Improving Tactical Performance with Cognitive Training

Imagine if you could train your brain to give you better situation on awareness, see and hear more and improve your tactical decision making abilities. Although this sounds like science fiction, it is quickly becoming science fact in the emerging field of brain training for tactical operators. On this episode of the debrief, we will explore the science of brain training for tactical operators with three experts in the field. Jeff Selleig from the National Tactical Officers Association, Dr. Henry Monkey from Posit Science, the creator of a program called BrainHQ, and Dr. Brittany Loney from Elite Cognition, a performance psychologist who works with Elite Military and Law Enforcement units. My name is John Becker. For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations. The goal of this podcast is to share their stories, in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people. Welcome to the debrief. [Music] Optimal performance in tactical situations is directly impacted by our ability to perceive, think, act, and react to an extremely complex, uncertain and changing environment. We often explain our ability to adapt to this environment through the work of John Boyd. Boyd's cycle, also known as the Udalupe, is a stalwart concept in tactical thinking used to explain everything from the smallest tactical movement to the largest strategic ideas. The ability of an individual operator, unit, or even an entire force to observe, orient, decide, and act is frequently used to explain how they respond to their environment. Interestingly, until very recently, most people operated into the assumption that only portion of this cycle we could affect was the Decide and Act. This was rooted in the ideas that our observation and orientation skills are fixed, and controlled by the physical limits of our cognitive abilities. But differently, we've always believed that the limits of our brain are predetermined and cannot be expanded or changed. Within the past two decades, this notion has been proven wrong, however. Pioneering brain science work has proven that our cognitive abilities are not fixed. They're highly adaptable, trainable, and possess incredible powers to reshape and remap themselves through a concept called neural plasticity. This new science has led to a rapid expansion of brain training practices in elite tactical units, as well as professional sports teams, where utilizing neural training techniques and applications to improve performance. Everyone from Tom Brady to our Tier 1 units has begun reshaping their ability to sense and orient, and the results have been very impressive. Today, we will look at these practices through the lens of a program called BrainHQ, developed by Posit Science. The National Tactical Officer Association has recently built a partnership with BrainHQ with the hope that officer safety and effectiveness can be enhanced through the use of BrainHQ. One quick disclaimer, BrainHQ is one of many applications in this space. This is not an endorsement of this program, and there's no business relationship between BrainHQ and the debrief. The reason we chose to use it as the means for exploration of this topic is because it's clearly the market leader in the space, and the partnership with IntiOA makes it widely available in the community. That said, the science behind this is not unique to BrainHQ, and there are certainly other programs and vehicles available to accomplish similar objectives. To begin our understanding in this area, I sat down with Jeff Selig from the National Tactical Officers Association to learn about the IntiOA's efforts in this area. So Jeff, thanks for being here. Well, you're welcome. Talk to me a little bit about the IntiOA's cognitive development program. So at the IntiOA, our cognitive development program is really about working on the system of the officer or the deputy. No one would argue the need for physical fitness. Everybody understands part of it, but no one is doing anything for the actual brain, the BrainHousing Unit of the system. And so we work as a holistic cognitive development program, both the mind and the brain as an organ. And so to work on your mind, your seated consciousness, we do emotional intelligence coaching, hardness and resiliency coaching, and we use the same instruments that special operations command uses. And then we use BrainHQ to work on the brain itself as an organ to make it better, better proficiency in use, better performance, more resistance, and really healthier and to make it a healthier part of the system. But we want to have a holistic response to overall fitness and longevity of the officers and deputies in public safety. The differentiation between the brain and the mind. So to say you correctly, the brain is the mechanic. It's the machine that is going to run. The mind is how the machine is run. Yeah, the mind is your seat of consciousness, how you see things, how you perceive, how you give meaning to things. And it's the system that helps you do that and the better it performs, the healthier it performs, like any organ, any muscle, it's going to do better. And so we need to do both. We need to work on both. And why did the Intel way decide to partner with BrainHQ? Well, if you go back, but you get the way back machine, we actually were introduced to BrainHQ in bits and pieces because we had our instructors, our trainers working with the military special missions units hosting training venues for them as really a liaison. And we were one of our first introductions. One of our trainers was driving a couple of special missions unit guys around. And he can hear this beep, beep, beep in the back seat. And he's like, what are you guys doing? You playing games? We're trying to do this recon of a training site. And they're like, oh, no, no, we have to do our brain fitness exercises every day or the star major jumps on us. And so at a break, he showed the they showed him what that was and he got a subscription. And then as he got used to it, and this is going back about 2015, as he did it over and over, he introduced other instructors to it. So it's like a little pocket of instructors using it fast forward to 2020. And our executive director is in Colorado Springs. He's a children that went through the Air Force Academy. And one of the directors of instruction reached out to him and said, hey, we're using this tool. It's pretty prolific across Air Force special operations and so calm. But I think cops could really get a lot of benefit from it. And so he introduces our executive director, Thoriels to it. And Thor says, well, I think there's something to this. Well, other people in the industry or other people in the organization say, we yeah, we're using it. But they had just gone and got a general subscription to the product through the brain HQ website. And so we start to look into it a little bit. We actually looked into a bunch