institute CAVE

Boy Scouts just got some competition.  Now, when little, old ladies need to cross a busy street, they should find a well-trained athlete to do the job, according to University of Illinois researchers. 


In a test of skill transfer, Laura Chaddock, a researcher at the Beckman Institute’s Human Perception and Performance lab, and her team pushed a bunch of college students out into busy traffic to see how well they could navigate the oncoming cars... well, sort of. 

With the help of a virtual 3D environment called the CAVE, volunteer pedestrians can step into a simulated city street scene, seeing traffic whiz by on three surrounding screens, while walking on a synchronized treadmill.  Failure here does not end up in a trip the hospital, just a system reset.


Of the 36 college student participants, half were student-athletes at Illinois, an NCAA Division 1 school, representing a wide variety of sports, including cross-country running, baseball, swimming, tennis, wrestling, soccer and gymnastics. The other half were just regular students matched for similar age, GPA and video game prowess.  

Chaddock hypothesized that the athletes would have the edge in street crossing given their training in busy, attention-demanding sport environments.  Previous studies have found that athletes outperform non-athletes on sport-specific tests of attention, memory, and speed.  


“We predicted that an elite soccer player, for example, not only shows an ability to multitask and process incoming information quickly on a fast-paced soccer field by running, kicking, attending to the clock, noting the present offensive and defensive formations, executing a play, and finding open players to whom to pass” Chaddock wrote.  “He or she also shows these skills in the context of common real world tasks.”


When the students stepped into the CAVE, they encountered a busy city street with cars and trucks zooming by at 40-50 mph.  They were asked to cross the street when they thought it was safe, but could only walk briskly with no sprinting.  To make it more interesting, (and realistic), the students were also given an iPod to listen to music, then a cell phone with an incoming call to distract their attention even more.


The team was correct in its prediction as the athletes completed more successful crossings than non-athletes by a significant margin.  But it wasn’t because the athletes were faster (they were limited to walking) or because they displayed better agility or moves.  Maybe it was because their advanced “field vision” was able to scan the environment for patterns and opportunities to cross better than the untrained eyes of the other students.


“While efficiency of information processing may be one cognitive mechanism underlying athlete and non-athlete differences in street crossing performance,” Chaddock noted,  “additional research is needed to characterize other cognitive factors that play a role in the cognitively complex multitask paradigm that involves attention, speed, working memory and inhibition.”

One other finding of the study confirmed what is probably already obvious.  Students who were talking on the phone when crossing the street were much more likely to not make it to the other side.


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Back To The Beginning

It was just over three years ago that I wrote a short article called "The Sports Cognition Framework" for my squeaky new blog.  It was one of the first five articles I had ever written and it shows.  However, it captured the core of my passion and interest which is reflected in the name I chose for this blog, Sports Are 80 Percent Mental.  Learning about the connections between skill, psyche, and tactics in sports remains my goal.

Between that simple start and today's post (#185 for those scoring at home), I have wandered all across the spectrum of sports science, sports medicine, sports psychology and fitness research.  Along the way, there was a weekly column for Livescience.com and a few dozen articles for Life's Little Mysteries.

However, the focus of my writing has become blurred.  In a quest to get freelance articles placed online and expand the readership of this blog, I've tried covering an ever-increasing universe of sports research.  As with many endeavors, it is time to refocus on the original intent of this project.  It is time to get back to the beginning.

Most importantly, I value and appreciate your loyal visits to this site and your tweeting, liking and linking of the articles you enjoy.  I hope that will continue but wanted to give you a heads-up that future articles will be centered on the core concept of sports cognition.  Focused quality over quantity will be my mantra.

To that end, what questions do you have?  Have you thought about this stuff, too?  To be more specific, currently in the sports training world there is the popular, yet more general theory of "practice makes perfect" skill development, along with practical mental coaching tips and tricks.  What drives me, though, is drilling down much further into the brain-body connection and picking apart the root causes of sports expertise.

The research is there, buried in academic journals.  If it can be extracted, explained and extended out to coaches, parents and players, then we can break down some traditional training myths while developing a better understanding of the sports we love.

So, my humble request is that you give the more specific 80% Mental a chance by visiting, keeping your RSS subscription, and joining the conversation both here and on our Facebook page.

Thanks!
Dan

P.S. My breakthrough to re-purpose my work was inspired by a new manifesto from Steven Pressfield, appropriately titled, Do The Work.  The Kindle version is now selling at the very reasonable price of free, thanks to Seth Godin and the Domino Project.  I highly recommend it!

Soccer Robots Are Getting Smarter At RoboCup

(Credit: Image courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University)

Robot soccer players from Carnegie Mellon University competing in this month's RoboCup 2010 world championship in Singapore should be able to out-dribble their opponents, thanks to a new algorithm that helps them to predict the ball's behavior based on physics principles.

That means that the CMDragons, the Carnegie Mellon team that competes in RoboCup's fast-paced Small-Size League, likely will be able to out-maneuver their opponents and find creative solutions to game situations that could even surprise their programmers. It's possible that the physics-based planning algorithm also might enable the players to invent some new kicks. "Over the years, we have developed many successful teams of robot soccer players, but we believe that the physics-based planning algorithm is a particularly noteworthy accomplishment," said Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science and leader of Carnegie Mellon's two robot soccer teams.

"Past teams have drawn from a repertoire of pre-programmed behaviors to play their matches, planning mostly to avoid obstacles and acting with reactive strategies. To reach RoboCup's goal of creating robot teams that can compete with human teams, we need robots that can plan a strategy using models of their capabilities as well as the capabilities of others, and accurate predictions of the state of a constantly changing game," said Veloso, who is president of the International RoboCup Federation.

 In addition to the Small-Size League team, which uses wheeled robots less than six inches high, Carnegie Mellon fields a Standard Platform League team that uses 22-inch-tall humanoid robots as players. Both teams will join more than 500 other teams with about 3,000 participants when they converge on Singapore June 19-25 for RoboCup 2010, the world's largest robotics and artificial intelligence event.

