STRENGTH AND SPEED TRAINING FOR YOUR BRAIN

Welcome to the booming world of high-performance mental training, where tech tools offer amateur athletes (like you!) a chance at pro-level focus, calm, and control.

- BY PETER FLAX

WHAT WOULD YOU do to get an edge at work, in sports, in life? Would you spend X amount of dollars? Would you take X kind of supplements? Would you even subject your brain to emerging technologies that may or may not work? Professional athletes have been the early adopters in the brain-training space. NFL quarterbacks are entering flow states with help from Dune-like, Bene Gesserit-style instruction. NBA players fine-tune their hand-eye coordination with virtual reality concentration exercises. MLB batters boost their averages through disrupted-vision drills. The pro versions of these tools are pricey, but there's good news for those not named Jalen, Steph, or Shohei: The tech is trickling down to us civilians.

“The democratization of the science is driving consumer interest,” says cognitive neuroscientist Greg Appelbaum, PhD, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied this field for more than a decade. “There's no doubt the technology has gotten cheaper. Now you can get many of these products for the price of one or two pairs of Nikes.”

Yes, some of this still-early-days tech has stronger marketing than it does peer-reviewed research. But many experts believe that the future for brain trainers is promising. One of the biggest and most encouraging categories: cognitive training tools that buff up visual processing skills. “The brain is like a muscle you can isolate,” says Murali Doraiswamy, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine. “Many of the products that are like video games are backed by evidence-based science to improve your reaction time.”