of different brain exercise programs and we're kind of egghead researcher geeks. And we kind of dig that. And so we started doing some research to it research to we started doing some research into it. And what we found was every time we got into the studies and looked in the methods section. Even though the other program said we're backed by science and they were the science says you should do cognitive development exercises for your brain. It'll be healthier. And so we looked in the methods part of it. They were using the positive science program as the test program, not the other programs that were advertising that they're based in science. Every legitimate study that we came across that's a blind study using a control group and it's peer reviewed and published in like a medical journal or research journal. And so we started to talk to as an organization, we started talking to positive science and brain HQ. But we wanted something that was specific to the needs of public safety and special and domestic special operations. So today six exercise program takes about 12 weeks to complete specifically for us. It's very, very similar to the so calm program that they use for ground troops and so calm. So if I am an operator and I'm, you know, I see the into aways doing this. What am I hoping to get? Like what's, you know, for lack of a better term? What's in it for me? What's in it for you? So I think Tom Brady's quote is the best Tom Brady's one of their clients. I see more. I see it faster and I make better decisions faster. That's what he gets out of it. And that's what I hope that the operator would get out of it. You're going to have a healthier, happier brain. You're going to make better decisions faster in condensed time frames for us. The biggest is Boyd cycle is at the foundation of everything that we do at the NTA. And we know that it's in the orientation phase that you give meaning to the stimulus that you're seeing. Well, if you look at the five nodes that Boyd puts in the orientation phase, really the only ones we could ever impact were new information of previous experience. And we did everything we could in our own. training to move as much novel new information into previous experience, because we know previous experience speeds that up, novel information slows it down. And that's all we could focus on. We couldn't focus on the genetic heritage or the cultural traditions or the analysis and synthesis nodes of Boyd's orientation phase. Well, now we can't. We can actually work on the analysis and synthesis node of Boyd's cycle and the entire observation phase. And so by making you more efficient in the front half of Boyd's cycle, you can get to decide and make better decisions sooner. I can't metaphysically buy you more time, but I can make you more efficient in time. Once I put it into the context of the operation, we have to put it in the context that they're operating in. And so, but what we can offer them is a significantly reduced cost to get into the program. The brain HQ and positive science allow us to bring it to market at a 60% discount. The same discount NASA gets, the same discount Socom got. And they call those needle movers, you know, Socom's a needle mover for brain HQ. They said, we're going to treat, at a really their own altruism. They said, we're going to treat public safety like one big organization. We'll give you the highest level of discount we offer if they buy it through the NTOA, because we know that public safety people are getting it. And really out of the goodness of their own heart, they did that. And so that was another big part for us. But we spent a lot of time feeling them out and corresponding with them, because in our profession, reputations everything. And you can burn up that capital quick. So we wanted to make sure they were a good fit for us. So from the NTOA's perspective, what would you recommend if I'm a team leader? And I completely agree with you, Boyd cycle is one of the things that I say in my lessons learned from the debrief class is we spend a lot of time training action. We spend a little time training decision. We spend almost no time training observation and orientation. And just the ability to sense better has value, right? Absolutely. If I'm a team leader and I'm listening to this and I'm like, okay, well, maybe Jeff's interesting and maybe he's got me, what do you recommend? I do. I recommend that you reach out to the NTOA and reach out to me. Let's talk about it. And or go look at the science. Be a good researcher. Be your own advocate. All of every published research study involving brain HQ, if it's published in a peer review scientific research journal is on their website. By symptom or by subject matter. So if you're interested in wellness and depression in your officers, go look up the depression studies. If you're interested in performance, look up the military studies, look up the sports studies, they have them all. And actually you can go to our website, hit the brain HQ tab and you go through all the brain HQ stuff. There's a tab that says information for the informed responder and it's just a link to their research tab. But every study that's published is on their website because the proofs in the pudding. And just go be a good informed responder. Do your homework. Give it a run. Reach out to me. I'll give you a trial subscription. I want you to try it. If you're willing to give it a good four to six weeks, I know you'll see a benefit. I have seen a marked change in my memory. Marked change in my memory. I had retired in 22. Started to get into retirement mode. I got my retirement job at the NTA way. And I was going through that. Can't remember stuff syndrome. And I've seen a marked difference in my memory since then. Remember me that's enough. Next I spoke to Dr. Henry Monca from Posit Science who was a neuroplasticity researcher who helped to develop brain HQ and was personally responsible for some of the breakthroughs in this area. My name is Dr. Henry Monca. I'm a neuroscientist by training. I did a PhD in neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. And since then, I've been working in the field of brain health and in particular how to build scientifically based and clinically proven brain training exercises that can take any brain, no matter where it starts, and make it sharper, faster, better, and healthier. So Dr. Monca, talk to me about the science behind training your brain. What are we doing when we're training our brain? Well, a science comes from this field of neuroscience we call brain plasticity, which is the understanding that the brain can rewire and change itself with training, experience, and learning. And you know that actually is a revolution in the field of neuroscience. If you were to turn the clock back to let's say 1970, you could ask any brain scientist, how does the brain work? They all would have said exactly the same thing. They would have said the brain is