RoboCup includes five different robot soccer leagues, as well as competitions for search-and-rescue robots, for assistive robots and for students up to age 19. The CMDragons have been strong competitors at RoboCup, winning in 2006 and 2007 and finishing second in 2008. Last year, the team lost in the quarterfinals because of a programming glitch, but had dominated teams up to that point with the help of a preliminary version of the physics-based planning algorithm.

"Physics-based planning gives us an advantage when a robot is dribbling the ball and needs to make a tight turn, or any other instance that requires an awareness of the dynamics of the ball," said Stefan Zickler, a newly minted Ph.D. in computer science who developed the algorithm for his thesis. "Will the ball stick with me when I turn? How fast can I turn? These are questions that the robots previously could never answer."

The algorithm could enable the robots to concoct some new kicks, including bank shots, Zickler said. But the computational requirements for kick planning are greater than for dribbling, so limited computational power and time will keep this use to a minimum.

Each Small-Size League team consists of five robots. The CMDragon robots include two kicking mechanisms -- one for flat kicks and another for chip shots. They also are equipped with a dribble bar that exerts backspin on the ball. Each team builds their own players; Michael Licitra, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center, built the CMDragons' highly capable robots. Like many robots in the league, the CMDragons have omni-directional wheels for tight, quick turns. In addition to physics-based planning, the CMDragons are preparing to use a more aggressive strategy than in previous years.

"We've noticed that in our last few matches against strong teams, the ball has been on our side of the field way too much," Zickler said. "We need to be more opportunistic. When no better option is available, we may just take a shot at the goal even if we don't have a clear view of it."

"Figuring out how to get robots to coordinate with each other and to do so in environments with high uncertainty is one of the grand challenges facing artificial intelligence," Veloso said. "RoboCup is focusing the energies of many smart young minds on solving this problem, which ultimately will enable using distributed intelligence technology in the general physical world."

Source: Carnegie Mellon University

See also: Take Your Brain To The Gym and Kids Who Exercise Can Get Better Grades

Which Comes First For Athletes - Money Or Motivation?

Whether it's for money, marbles or chalk, the brains of reward-driven people keep their game faces on, helping them win at every step of the way. Surprisingly, they win most often when there is no reward.  That's the finding of neuroscientists at Washington University in St. Louis, who tested 31 randomly selected subjects with word games, some of which had monetary rewards of either 25 or 75 cents per correct answer, others of which had no money attached.

Subjects were given a short list of five words to memorize in a matter of seconds, then a 3.5-second interval or pause, then a few seconds to respond to a solitary word that either had been on the list or had not. Test performance had no consequence in some trials, but in others, a computer graded the responses, providing an opportunity to win either 25 cent or 75 cents for quick and accurate answers. Even during these periods, subjects were sometimes alerted that their performance would not be rewarded on that trial.

Prior to testing, subjects were submitted to a battery of personality tests that rated their degree of competitiveness and their sensitivity to monetary rewards.

Designed to test the hypothesis that excitement in the brains of the most monetary-reward-sensitive subjects would slacken during trials that did not pay, the study is co-authored by Koji Jimura, PhD, a post-doctoral researcher, and Todd Braver, PhD, a professor, both based in psychology in Arts & Sciences. Braver is also a member of the neuroscience program and radiology department in the university's School of Medicine.
But the researchers found a paradoxical result: the performance of the most reward-driven individuals was actually most improved -- relative to the less reward-driven -- in the trials that paid nothing, not the ones in which there was money at stake.

Even more striking was that the brain scans taken using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) showed a change in the pattern of activity during the non-rewarded trials within the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), located right behind the outer corner of the eyebrow, an area that is strongly linked to intelligence, goal-driven behavior and cognitive strategies. The change in lateral PFC activity was statistically linked to the extra behavioral benefits observed in the reward-driven individuals.

The researchers suggest that this change in lateral PFC activity patterns represents a flexible shift in response to the motivational importance of the task, translating this into a superior task strategy that the researchers term "proactive cognitive control." In other words, once the rewarding motivational context is established in the brain indicating there is a goal-driven contest at hand, the brain actually rallies its neuronal troops and readies itself for the next trial, whether it's for money or not.

The brain's lateral prefrontal cortex (in yellow) shows heightened and long-lasting activity in people more driven by rewards, even when a reward is not offered. (Credit: Koji Jimura)

"It sounds reasonable now, but when I happened upon this result, I couldn't believe it because we expected the opposite results," says Jimura, first author of the paper. "I had to analyze the data thoroughly to persuade myself. The important finding of our study is that the brains of these reward- sensitive individuals do not respond to the reward information on individual trials. Instead, it shows that they have persistent motivation, even in the absence of a reward. You'd think you'd have to reward them on every trial to do well. But it seems that their brains recognized the rewarding motivational context that carried over across all the trials."

The finding sheds more light on the workings of the lateral PFC and provides potential behavioral clues about personality, motivation, goals and cognitive strategies. The research has important implications for understanding the nature of persistent motivation, how the brain creates such states, and why some people seem to be able to use motivation more effectively than others. By understanding the brain circuitry involved, it might be possible to create motivational situations that are more effective for all individuals, not just the most reward-driven ones, or to develop drug therapies for individuals that suffer from chronic motivational problems.

Their results are published April 26 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Everyone knows of competitive people who have to win, whether in a game of HORSE, golf or the office NCAA basketball tournament pool. The findings might tell researchers something about the competitive drive.

The researchers are interested in the signaling chain that ignites the prefrontal cortex when it acts on reward-driven impulses, and they speculate that the brain chemical dopamine could be involved. That could be a potential direction of future studies. Dopamine neurons, once thought to be involved in a host of pleasurable situations, but now considered more of learning or predictive signal, might respond to cues that let the lateral PFC know that it's in for something good. This signal might help to keep information about the goals, rules or best strategies for the task active in mind to increase the chances of obtaining the desired outcome.

