The Brazilian star says he adopted moves from football video games and assimilated them into his play with a teammate, Ganso, at Santos. Richard Fitzpatrick is the author of El Clásico: Barcelona v Real Madrid, Football’s Greatest Rivalry (Bloomsbury 2012) JUST A GAME It could be that video games – apart from being a way to unwind before a World Cup final – become an integral part of footballers’ training-and-fitness regime another counterintuitive way to get an edge, such as doing yoga or ballet, one which appeals to their obsessive, competitive nature and draws on keen eyesight, spatial awareness and a greater ability to “hyper-focus” than average undergrads. Good vision helps them to pick up on visual clues so they can make better decisions, such as picking the right moment to pinch a ball from the feet of a winger. It is not that top athletes have superior reaction times to the rest of us, it’s that they have better eyesight. “If you have poor vision, your contrast sensitivity goes down,” says Kirschen. They found that soccer players, who track flying objects at a distance, scored well on contrast sensitivity, which is the ability to pick a target out of a background and is a feature of action-based video games such as Call of Duty. That innate ability of football’s finest playmakers like Pirlo to read a game, to end up in the right place at the right time, is a function of good visual memory.ĭavid G Kirschen, an optometrist and a colleague, Daniel M Laby, studied US Olympians from the 2008 Beijing Games. We know, for instance, that surgeons who play a lot of video games, which make demands on their perceptual motor system, perform better and have better accuracy they show slightly better surgical technique.”įaubert says that a footballer’s working memory is used in the same manner for playing video games as it is for making decisions on a football pitch – the ability to focus intensely, to track multiple elements, to anticipate things that are out of sight but remain in play, to make calculations and predictions. “I know,” he says, “that if you play games like Medal of Honor, for instance, your capacity for spatial thinking improves. He makes the point that the brain is like a muscle. Is it possible to train a footballer’s brain? Professor Ian Robertson is a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. We did the NeuroTracker training and measured (pre and post) their ability to do passing and decision-making on the pitch and they improved while the other groups did not improve.” “We separated the soccer players into three groups. The conclusion he draws from the NeuroTracker, which has been used as a training device by Manchester United, is that it can arguably improve players’ concentration during a game. There’s movement, but there’s movement in real life, too.”
![nu train neurotracker nu train neurotracker](https://helpdeskgeek.com/wp-content/pictures/2021/02/5-Discord-Add-Game-Menu.png)
#Nu train neurotracker professional#
“What really blew me away,” he says, “is that professional footballers learnt so much faster for this task that really had no specific sports element. He tested 51 English Premier League players against two other test groups – elite amateurs, including athletes from an Olympic training centre, and 33 university students who were not athletes.įaubert discovered that a professional footballer can “hyper-focus” better than a typical undergraduate student (and top athletes).
![nu train neurotracker nu train neurotracker](https://images.wondershare.com/filmora/article-images/discord-user-interface.jpg)
![nu train neurotracker nu train neurotracker](http://ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2012/10/31/10077032/gI_121593_aaron.jpg)
![nu train neurotracker nu train neurotracker](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/16750d86-1e48-40cd-a225-fb549fee2bed-160624112320/95/introducing-neurotracker-5-638.jpg)
Players have to index a number of spheres floating in 3D space. Professor Jocelyn Faubert, a psychophysicist at the University of Montreal, has devised a computer game, a type of graphical simulation machine, called a NeuroTracker. Is it possible, though, that the skills required to play video games might be useful for nurturing certain parts of footballers’ brains? Andrea Pirlo, for example, spent the hours before winning the 2006 World Cup final with Italy playing video games and sleeping. G aming is essentially a sedentary pastime.