like a computer chip inside your skull. You know, it's got wires, curious electricity, processes, information, sounds exactly like a computer chip, right? And that led to some really wrong ideas about how the brain actually works. And the biggest wrong idea it led to, which is, hey, we know that computer chips are hard wired, right? Once they get printed, they work the way they do, they might wear out over time, they might break when you drop them, but they're not going to rebuild themselves. And that is 100% not how the brain works. And in fact, if you and your listeners walk away with anything from our conversation today, I hope it's that understanding that brain is nothing like a computer chip. It is constantly rewiring and rebuilding itself in response to what we ask it to do. And hey, that happens when we're kids, happens when we're young adults, happens when we're older adults, happens if we have healthy brains. Frankly, it happens if we have pretty unhealthy brains, it's just how the brain works. It rewires and rebuilds itself. So what that means is if we can ask the brain to do the right thing with the right kind of brain training exercises, we can make it rebuild itself in a way that is helpful. In a way that makes it faster, a better processor of information, and improves all kinds of cognitive abilities. So you know where this came from is a lab at UCSF that turned the world of neuroscience head in the 90s. And what came out of that lab was the belief that, hey, if we can help rats build better brains with the right kinds of rat brain training exercises, and if we can help monkeys build better brains with the right kind of monkey brain training exercises, we can probably help people build better brains with the right kind of, well, people brain training exercises. You know, what you're saying is our brains have the ability to kind of rebuild and reconstruct themselves in a way that is more useful or less useful, depending on how we're using our brains in the same way that our body does, right? If we start lifting heavy weights, we become more muscular, we become stronger, if we start running distance, we adapt to that and become distance runners. Our brains can do the same thing. Yeah, that's very much true. And you know, one way we might know this is, you know, if you just look at the spectrum of human performance in an average healthy person, you know, you and I both know that there's a huge variation in performance and I don't know how far a person can run, right? How much a person can deadlift. And that variation in human performance has a little bit to do with genetics and a lot to do with how you've been using your body over the past five or 10 years. Well, brain performance is exactly the same way. If you look at measures like attention or brain processing speed or working memory or executive function, right? Rapid decision making. Every one of those measures, if you look at healthy people, you're going to see a wide range of human performance and it's exactly like physical, for fitness in the sense that, hey, a little bit of that is genetics. And a lot of that is what have you been doing with your brain over the past years that has reshaped it, rebuilt it and rewired it in certain directions. So, you know, before we even talk about the details of computerized brain training exercises, let's just look at normal life, right? You know, let's say you're a top tennis player, right? To pick something that's got some physical and some cognitive aspects. You know, it's pretty easy to imagine that a top tennis player has pretty fantastic speed of processing in their brain, pretty fantastic executive function, right? The ability to make the right decision quickly and under pressure. And where did that come from? Were they all born that way? No, they weren't all born that way, right? Their brain's got faster, their brain's got improved executive function because the result of the, I guess what I might call implicit brain training that they had been doing by developing their high performance skills. And when you look at it that way, look at all of us and think, well, we can probably rebuild and sharpen our brains to be, you know, better and faster in the directions we want if we think about what we do with our brains and doing the right thing with them. And we've seen this with top athletes, right? I mean, you know, there's the stories of Tom Brady and his brain training exercises and how he felt that improved his ability to see what was going on the field and make decisions. And, you know, this is, this is not completely new science in that regard. You know, it is something that top athletes have been doing for a while. That's true. You know, when we started our company, BrainHQ, we started building these brain training exercises. We wanted to take this science of brain plus to see out of the lab and into the world to help people. You know, frankly, when we first built these exercises, we thought, well, who's this going to be for? Well, probably older people, right? Everyone slows down and experiences some memory problems on the average. Might be really helpful for people who have had damaged their brain in some ways, right? Maybe you've had TBI or multiple sclerosis or chemo brain. And in fact, a lot of studies showed exactly that. We were really the first company to run large-scale trials to show that we could improve cognitive function in those kinds of populations. But our view of what we could do with this science and this technology changed pretty dramatically one day when Tom Brady's personal coach gave us call. And he said, hey, did you know Tom Brady's been using BrainHQ actually? exercises. And we said, well, we have an excellent commitment to patient privacy here at Brain HQ. We had no idea he was using Brain HQ exercises. He's like, you want to come talk to him about it? So we sure do. So we got on a plane. We went out to Foxboro. He's playing for the Patriots at that point in time and met, met Tom, met his personal coach, met his entire team of brain health experts, which was kind of incredible that he had a group of people working with him and thinking about brain health. And when we talked to him about, hey, why are you doing Brain HQ? You know, I expected what he was going to tell us, frankly, was for concussion recovery, right? But that's not at all. He was using Brain HQ. He was using Brain HQ and he put it to me. I'll tell you what he said. He said, look, the cognitive performance demands on being a top quarterback are enormous, right? Think about me, right? I get the snap. I've got in the average three or four seconds before I'm going to get tackled. I can have the best offensive line in the NFL. They give me three or four seconds before I get tackled. During that period of time, what do I have to do? I have to use my working memory to remember all of the place that the coachbellicic has given us, right? And there's well more than 100, right? There's