In the context of this study, when a 75-cent reward is available for a trial, the dopamine-releasing neurons could be sending signals to the lateral PFC that "jump start" it to do the right procedures to get a reward.
"It would be like the dopamine neurons recognize a cup of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, and tell the lateral PFC the right action strategy to get the reward -- to grab a spoon and bring the ice cream to your mouth," says Braver. "We think that the dopamine neurons fires to the cue rather than the reward itself, especially after the brain learns the relationship between the two. We'd like to explore that some more."

They also are interested in the "reward carryover state," or the proactive cognitive strategy that keeps the brain excited even in gaps, such as pauses between trials or trials without rewards. They might consider a study in which rewards are far fewer.

"It's possible we'd see more slackers with less rewards," Braver says. "That might have an effect on the reward carryover state. There are a host of interesting further questions that this work brings up which we plan to pursue."


Source: Washington University in St. Louis

See also: The Big Mo' - Momentum In Sports and Tiger's Brain Is Bigger Than Ours

Sports Fans Have Selective Memories

In a novel study that used historical tape of a thrilling overtime basketball game between Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brain researchers at Duke have found that fans remember the good things their team did much better than the bad.  It's serious science, aimed at understanding the links between emotion and memory that might affect Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and how well people recall their personal histories.

Struggling to find a way to measure a person's brain while subjecting them to powerful emotions, Duke scientists hit on the idea of using basketball fans who live and die with each three-pointer. Using game film gives researchers a way to see the brain deal with powerful, rapid-fire positive and negative emotions, without creating any ethical concerns.

"You can get much more emotional intensity with a basketball film than you could ethically otherwise," said study co-author David Rubin, the Juanita M. Kreps Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke. Similar studies, for example, might use pictures of flowers versus mutilated bodies.

Two dozen college-aged men from both Duke and UNC who had passed a basketball literacy test to determine their true fandom were shown an edited tape of the Feb. 3, 2000 game at UNC's Dean Smith Center, which Duke won 90-86 in overtime. They watched the full game three times with a few like-minded friends, and then went into an MRI machine individually to watch a series of 12-second clips leading up to a shot. Each of the 64 taped segments ends just as a player releases the shot, and the subjects had to answer whether it went in the basket or not.

 Test subjects were more accurate at remembering a successful shot by their own team than a miss by their team or a successful shot by the other team. Positive emotion improved their memory and "broadened their attention," according to neuroscientist Kevin LaBar, who co-authored the study, which appeared in the Feb. 10 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Subjects watched game video that froze just as a shot was released and had to recall if  it went in or not. | Courtesy of Duke Athletics

What the researchers saw in the MRI scan is multiple areas of the brain being recruited to assemble a memory. The fan's connection to the game includes an emotional component from the amygdala, a memory component from the hippocampus, and some empathy from the pre-frontal cortex as the subject feels some relation to the player or to the other fans on his side, LaBar said. Some of the sensory-motor areas light up, too, as if the subject is imagining himself as the shooter. Brain areas that control attention were more active for plays that benefitted the fan's team than for those that did not.

These brain regions function together to improve memory storage, particularly for emotionally intense plays, said LaBar, who is an associate professor of psychology & neuroscience.

Unfortunately, traumatic events can be stored in memory the same way, making them persistent and difficult to handle, said Rubin. "Brain imaging provides details we could not get with earlier technologies, such as studies of brain damage."

Ongoing studies by the same researchers are monitoring fans in real time as they watch a game to get a glimpse of what brain areas are involved in forming positive and negative memories in the first place. Rubin would also like to see how the brains of emotionally impaired and depressed people might respond differently.

A pilot study for the basketball experiment included a half-dozen women who had passed the super-fan test, but even after five or six showings of the game, their recall of the shots was too low to be useful. The researchers aren't sure why that happened, but would like to try again with women who played basketball or by using a tape of a women's basketball game to see if that makes a difference.

Rubin said the Duke fans and the UNC fans did equally well on the recall test, though the Duke fans tended to answer quicker and tended to be more sure of themselves. "They thought there were better, but they weren't," he said. Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology & neuroscience, Anne Botzung, a postdoctoral fellow, and Amanda Miles, who is now a graduate student, also participated in the research, which was supported by two grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health.

Source: Duke University

See also: The Cognitive Benefits Of Being A Sports Fan

Top Athletes Can React Quicker

A study conducted by scientists at Brunel University and at the University of Hong Kong has found that expert sportsmen are quicker to observe and react to their opponents' moves than novice players, exhibiting enhanced activation of the cortical regions of the brain.

The results of the study, which appear in the most recent issue of NeuroReport, show that more experienced sports players are better able to detect early anticipatory clues from opposing players' body movements, giving them a split second advantage in preparing an appropriate response.
 
Recent studies have demonstrated how expertise affects a range of perceptual-motor skills, from the imitation of hand actions in guitarists, to the learning of action sequences in pianists and dancers. In these studies, experts showed increased activation in the cortical networks of the brain compared with novices.

Fast ball sports are particularly dependent on time-critical predictions of the actions of other players and of the consequences of those actions, and for several decades, sports scientists have sought to understand how expertise in these sports is developed.

This most recent study, headed by Dr Michael Wright, was carried out by observing the reaction time and brain activity of badminton players of varying degrees of ability, from recreational players to international competitors. Participants were shown video clips of an opposing badminton player striking a shuttlecock and asked to predict where the shot would land.

In all participants, activation was observed in areas of the brain previously associated with the observation, understanding and preparation of human action; expert players showed enhanced brain activity in these regions and responded more quickly to the movements of their opponents.

Expertise in sports is not only dependent on physical prowess, then, but also on enhanced brain activity in these key areas of the brain. The observations made during this study will certainly have implications for how we perceive the nature of expertise in sport and perhaps even change the way athletes train.

See also: The Cognitive Benefits of Being a Sports Fan and How To See A 130 MPH Tennis Serve

Source:  Wolters Kluwer Health / Lippincott Williams & Wilkins and Functional MRI reveals expert-novice differences during sport-related anticipation : Neuroreport

For Rock Climbers, Endurance Is Key To Performance

The maximum time an athlete is able to continue climbing to exhaustion may be the only determinant of his/her performance. A new European study, led by researchers from the University of Granada, the objective of which is to help trainers and climbers design training programmes for this type of sport, shows this to be the case.


