No longer content to build on what the genetic lottery gave them, athletes are increasingly eager to reprogram and redesign themselves down to their molecular building blocks, drawing on a range of scientific advancements that, by comparison, make old-school performance enhancers like anabolic steroids seem downright primitive. But as the societal importance of sport grows, and the financial rewards with it, the quest for higher, stronger, faster has ventured into new and uncertain territory. “The difference is remarkable.”Īthletes have always pushed their bodies’ physical limits. “We’ve seen elite players double the speed with which they can do these things,” says Faubert. The NeuroTracker’s chamber can be customized by sport-hockey players learn to perform their tasks while stickhandling and skating on a treadmill-like surface-and while it doesn’t turn every athlete into an MMOT savant, peer-reviewed studies suggest the program boosts the performance of even weekend warriors. A regimen of 15 five-minute sessions can condition neural circuits to process the chaos of in-game action more efficiently, says Jocelyn Faubert, the Université de Montréal neuropsychologist who designed it, and that frees up brain matter for other functions. More than a diagnostic instrument, the NeuroTracker serves as a training tool that effectively reprograms an athlete’s brain, establishing abilities that nature never bequeathed. But for others, it represented an opportunity to improve their game. At random intervals, the system would pause and require the players to show where the target balls were, and over time, the animation sped up, increasing the degree of difficulty.įor neurologically gifted players, a chance to strut their stuff on this system, known as a NeuroTracker, meant the chance to get drafted in the first round by the Vancouver Canucks, the team that brought the device to the combine in Toronto.
The idea was to determine which players excel in so-called “multiple moving object tracking” (MMOT)-a prized faculty in high-speed team sports such as hockey, football and rugby. Inside a dimly lit, tent-like chamber, each watched through 3D glasses as a swarm of identical yellow balls swirled, surged and faded on a screen before them, straining to keep tabs on “target” balls the system had identified to them before the exercise began. Last spring, junior-aged hockey players attending the annual NHL Scouting Combine-a festival of prodding and examining intended to help teams make their draft selections-took part in a novel test.
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