a lot to remember. I have to use my visual attention, right? I might have four guys running down field and they're moving around in different directions. And I have to figure out, hey, which ones of them are open and on their route and which ones of them recovered are off their route, right? I do that kind of target selection. And then I have to throw the ball quickly and accurately if it's passing play and hit that receiver. And again, all that in three or four seconds. That's incredible brain performance. And so what he said was, hey, I came to Brain HQ because I wanted to sharpen my brain performance. In the same way, he said that I think about optimizing my physical performance, performance and resilience. I need to think about optimizing my brain in exactly the same way. And that's what brought me to these exercises. And of course, he went on to win a number of more Super Bowl staff of that, which is pretty incredible performance. And that really, you know, I'm kind of a science guy, right? But a lot of time in the lab, it's kind of fun and different for me to have a top athlete tell me something about science. That's really what happened in that because what it taught us was, hey, in the same way that physical training is good for all of us, right? No matter where you are in your physical performance, a physical training is going to boost you up, right? It really showed us that, hey, cognitive training, brain training works exactly the same way, almost no matter where you are in your brain performance. If you do the right kind of brain training and the right kind of brain exercises, you're going to sharpen that brain performance. Maybe you're starting at the 10th percentile and your goal is to get to the 30th percentile because you're recovering from injury. Or maybe you're like Tom Brady, right? Your performance is at the 90th percentile, but hey, that's not good enough in your line of work. You need to get from the 90th percentile to 99th percentile. And that's what we showed that we could do. What is it? What aspects of the way we use our brain are trainable? Yeah, so what aspects of brain function are trainable? And it turns out that actually virtually every aspect of what the brain can do is trainable. And that might sound really complicated because we know the brain can do enormous number of things. But it actually boils down to one pretty simple idea, which is how healthy your brain is, is how noisy your brain is, or I should say the opposite, the healthier your brain is, the less noisy your brain is. And if you can improve kind of what you might think of as the signal to noise ratio in any different part of the brain, you're going to improve performance in that part of the brain. So what am I talking about here? Well, let's put this in an example that a lot of people might know, signal noise ratio. What is that? You know, imagine you're listening to a radio, right? I think all of us have been on a, oh, Mr. Radio at some point. And hey, it's been off a little bit, right? They're static. There's noise in the background, right? When that happens, it becomes harder to hear what someone says. It becomes harder to pay attention to what's coming across that radio. It becomes harder to remember it and harder to act on it because in a way, your brain is so busy pulling the signal out from that background noise, it just doesn't have enough cognitive capacity. One might say to do this higher order stuff, like speed and attention and working memory and decision making. Well, we've all had that experience in the real world with a noisy radio, right? It turns out your brain can actually have an internal level of noisy information processing like that. What that means is, hey, if you've got that noise inside your head, well, you're aren't going to be so good at speed and working memory and attention and decision making with that part of your brain. What we can do with brain training exercises, and we can talk about how in a moment, I suppose, what we can do is we can improve that signal noise ratio in your brain, bring in the radio back on tune inside of your brain. So as it's processing information, it's happening quickly and accurately and clearly. So if we do that in part of the brain that's relevant to, let's say, speech reception, well, your brain's going to be better at speech reception. You're going to hear things more quickly and accurately. You're being able to pay attention to them and remember the more and act on them. The same time if we take that same kind of approach and we work on an area of the brain that let's say has to do with recognizing the facial expression of emotion, well, we're going to make you a better emotional processor. You're going to see people and you're going to recognize more quickly. Hey, is that person angry? Are they afraid? Which might be a really important decision to make at a key moment. So that that's the underlying similarity of how we can improve cognitive performance in so many different areas because in every area of the brain, you're limited by your signal noise ratio of that information processing. And we can sharpen that up with exercises directed at that part of the brain, make that part of the brain a better information processor and then make every part of cognitive function that depends on that part of the brain work better. Got it. So break down for me if you would the kind of big picture areas like put my brain into buckets for me as far as is what I do with it and how I use it. So hey, what does the brain do? What parts of it might we want it to do better? You know, one kind of framework you can look at is to say, hey, first there's perception, right? And deeply related that is attention, right? You have to notice certain things and you have to ignore certain things. After that comes working memory. Once you've noticed the things you need to notice, you got to put them in working memory so you can manipulate them act upon them. And then finally, there's executive function, right? I need to make a decision and I need to make the right decision based on what I've perceived, what I've attended to, what I've put in working memory. Now I need to act on it. So that's a pretty straightforward model for what the brain does. And then we'll make it a little bit more complicated. We'll say, hey, all that exists in vision, right? And all of that exists in hearing. And of course, it exists in our other senses as well. But for the moment, let's talk about what we see and what we hear because that's two of the most important ways we take in information as all of us. So every step of that, that perception, attention, working memory, and executive function across vision, across hearing, can be sharpened with the right kind of brain training. And by sharpening it, you know, a person's going to experience, well, better perception, better attention, better working memory, and better executive function. So let me give you an example