Until now, performance indicators for climbing have been low body fat percentage and grip strength. Furthermore, existing research was based on the comparison of amateur and expert climbers. Now, a new study carried out with 16 high-level climbers breaks with this approach and reveals that the time it takes for an athlete to become exhausted is the only indicator of his/her performance.

Vanesa España Romero was the first author of the work and is a researcher at the University of Granada.

The study, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, analyses the physiological parameters that determine performance in this sport at its highest level. The participants, eight women with an average rating of 7a (the scale of difficulty of a climbing route is graded from 5 to 9, with sub-grades of a, b and c) and eight men with an average rating of 8a, were divided into an "expert group" and an "elite group."

The researchers assessed the climbers with body composition tests (weight, height, body mass index, body fat %, bone mineral density, and bone mineral content), kinanthropometry (length of arms, hands and fingers, bone mineral density and bone mineral content of the forearm), and physical fitness tests (flexibility, strength of the upper and lower body and aerobic capacity measured at a climbing centre).

The results show there to be no significant differences between expert and elite climbers in any of the tests performed, except in climbing time to exhaustion and in bone mineral density, both of which were higher in the elite group. "Therefore, the maximum climbing time to exhaustion of an athlete is the sole determinant of performance," the researcher confirms.

Sport climbing began as a form of traditional climbing in the mid 80s, and is now a sport in its own right. The International Federation of Sport Climbing is currently requesting its inclusion as an Olympic sport.

The increase in the number of climbers and the proliferation of climbing centres and competitions have contributed to its interest in recent years, although there is limited scientific literature on climbing effort.

The most important research relates to energy consumption (ergospirometry, heart rate and lactic acid blood concentrations), the designation of maximum strength and local muscular resistance of climbers (dynamometry and electromyography), and to establishing anthropometric characteristics.

According to experts, a fundamental characteristic of sport climbing is its "vertical dimension," making it unique given its postural organisation in space, and from a physiological point of view, the effect a gravitational load has on movements.

In short, to complete a climb successfully, athletes should maintain their effort for as long as possible to improve their chances of reaching the ultimate goal.

Sources: FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology and Climbing time to exhaustion is a determinant of climbing performance in high-level sport climbers. European Journal of Applied Physiology.

Virtual Reality Lab Proves How Fly Balls Are Caught

While baseball fans still rank "The Catch" by Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series as one of the greatest baseball moments of all times, scientists see the feat as more of a puzzle: How does an outfielder get to the right place at the right time to catch a fly ball?


Thousands of fans (and hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers) saw Mays turn his back on a fly ball, race to the center field fence and catch the ball over his shoulder, seemingly a precise prediction of a fly ball's path that led his team to victory. According to a recent article in the Journal of Vision ("Catching Flyballs in Virtual Reality: A Critical Test of the Outfielder Problem"), the "outfielder problem" represents the definitive question of visual-motor control. How does the brain use visual information to guide action?

To test three theories that might explain an outfielder's ability to catch a fly ball, researcher Philip Fink, PhD, from Massey University in New Zealand and Patrick Foo, PhD, from the University of North Carolina at Ashville programmed Brown University's virtual reality lab, the VENLab, to produce realistic balls and simulate catches. The team then lobbed virtual fly balls to a dozen experienced ball players.

"The three existing theories all predict the same thing: successful catches with very similar behavior," said Brown researcher William Warren, PhD. "We realized that we could pull them apart by using virtual reality to create physically impossible fly ball trajectories."

Warren said their results support the idea that the ball players do not necessarily predict a ball's landing point based on the first part of its flight, a theory described as trajectory prediction. "Rather than predicting the landing point, the fielder might continuously track the visual motion of the ball, letting it lead him to the right place at the right time," Warren said.

Because the researchers were able to use the virtual reality lab to perturb the balls' vertical motion in ways that would not happen in reality, they were able to isolate different characteristics of each theory. The subjects tended to adjust their forward-backward movements depending on the perceived elevation angle of the incoming ball, and separately move from side to side to keep the ball at a constant bearing, consistent with the theory of optical acceleration cancellation (OAC). The third theory, linear optical trajectory (LOT), predicted that the outfielder will run in a direction that makes the visual image of the ball appear to travel in a straight line, adjusting both forward-backward and side-to-side movements together.

Fink said these results focus on the visual information a ball player receives, and that future studies could bring in other variables, such as the effect of the batter's movements or sound.
"As a first step we chose to concentrate on what seemed likely to be the most important factor," Fink said. "Fielders might also use information such as the batter's swing or the sound of the bat hitting the ball to help guide their movements."

Sources:  Catching fly balls in virtual reality: A critical test of the outfielder problem and Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology

How Nerves Affect Soccer Penalty Kicks

Research by the University of Exeter shows for the first time the effect of anxiety on a soccer player's eye movements while taking a penalty.

The study shows that when penalty takers are anxious they are more likely to look at and focus on the centrally positioned goalkeeper. Due to the tight coordination between gaze control and motor control, shots also tend to centralise, making them easier to save. The research is now published in the December 2009 edition of the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

The researchers attribute this change in eye movements and focus to anxiety. Author Greg Wood, a PhD student in the University of Exeter’s School of Sport and Health Sciences said: “During a highly stressful situation, we are more likely to be distracted by any threatening stimuli and focus on them, rather than the task in hand. Therefore, in a stressful penalty shootout, a footballer’s attention is likely to be directed towards the goalkeeper as opposed to the optimal scoring zones (just inside the post). This disrupts the aiming of the shot and increases the likelihood of subsequently hitting the shot towards the goalkeeper, making it easier to save.”

For their study, the researchers focused on 14 members of the University of Exeter football team. They asked the players to perform two series of penalty shots. First, they were simply asked to do their best to score. The researchers made the second series more stressful and more akin to a penalty shoot-out. The players were told that the results would be recorded and shared with the other players and there would be a £50 prize for the best penalty taker.

The players wore special glasses which enabled the researchers to record precise eye movements and analyse the focus of each footballer’s gaze and the amount of time spent looking at different locations in the goal.