if I may from the visual system. Would that be all right? Let's talk about, let's talk about spatial awareness. And we've had conversations with so-com tactical operators and spatial operators awareness is one of the key cognitive skills that they wanted to work on at so-com. What I mean very specifically by spatial awareness and a tactical officer framework is, hey, at a room, and you need to become aware of everything that's in the room, what's directly ahead of you, what's off in your peripheral vision, and then related to that, you know, fundamentally, what's in target and what's in non-target. So how can we improve that ability? I mean, you fight first ask, well, can we even improve that ability? Isn't that just sort of an automatic function of our brain? Well, it's not an automatic function. Well, it is not an automatic function of our brain, but of course, it's incredibly different across different people. You know, again, in the same way that one person might be able to, you know, run 100 yards and one person might be able to run 26 miles, people are going to have incredible differences in their ability to go in a room and become spatially aware of everything that's around me. Okay, well, let's say we wanted to take a person, you know, let's say you got an officer and the big problem they have is they enter a room and they just never notice what's off in their peripheral vision, right? They get captured immediately by what's right in front of them, and what that means is that a threat that's off off in the side of the room, they don't pick up on that and that becomes a danger. Now, how can we improve that core tactical ability? Well, one of the exercises that we built called double decision, and in this brain training exercise, it's a visual brain training exercise, you look at a screen when you do it, you're going to see something in the center of your screen and the context of this particular exercise, it's either a car or a truck, and they're pretty similar, right? If you want to tell which one's which, you got that, you got to really focus some attention at the center of your screen there. At the same time, you do that, we flash a road sign up in your peripheral vision, and I might be at the one o'clock, or the three o'clock, the seven o'clock, wherever, and you got to do both those things at the same time, you got to figure out what's in the center of your vision, you got to notice what's in your peripheral vision. Now, that might sound easy, right? If I put that on the screen for six seconds, anyone could do it, right? A child can walk in and we'll room and do it, you just look and see, right? But six seconds isn't fast enough, as you know, for the kind of work that tactical officers do. So how does the exercise work? Well, you get it right, and hey, we're going to make it a little faster, and you get it right, again, well, we're going to make it a little faster again, and we're just going to keep pushing your brain's ability to do this until we hit your personal limit. And when you get it wrong, well, hey, we'll back off a little bit, make it a little slower. And in that sense, we're going to find your brain's personal, unique threshold, and we're going to give you a lot of trials around that to work on your brain's ability to, again, notice what's right in front of you, but keep enough attention that you're seeing what's in your peripheral vision. And when you master one level of it, well, we'll make it harder, we'll make those targets further out in your peripheral vision. We'll add some clutter, so that target in your peripheral vision kind of disappears in a cloud of other stuff. We'll change how the background works, so it's harder to pop these things out against the background, and by comprehensively working that ability. Well, your brain is going to rewire itself because the way the brain works is it rewires itself in response to what we're doing. And if you do a lot of that and you're paying attention and you get rewarded and all these things that drive learning in the brain, you're going to reshape your brain's ability to do that kind of task quickly and accurately. Now fantastic, we've made you better at that in a computer. Does that help anyone in the real world? And what clinical trial after clinical trial shows is yes. Because we vary these stimuli so much as you training them, when you go out in the real world, you were going to notice your entire field of view more quickly and more accurately. So if we work with people, for example, who are drivers, we see that they have a few auto crashes as a result because they become more aware of their peripheral vision. They notice a hazard before before before it hits them and they step on the break. When we work with tactical officers, they come back and tell us I go into that room and what you probably know, this kind of training works, right? And a training exercise you go in the room and they're going to put a red card somewhere up on a bookshelf, right? And if you don't see that red card as you're going through the room, you're going to get a dinged, right? Because they need you to be aware of everything. And the guys and guys going through the training come back and they say, hey, I was more aware of when I went out of the room, I noticed that stuff right off the bat as I came there. So that's one kind of specific ability that relates to that perception, attention, working memory, executive function framework, in this case, individual system. And that's how that ends up playing out in the real world. And again, that's a plastic ability that can be changed with the right kind of training. So if I'm understanding you correctly, I mean, what we have these kind of four areas, auditory and visual obviously, but we have these kind of four areas. And so what we're going to do is we're going to challenge our perceptive abilities. We're going to challenge our attention. We're going to challenge our working memory. We're going to challenge executive function and decision making. And we're going to test it, push it in a variety of ways with an eye on just improving the processor. Right? Like we're just making the processor work better. So then when we take that processor out and we're driving a car or in a tactical situation or watching our kids play, all of those things we're going to do better. In the same way that if we run faster, we run faster at everything that we do. Yeah, that's exactly right. So I love that analogy of, hey, let's take something we know we can improve like running. You know, we know that if we go out and train and we can run faster, we can run further. And hey, it's not just on the track that we get better, right? We're in a real world situation where we need to get faster and we need to run further and have more endurance. And that benefit from the training generalizes is what a scientist would call it to a real world situation. And that generalization can sometimes be a little bit hard, right? Certainly there are certain kinds of exercises where, hey, you're going to lift weights in a certain way and hey, one muscle is going to get better and that's it, right? And that's not the muscle you needed when you needed it. But what we've learned from a lot of physical fitness studies over the years, hey, how can we train very generally so that we get stronger and faster? Hey, that's not just true in the gym, but it's out true in the real world as well. Absolutely the same kind of thing is true in brain training. What a lot of science has shown us is how can we train the brain in such a way that hey, we're not just getting better what we did on the computer, but then we're out in the real world. You know, that processor has been upgraded, right? The fundamental clock cycles of your brain are ticking off faster so that you're taking in information process faster, you're acting on it faster, you're doing the right thing faster. Now that's what we want to see with the careful design of the right kind of brain training exercises. And again, that's what the studies show us what we get. We get that faster, more accurate brain and then that helps people, you know, act more vigorously, more quickly, more accurately, more decisively in the real world when it counts. So I mean, if you think of this in a tactical situation, right, the ability to perceive, right, the ability to see in here, obviously you don't have to be a math major to figure out how that matters. The ability to focus attention, right, the ability to spot what matters. In this case, you know, the plant in the corner of the room is probably not as important as the guy with the gun on the other corner of the room. So the ability to kind of perceive those things. And then to keep all of that, you know, all of those things functioning, you know, the clearing of the room and the handling of the weapon and the movement of the team members, you know, you can see where you could build a, you know, a supercharged house that then, you know, you take to any operation, you're going to be more operationally effective. And I think that's why we're seeing so many of the tier one units in the national level units all over the world begin to engage in cognitive training. Let's expand on this idea of training a little bit, right? So you know, anyone who's in a, in a tier one unit in a national unit, who's a tactical officer, they've done a lot of training on clearing buildings, for example, right? They know how to sweep from room to room and they, they have been taught, if I might say almost the book learning of, hey, what am I supposed to do as I enter room, right? Step by step. Look here, do here, check, act, right? They've been taught all that. But nonetheless, you know, some of them are better than others, right? And what are the limits that they're running up to? Why, why might you see someone in that who just can't quite get to where they need to be, to be the teammate they need to be, to be the operator they need to be? And, and you know, in my view, often the limit is not the, that kind of top down training they've been given about how to do this. The limit is inside their brain, they don't have the cognitive performance in the right areas to put that, to put that learning to work. And then if you can take that brain and you can sharpen its attention, for example, then hey, everything that that person's been taught about, hey, here's how you look around the room and here's how you notice what's, what's the threat and what's on the threat. All that learning they've been given by their instructor can finally come into fruition because their underlying brain is, is fast enough and sharp enough to do it. Again, think about the same thing from a physical fitness perspective, right? You know, you might have been taught like, oh, I don't know what's a good example. You know, I had a climb a wall, right, to get over, right? This certain pattern way you want to get up it real quick. But if you don't have the underlying upper body strength to pull yourself up, they can teach you that all day long. You're not going to be good at it, right? The same logic here for clearing a room, right? They can teach you, hey, here's how a top tier group clears a room. But if you don't have the attention, the sharpness, the working memory to put that to work, hey, you're not going to be good at it. But the great news is we can make you better with those underlying cognitive skills so that when you go through that kind of training, you can put it better to use and, you know, be the kind of asset that you're capable of being. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, talking, you know, my day job is working with elite units and you talk to them about selection. And for most units where guys bounce out is CQB or CQC, it's in that close quarter environment where there's a lot of stuff going on and you talk to the trainers and you go like, you know, why do guys bounce out? They can't process the information fast enough. They can't hold enough of it in their mind at the same time. And so they either forget something and become sloppy with weapon handling or sloppy in their movements or they become overwhelmed. And it strikes me that, you know, cognitive training would address both of those capabilities, right? We're going to make you more able to process information and also more able to discern the information that matters. That's exactly right. So I've actually spoken to so calm folks about this as well. And if you ask them, hey, what is it when someone fails out at CQC, right? They just cannot go forward. And hey, and so calm by the time they put you in CQC, they want you to succeed, right? This isn't the part where they want you to wash out fundamentally. Like when you make it there, they've invested tons of time in money. They want every single person to make it through. Not every single person does. And why don't they? And, you know, it is because in many cases that underlying cognitive ability just isn't as sharp as it need to be. Now, as an aside, let me say, why might that not be true? How can you get a guy who makes it through all that far? And just doesn't have the speed, the attention, the working memory to do it. Well, a lot of people coming into special forces, certainly a lot of people coming to law enforcement, they come from, I don't know, what's the best way to put a John, let's say, active lives, right? There are a lot of things that have happened to their brains and their heads already. And hey, some of that has shaken them up a little bit, right? And you get a little bit of, you know, maybe you fell off a motorcycle eight years ago, right? Maybe you took a tumble down the stairs during an exercise, right? Got bounced around a little bit. And you know, that's maybe taken your speed and your attention, your working memory down a notch. And so you get into a training environment like that and that underlying