The results showed that when anxious, the footballers looked at the goalkeeper significantly earlier and for longer. This change in eye behaviour made players more likely to shoot towards the centre of the goal, making it easier for the keeper to save. The researchers believe that by being made aware of the impact of anxiety on eye movements, and the affect this has on the accuracy of a player’s shot, coaches could address this through training.

Greg Wood continues: “Research shows that the optimum strategy for penalty takers to use is to pick a spot and shoot to it, ignoring the goalkeeper in the process. Training this strategy is likely to build on the tight coordination between eye movements and subsequent actions, making for more accurate shooting. The idea that you cannot recreate the anxiety a penalty taker feels during a shootout is no excuse for not practicing. Do you think other elite performers don’t practice basic aiming shots in darts, snooker or golf for the same reasons? These skills need to be ingrained so they are robust under pressure”.

Source: University of Exeter: Anxiety, Attentional Control, and Performance Impairment in Penalty Kicks.

Ending The Myth Of The Dumb Jock

In the first study to demonstrate a clear positive association between adolescent fitness and adult cognitive performance, Nancy Pedersen of the University of Southern California and colleagues in Sweden find that better cardiovascular health among teenage boys correlates to higher scores on a range of intelligence tests – and more education and income later in life.

"During early adolescence and adulthood, the central nervous system displays considerable plasticity," said Pedersen, research professor of psychology at the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. "Yet, the effect of exercise on cognition remains poorly understood."

Pedersen, lead author Maria Åberg of the University of Gothenburg and the research team looked at data for all 1.2 million Swedish men born between 1950 and 1976 who enlisted for mandatory military service at the age of 18.

In every measure of cognitive functioning they analyzed – from verbal ability to logical performance to geometric perception to mechanical skills – average test scores increased according to aerobic fitness.

However, scores on intelligence tests did not increase along with muscle strength, the researchers found.

"Positive associations with intelligence scores were restricted to cardiovascular fitness, not muscular strength," Pedersen explained, "supporting the notion that aerobic exercise improved cognition through the circulatory system influencing brain plasticity."

The results of the study – in the current issue of PNAS Early Edition – also show the importance of getting healthier between the ages of 15 and 18 while the brain is still changing.

Boys who improved their cardiovascular health between ages 15 to 18 exhibited significantly greater intelligence scores than those who became less healthy over the same time period. Over a longer term, boys who were most fit at the age of 18 were more likely to go to college than their less fit counterparts.

"Direct causality cannot be established. However, the fact that we demonstrated associations between cognition and cardiovascular fitness but not muscle strength . . . and the longitudinal prediction by cardiovascular fitness on subsequent academic achievement, speak in favor of a cardiovascular effect on brain function," Pedersen said.

In their sample, the researchers looked at 260,000 full-sibling pairs, 3,000 sets of twins, and more than 1,400 sets of identical twins. Having relatives enabled the research team to evaluate whether the results might reflect shared family environments or genetic influences.

Even among identical twin pairs, the link between cardiovascular health and intelligence remained strong, according to the study. Thus, the results are not a reflection of genetic influences on cardiovascular health and intelligence. Rather, the twin results give further support to the likelihood that there is indeed a causal relationship, Pedersen explained.

"The results provide scientific support for educational policies to maintain or increase physical education in school curricula," Pedersen said. "Physical exercise should be an important instrument for public health initiatives to optimize cognitive performance, as well as disease prevention at the society level."

Source: University of Southern California

How To See A 130 MPH Tennis Serve

For most of us mere mortals, if an object was coming at us at 120-150 mph, we would be lucky to just get out of the way. Players in this week's U.S. Open tennis tournament not only see the ball coming at them with such speed, but plan where they want to place their return shot and swing their racquet in time to make contact. At 125 mph from 78 feet away, that gives them a little less than a half second to accomplish the task.

How do they do it? Well, they're better than you and I, for one. But science has some more specific answers to offer.

Swiss researchers have concluded that expert tennis players, like their own Roger Federer, have an advantage in certain visual perception skills, while UK scientists have shown how trained animals — and presumably humans — can rely on a superior internal model of motion to predict the path of a fast moving object.

For any sport that involves a moving object, athletes must learn the three levels of response for interceptive timing tasks. 

• First, there is a basic reaction, also known as optometric reaction (in other words, see it and get out of the way).

• Next, there is a perceptual reaction, meaning you actually can identify the object coming at you and can put it in some context (for example: That is a tennis ball coming at you and not a bird swooping out of the sky).

• Finally, there is a cognitive reaction, meaning you know what is coming at you and you have a plan of what to do with it (return the ball with top-spin down the right line).

This cognitive skill is usually sport-specific and learned over years of tactical training. Obviously, professional tennis players are at the expert cognitive stage and have a plan for most shots.

But, in order to reach that cognitive stage, they first need to have excellent optometric and perceptual skills.

Leila Overney and her team at the Brain Mind Institute of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) studied whether expert tennis players have better visual perception abilities than other athletes and non-tennis players. Typically, motor skill research compares experts to non-experts and tries to deduce what the experts are doing differently to excel.

They carried out seven visual tests, covering a wide range of perceptual functions including motion and temporal processing, object detection and attention, each requiring the participants to push buttons based on their responses to the computer-based tasks and each related to a particular aspect of visual perception.

In this study, which was detailed in the journal PLOS One, Overney wanted to see if the perceptual skills of the tennis players were not only more advanced than non-tennis players but also other athletes of a similar fitness level, (in this case triathletes), to eliminate any benefits of just being in top physical shape.  To eliminate the cognitive knowledge difference between the groups, she used seven non-sport specific visual tests which measured different forms of perception including motion and temporal processing, object detection and attention. The participants watched the objects on computer screens and pushed buttons per the specific test instructions.

The tennis players showed significant advantages in the speed discrimination and motion detection tests, while they were no better in the other categories.

"Our results suggest that speed processing and temporal processing is often faster and more accurate in tennis players," Overney writes. They even scored better then their peers, the triathletes. "This is precisely why we added the group of triathletes as controls because they train as hard as tennis players but have lower visual processing demands in their sport."

Still, are the tennis players really just relying on their visual advantage when given that half second to react? Have their years of practice created an internal cognitive model that anticipates and predicts the path of an object?

Nadia Cerminara worked on that question. Cerminara, of the University of Bristol (UK), designed an experiment that taught household cats to reach with their paw at a moving target. If they successfully touched the target, they received a food reward.

After training the cats to be successful, she recorded their neuronal activity in their lateral cerebellum. Then, she measured the activity again but would block the vision of the cats for 200-300 milliseconds while performing the task. Despite the lapse in visual information, the neuron firing activity remained the same as before. Cerminara concluded that an internal model had been used to bridge the gap and provide a prediction of where the object was headed.

The study was published in the Journal of Physiology.

So, when faced with a blistering serve, science suggests that players like Federer not only rely on their superior perceptual skills, but also have created an even faster internal simulation of a ball's flight that can help position them for a winning return.

Of course, you may want to avoid the world's fastest server, Andy Roddick, especially when he's upset from a bad line call (see video). :-)

Running Addicts Need Their Fix

Just as there is the endorphin rush of a "runner's high," there can also be the valley of despair when something prevents avid runners from getting their daily fix of miles.

Now, researchers at Tufts University may have confirmed this addiction by showing that an intense running regimen in rats can release brain chemicals that mimic the same sense of euphoria as opiate use. They propose that moderate exercise could be a "substitute drug" for human heroin and morphine addicts.

Given all of the benefits of exercise, many people commit to an active running routine. Somewhere during a longer, more intense run when stored glycogen is depleted, the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus release endorphins that can provide that "second wind" that keeps a runner going.

This sense of being able to run all day is similar to the pain-relieving state that opiates provide, scientists have known. So a team led by Robin Kanarek, professor of psychology at Tufts University, wondered whether they could also produce similar withdrawal symptoms, which would indicate that intense running and opiate abuse have a similar biochemical effect.

Running rodents
The team divided 44 male rats and 40 female rats into four groups. One group was housed inside an exercise wheel, and another group had none. Each group was divided again, either allowing access to food for only one hour per day or for 24 hours per day. Though tests on humans would be needed to confirm this research, rodents are typically good analogues to illuminate how the human body works.
The rodents existed in these environments for several weeks. Finally, all groups were given Naloxone, a drug used to counteract an opiate overdose and produce immediate withdrawal symptoms.

The active rats displayed a significantly higher level of withdrawal symptoms than the inactive rats. Also, the active rats that were only allowed food for one hour per day exercised the most and showed the most intense reaction to Naloxone. This scenario mimics the actions of humans suffering from anorexia athletica, also known as hypergymnasia, that causes an obsession not only with weight but also with continuous exercise to lose weight.

"Exercise, like drugs of abuse, leads to the release of neurotransmitters such as endorphins and dopamine, which are involved with a sense of reward," Kanarek said. "As with food intake and other parts of life, moderation seems to be the key. Exercise, as long as it doesn't interfere with other aspects of one's life, is a good thing with respect to both physical and mental health."

The study appears in the August issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, published by the American Psychological Association.

Treatment ideas
Kanarek hopes to use these results to design treatment programs for heroin and morphine addicts that substitute the all-natural high of exercise in place of the drugs.  "These findings, in conjunction with results of studies demonstrating that intake of drugs of abuse and running activates the endogenous opioid and dopamine reward systems, suggest that it might be possible to substitute drug-taking behavior with naturally rewarding behavior," she writes.

She also wants to do further research on understanding the neurophysiology of extreme eating and exercise disorders. "The high comorbidity of drug abuse and eating disorders provides further evidence of a common neurobiological basis for these disorders," Kanarek concludes.

Tiger's Brain Is Bigger Than Ours

As Tiger Woods heads to Sawgrass for The Players Championship this weekend, mortal golfers wonder what's inside his head that keeps him winning. Well, chances are his brain actually has more gray matter than the average weekend duffer.

Researchers at the University of Zurich have found that expert golfers have a higher volume of the gray-colored, closely packed neuron cell bodies that are known to be involved with muscle control. The good news is that, like Tiger, golfers who start young and commit to years of practice can also grow their brains while their handicaps shrink.

Executing a good golf swing consistently is one of the hardest sport skills to master. Coordinating all of the moving body parts with the right timing requires a brain that has learned from many trial and error repetitions.

In fact, past studies have shown that the number of hours spent practicing is directly related to a golfer's handicap (a calculated number that represents recent playing ability).

Magic number
K. Anders Ericsson, a Florida State professor and the "expert on experts," has spent more than 25 years studying what it takes to become elite in any field, including sports.

The magic number that keeps recurring in Ericsson's studies is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. If someone is willing to dedicate this amount of structured time on any skill, he has the potential to rise to the top.

Some critics argue that practice is good, but we all start with different levels of innate abilities that put some at an early advantage (i.e. the boy who is six feet tall in fourth grade) While that may be true, Ericsson does not want the rest of us to use that as an excuse. "The traditional assumption is that people come into a professional domain, have similar experiences, and the only thing that's different is their innate abilities," he said in an interview with Fast Company. "There's little evidence to support this. With the exception of some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body constrains an individual from reaching an expert level."

So, what happens to the brain after all of that practice?

In the new study, a team led by neuropsychologist Lutz Jäncke compared the brain images of 40 men divided into four groups based on their experience as golfers. They recruited ten professional golfers (with handicaps of 0), ten advanced golfers (handicaps between 1 and 14), ten average golfers (handicaps between 15 and 36) and ten volunteers who had never played golf (not even mini-golf!).

Interviews revealed the "practice makes perfect" correlation between hours of practice and lower handicaps.

Brain scans (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) showed that, indeed, there were structural differences, but not in the linear pattern they imagined. While significant differences existed in total volume of gray matter between the pros and the non-players, there was little difference between the pro and the advanced groups or between the average and non-players groups.