cognitive ability just isn't where it needs to be. But again, what the right kind of brain training exercise is, we can sharpen that signal to noise ratio, we can get that information flowing faster and more accurately to the brain. That's going to make a person feel less overwhelmed because they got more cognitive resources to put to work in those environments. And again, just to bring it back to physical fitness, right? You know, you know, you had a, if you had a training exercise in, you know, again, in swatter and so calm. And the guy just couldn't, you know, carry the pack, right, for far enough. Well, we know what to do about that, right? We can get a guy strong enough that they can carry a pack, right? That's not really a reason you need to wash out of any of this training. And we can bring exactly that same lens to cognitive performance. No reason anyone should be washing out of training because they're executive function, this is sharp enough. Their speed isn't good enough. They're just not noticing things in their peripheral vision. Those are all solvable issues from a brain performance perspective. When I don't think like, you know, we all know that you can get physically fit. I don't think that we have really, and like brain plasticity is relatively new science, but I don't think we even understood that this is something that we can train, and that's part of why I wanted to talk to you, is I think that you do have this kind of fixed mindset when it comes to cognitive intelligence. Y'all, that guy's really smart, that guy's really dumb. You know, that guy sees pretty well, that guy doesn't. - Yeah, we have a fixed mindset about cognitive performance in a way that we don't about physical performance. We know we can make people faster and stronger. No one, that's not a mystery to anyone. Why don't we have that fixed mindset about cognitive performance? Well, you know, a lot of us just bad education, right? How many kids got told they weren't good at math? Well, I'm never gonna be good at math, shouldn't work on it. How many kids got told they weren't really good readers, right? How many kids just got told they were dumb at some point. You're like, hey, the teacher told me how is dumb, I guess that's it. That, you know, in the broader work that we think about society, you know, that is terrible messaging to tell a kid or a young person, hey, you're just not good at something. When we know the science has been telling us for 20, 30 years now, you can rewire your brain to be better at things, right? And so I do think a lot of people absorb that, right? They took the SAT and they got a certain score and they feel like, well, this is my score, right? You know, my slot in life has now been determined as a result of this. And hey, we just got to get past that as a society. We've got to get past it for kids. We've got to get past it for young adults who are, you know, working on figuring out what they want to be in life. And we've got to get past it for older adults when we often think about just writing people off 'cause their end of the career, all of that is just wrong. The science is in on this front. And, you know, it takes a while to change society's views after the science is in, but we are certainly well on the way to doing that. - Yeah, I think one of the most striking things for me with neural plasticity was this idea that like, yeah, you can actually teach a dog new tricks. You can teach him the same tricks. You can teach a young dog. And it's, it is this idea that part of the reason that we over time fade is the same reason we physically fade. We atrophy, we stop working out, we stop exercising, we stop challenging ourselves, we stop pushing ourselves. And so our brains do begin to shrink and become more fixed. But, you know, it strikes me that cognitive training not only will make us a better tactical operator, will make our brains last longer, it'll make careers last longer, but can has the potential here to really significantly improve our lives across the board. - Right, so why is it that people say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks? You know, well, one reason is that, hey, certain things do happen over time. The brain becomes, the brain's always capable of change. And I hate, we all know it's a little bit harder to change as we get older. But, you know, another thing that happens is that we kind of get into a rut and we like being good at things. Right? You know, imagine you've started to develop a great set of skills. You're getting a lot of positive rewards from your teammates and your work and maybe even your family about how great you are in a certain line of work. Well, that feels good, right? It feels good to be good at things. That's a good reason to keep doing them. Well, that's great. You're contributing society in a maybe bigger way 'cause you got these skills, but maybe your learning is no longer there, right? Maybe you're not challenging yourself to develop as much because let's face it, if you're gonna learn something new, if you're gonna challenge yourself in a really new way, you're gonna fail at first, right? You're gonna fall down. You're gonna have to lie there in the dirt for a little while and reflect on what a beginner you are. And for a lot of people, that's just not fun. That's the certain age, right? I'm used to everyone telling me, I'm the greatest in the world at X and I go out and I do Y completely fail at it. I don't really enjoy that very much. But it's that getting into that rut where we're kind of resting on our laurels, where we're kind of coasting on the investment and learning we made in an earlier age, that's what starts to turn the brain off. You know, I'm a neuroscientist, people ask me sometimes, "Hey, what's the brain for?" I ask people that and they always tell me the same thing. The brain's for thinking. The brain's not for thinking. Brain doesn't care anything about thinking at all. The brain's for learning and changing and adapting. The reason we as humans have these like gigantic brains, right, you know, one of the biggest brain-to-body ratios in the entire animal kingdom is because we are so adaptive. You know, because of our huge brains, we can thrive in the deserts of Africa and we can thrive in the icy wastelands of the North Pole and we can thrive in the urban jungles of big cities. And that's because our brain adapts and changes itself. No other animal has that kind of span that we do. So the brain is for learning and when we stop learning because we're good at something and we just want a coast, well, our brain starts to turn off. Doesn't not really need it anymore, right? It starts to shrink in those kinds of way. And you know, to build a healthy brain across our entire career, we do need to keep challenging and learning and that means at all points in our career, we have to be comfortable with the idea that we're gonna rob, we're gonna be wrong, we're gonna fail, we're gonna mess it