When the researchers combined the pros and the advanced golfers into one group called "expert," and the average and non-players into a second group called "novice," a clear dividing line emerged, showing that practice produces a noticeable step up in the brain's gray matter. This jump comes somewhere between 800-3,000 practice hours.

The results were detailed last month in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Step 1: Grow the brain
Another interesting twist is that the pros reported practicing five to eight times more than the advanced group, while the advanced group practiced only twice as much as the average group.

Yet the big jump in gray matter came after golfers achieved a skill level below a 15 handicap, moving from average to advanced. This is consistent with another study in 2008 that measured gray matter volume in students learning to juggle three balls. After learning to juggle for the first time, their gray matter increased. However, once that initial concept was learned, more advanced juggling tricks did not grow more brain cells.

It's been a long time since Tiger's handicap was 15, so clearly the additional years of practice were necessary to reach the top.  And, all of that gray has produced a lot of green.

Please visit my other sports science stories at LiveScience.com

Take Your Brain To The Gym

The moment of truth has arrived, again. The holidays have passed, the bowl games are over and you have renewed your annual New Year's resolution to get back into shape... for real. Don't worry, you are not alone. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 63 percent of Americans have a Body Mass Index (BMI) in excess of 25 (defined as overweight), while a quarter are greater than 30 (obese).

Its not just kids that benefit from exercise. As we get older, those extra pounds start to affect other areas of our health, contributing to the onset of diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol.

Several new studies in the last month have now built stronger links between our levels of physical activity and the health of our most important body part, the brain. Conditions such as dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and even mild age-related memory loss can be delayed by regular physical activity.

Shrinking brain

According to John Ratey, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of "Spark: the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain" (2008, Little, Brown), "Age happens. Getting older is unavoidable, but falling apart is not."

Starting at age 40, we lose about 5 percent of our brain volume per decade, but then at age 70 other conditions may start to accelerate the deterioration. As we age, our cells are less able to cope with stress from waste products such as free radicals.

In the brain, as this stress claims more neuron cells, the web of interconnections between neurons weakens. As we each have more than one hundred billion neurons with each having oodles of connections to other neurons, this gradual net loss is not as dramatic, at first. However, as we age, if this neurodegenerative process accelerates, then our general focus and memory loss as well as more serious conditions like Alzheimer's may appear.

What the aging brain needs is a pumped-up blood flow. Exercise-induced neurotrophins such as brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), as well as the neurotransmitter dopamine are needed to grow and fertilize new and existing neurons and their synapse connections. Ratay calls BDNF "Miracle-Gro for the brain."

Make new brain cells

Researchers at the National Cheng Kung University Medical College in Taiwan recently tested the effects of BDNF in the brains of mice of different ages. Half were trained to run a maze for 1 hour a day for exercise, while the control group did not exercise.

As expected, the researchers first found that neurogenesis, the creation of new neuron cells in the brain, dropped of dramatically in the middle-aged mice compared with younger mice. They also were able to conclude that exercise significantly slows down the loss of new nerve cells in the middle-aged mice.

Production of neural stem cells improved by approximately 200 percent compared to the middle-aged mice that did not exercise.

Increase blood flow

OK, that was mice. What about humans?  University of North Carolina brain researchers recently found that older adult humans who regularly exercised had increased blood flow in their brains. They compared long-time exercisers with sedentary adults using 3D MRI brain-scanning techniques.

"The active adults had more small blood vessels and improved cerebral blood flow," said the study's senior author, J. Keith Smith, associate professor of radiology at UNC School of Medicine. "These findings further point out the importance of regular exercise to healthy aging."

The research builds on a host of other studies, summarized in an August review, that show a balanced diet and regular exercise can protect the brain and ward off mental disorders.

Helps manage glucose

Finally, in a report released last month, Scott A. Small, associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center, found that levels of blood sugar (glucose) have a direct effect on blood flow in the brain.

By testing 240 elderly volunteers, and using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Small and his colleagues found a correlation between elevated blood glucose levels and decreased cerebral blood flow, in the dentate gyrus, an area in the brain's hippocampus that has a direct effect on our memories. This corresponds with Smith's findings by showing that exercise may help manage glucose levels, which will improve blood flow to the brain.

Small's previous imaging studies have shown that physical exercise causes an improvement in dentate gyrus function.

"By improving glucose metabolism, physical exercise also reduces blood glucose" Small said. "We have a behavioral recommendation — physical exercise."

Please visit my other articles on Livescience.com

Kids Who Exercise Can Get Better Grades

The end of 2008 brings some discouraging news about our kids' brains and brawn. Recent results from an international math and science test show United States students are performing near the middle of the pack compared to other countries, while their levels of obesity continue to climb.

Historically, these two trends were studied independently with plans of action developed for each. However, several researchers and a new book have been making the case for linking these two problems by showing the effects of aerobic exercise not only on a student's fitness level but also on their test scores.

Last month, the latest (2007) TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) scores were released. They compare fourth grade students from 36 countries and eighth grade students from 48 countries. They were tested on subjects that were common to all of the countries, including algebra, geometry, chemistry and physics. Overall, 425,000 students participated in the test, which is administered every four years.

In math, American fourth graders came in at 11th place of the 36 countries while eighth graders scored ninth out of 48. Hong Kong and Taiwan ranked first for fourth grade and eighth grade, respectively.  In science, Singapore topped the list for both fourth grade and eighth grade, with U.S. science students taking eighth place and 11th place.

While the American math scores have improved slightly, the science scores have dropped. In 2003, U.S. fourth graders were in sixth place in the world and eighth graders were in ninth place.

Only 6 percent of U.S. eighth-grade students reached the TIMSS "advanced" level in math, compared to 45 percent of students in Chinese Taipei, 40 percent in Korea, 40 percent in Singapore, 31 percent in Hong Kong, 26 percent in Japan and 10 percent in Hungary.

Regarding student fitness, the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the percentage of overweight or obese 6- to 11-year-olds has tripled since 1980, with more than 125 million children at unhealthy levels.

Leaping backward

Ironically, one of the solutions proposed for raising test scores, No Child Left Behind, encourages schools to focus more of the school day on the core academic subjects while reducing class time in peripheral subjects, like art, music, and physical education.  In fact, only 6 percent of American high schools offer a daily gym class. Yet a 2002 Virginia Tech study showed no relationship between reduced class time in those subjects and higher overall standardized tests.

In his latest book, "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" (2008, Little, Brown), John Ratey, a Harvard clinical associate professor of psychiatry, argues for more physical fitness for students as a cure for not only their obesity but also their academic performance.

"I cannot underestimate how important regular exercise is in improving the function and performance of the brain." Ratey writes. "Exercise stimulates our gray matter to produce Miracle-Gro for the brain." That "Miracle-Gro" is a brain chemical called brain-derived neurotropic factor, or BDNF. When we exercise, our working muscles send chemicals into our bloodstream, including a protein known as IGF-1.

Once in the brain, IGF-1 orders the production of more BDNF. The additional BDNF helps new neurons and their connections grow. In addition, levels of other neurotransmitters are increased after a strenuous exercise session.

"Dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine — all of these are elevated after exercise," says Ratey. "So having a workout will help focus, calming down, and impulsivity — it’s like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin."

Evidence mounts

Research showing a link between fitness and academics is growing. The California Department of Education (CDE) looked for a correlation between fitness scores and test scores. They found that kids who were deemed fit (by a standard test of aerobic capacity, BMI, abdominal strength, trunk strength, upper body strength and overall flexibility) scored twice as well on academic tests as those that were unfit.  In the second year of the study, socio-economic status was taken into account, to possibly eliminate that variable as an explanation. As expected, those in the upper-income brackets scored better overall on the academic tests, but within the lower-income set of students, the same results were observed — kids who were more fit performed better academically.

Charles Hillman, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Illinois, was able to duplicate these findings with 259 third and fifth-grade Illinois students. His team also noticed that two of the tests, BMI and aerobic capacity, were significantly more influential to higher academic scores than the other four fitness factors. Digging deeper, he isolated two groups of 20 students, one fit and the other unfit. They were given cognitive tests of attention, working memory and processing speed while their brain's electrical activity was being measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG) test.

The fit kids’ brains showed more activity in the prefrontal cortex, known for its executive function and control over other brain processes.

So, just send the kids on a fast jog and they will ace all of their tests?  Not quite.

“The exercise itself doesn’t make you smarter, but it puts the brain of the learners in the optimal position for them to learn,” Ratey said. “There’s no way to say for sure that improves learning capacity for kids, but it certainly seems to correlate to that."

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Hockey Hits Are Hurting More

One painful lesson every National Hockey League rookie learns is to keep your head up when skating through the neutral zone. If you don't, you will not see the 4700 joules of kinetic energy skating at you with bad intentions.

During an October 25th game, Brandon Sutter, rookie center for the Carolina Hurricanes, never saw Doug Weight, veteran center of the New York Islanders, sizing him up for a hit that resulted in a concussion and an overnight stay in the hospital.  Hockey purists will say that it was a "clean hit" and Weight was not penalized.

Six days before that incident, the Phoenix Coyotes' Kurt Sauer smashed Andrei Kostitsyn of the Montreal Canadiens into the sideboards. Kostitsyn had to be stretchered off of the ice and missed two weeks of games with his concussion. Sauer skated away unhurt and unpenalized. See video here.

Big hits have always been part of hockey, but the price paid in injuries is on the rise. According to data released last month at the National Academy of Neuropsychology's Sports Concussion Symposium in New York, 759 NHL players have been diagnosed with a concussion since 1997. For the ten seasons studied, that works out to about 76 players per season and 31 concussions per 1,000 hockey games. During the 2006-07 season, that resulted in 760 games missed by those injured players, an increase of 41% from 2005-06. Researchers have found two reasons for the jump in severity, the physics of motion and the ever-expanding hockey player.

In his book, The Physics of Hockey, Alain Haché, professor of physics at Canada's University of Moncton, aligns the concepts of energy, momentum and the force of impact to explain the power of mid-ice and board collisions.

As a player skates from a stop to full speed, his mass accelerates at an increasing velocity. The work his muscles contribute is transferred into kinetic energy which can and will be transferred or dissipated when the player stops, either through heat from the friction of his skates on the ice, or through a transfer of energy to whatever he collides with, either the boards or another player.

The formula for kinetic energy, K = (1/2)mass x velocity², represents the greater impact that a skater's speed (velocity) has on the energy produced. It is this speed that makes hockey a more dangerous sport than other contact sports, like football, where average player sizes are larger but they are moving at slower speeds (an average of 23 mph for hockey players in full stride compared to about 16 mph for an average running back in the open field).

So, when two players collide, where does all of that kinetic energy go? First, let's look at two billiard balls, with the exact same mass, shape and rigid structure. When two balls collide on the table, we can ignore the mass variable and just look at velocity. If the ball in motion hits another ball that is stationary, then the ball at rest will receive more kinetic energy from the moving ball so that the total energy is conserved. This will send the stationary ball rolling across the table while the first ball almost comes to a stop as it has transferred almost all of its stored energy.

Unfortunately, when human bodies collide, they don't just bounce off of each other. This "inelastic" collision results in the transfer of kinetic energy being absorbed by bones, tissues and organs. The player with the least stored energy will suffer the most damage from the hit, especially if that player has less "body cushion" to absorb the impact.

To calculate your own real world energy loss scenario, visit the Exploratorium's "Science of Hockey" calculator. For both Sutter and Kostitsyn, they received checks from players who outweighed them by 20 pounds and were skating faster.

The average mass and acceleration variables are also growing as today's NHL players are getting bigger and faster. In a study released in September, Art Quinney and colleagues at the University of Alberta tracked the physiological changes of a single NHL team over 26 years, representing 703 players. Not surprisingly, they found that defensemen are now taller and heavier with higher aerobic capacity while forwards were younger and faster. Goaltenders were actually smaller with less body mass but had better flexibility. However, the increase in physical size and fitness did not correspond with team success on the ice. But the checks sure hurt a lot more now. 

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