up, we're gonna need to keep trying, we're gonna look stupid in front of our friends. But hey, that's all part of having that healthy active brain and that's really the key, I think, to a lifetime of sharp cognitive performance. - Well, one of these struck me when I started playing with brain HQ was, yeah, you're gonna suck it every single one of these games when you start. Like it adapts very well to what you're doing and it does tune pretty well on your efforts. But there's certainly, like, it is challenging, but it's also in the privacy of your own home and nobody else sees it happen. So if you're gonna fall on your face, you know, I mean, my kids saw me fall on my face, but you know, if you're gonna fall on your face, it's a fantastic place to do it rather than doing it in front of your team on an operation. - Yeah, so, you know, in order to drive brain plastic, in order to drive rewiring of the brain, I have bad news. You can't get 'em all right. And that's kind of too bad. Most people like to get 'em all right, right? We're used to taking a test, what's more do you wanna get? I wanna get 100% right? And that feels good, makes me feel like, hey, I'm good at this. Well, brain training doesn't work that way, unfortunately. You're gonna train your brain. You have to, you have to be at a difficulty level for whatever specific thing you're training, whether it's auditory attention or visual decision making. You gotta be at a difficulty level where you're getting a lot of them right, but some of them are a little bit beyond your ability. Some of them, you're gonna get wrong. Why do we have to do that? It's not very much fun. Oh, we have to do that because, hey, the brain only changes when it has to, right? If you give the brain tasks where it can do it every single time, there is no underlying biological signal that tells the brain it has to change. Why should it invest in change? It's doing great. Doesn't need to do anything different. Now at the same time, if you give the brain only tasks which are too challenging for it, you get 'em all wrong, well, the brain doesn't change then either 'cause it can't really quite get a toe hole, so to speak, on how to get this right. So we use these very fancy adaptive algorithms when we build these brain training exercises, and they track so that you're probably getting 70 to 80% of them right, but that means you're getting 20 to 30% of them wrong each time you do it. And hey, that's true if we're working with a person who's 89 years old and has early stage Alzheimer's disease, they're gonna get 20 to 30% wrong, and that happens when we work with a so-called special forces operator. They're gonna get 20, 30% of them wrong. The difference is, hey, which 20 to 30% are you getting wrong? Obviously, at a high performance, we're trying to push that brain even higher and get those wrong. But it is true, and it's a really interesting mindset issue that I think we all just need to get a little bit more comfortable with the idea that when we're training, we need to push ourselves with that level. And actually, this is a great physical fitness example if I may for just a second, right? And if you go to the gym and you're lifting weight, if you can do every rep and every set over and over and over again, I mean, good for you, that probably feels good. But you're probably not building at that point, right? We all know that hey, if you're gonna lift, you need to push yourself and hey, when you break, well, you don't have a spotter, that's a good idea. But hey, that's when those changes and gains are gonna occur, and exactly the same thing is true in cognitive performance training as well. So let's talk about the mechanism of Brain HQ. And like, physically, how it works, what I'm doing, when I'm using it and I'm doing the exercise, what is going on there? So how does a Brain HQ exercise work? Well, let me tell you about some scientific principles and then I'll walk through the specifics of one exercise, right? So just about every Brain HQ exercise works by training speed, right? We want your brain to be a faster processor of information. Just about every Brain HQ exercise trains accuracy as well. Anyone can be faster if they're less accurate, but we want you to be fast and accurate at the same time. Every Brain HQ exercise is adaptive. It's gonna get harder as you get the trials right, get a little easier if you get them wrong, and that way it homes in for exactly the right level of challenge for your brain. Every Brain HQ exercise is designed to generalize to real world performance. That means as scientists, we have worked on the stimuli that you're gonna see on the screen or here on your earphones so that they relate to real world things you're gonna encounter in helpful ways. And then every Brain HQ exercise taps into your attention, traps into your reward systems, taps into your novelty detection systems, because all of those things release neurochemicals that help drive brain plasticity and rewire the brain. Let's take a particular Brain HQ exercise example. Let's say we want to build a better auditory processor in your Brain. We want you to be able to hear speech more quickly and more accurately. And hey, that might be helpful for you when you go to the store and your spouse tells you four things you wanna pick up on the way out the door. You need to hear that and pay attention to it ideally and start working memories. You get the store and remember it. But hey, it's useful if you're a tactical officer, right? You might be entering a building and getting instructions over the radio and annoys you fast-paced environment and you need to have a sharp speech processor in your brain [BLANK_AUDIO] hear what's being said and act on it, right? How can we build that better speech processor? Well, here's a fun little exercise everyone can do along at home right now. If you put your hand on your voice box, here you're Adam's apple, and I want everyone to do this, and I want you to make the sound, "Bah, ba," like a bottle, "ba." Now when you do that, you might notice, "ba," that your lips open, and just about the same time your voice box starts to vibrate, "ba." Now I want you to make a different sound. I want you to make a "pa," like my "pa-pa," "pa-pa." When you do that, you might notice that your lips open just a little bit before your voice box starts to vibrate. That difference is just about 30 or 40 milliseconds, right? We're talking about thousands of a second right there, but that little gap is actually kind of what makes a "ba" different than a "pa." Now you'll be delighted to know that there are scientists all over the world, and this is what they study for a living, all during their entire working career, right? Well, why do we care about it? Well, we care about it because if you have a brain that maybe has gotten a little slowed down, maybe your brain's a little bit noisy, you actually can't necessarily perceive that short 30 to 40 millisecond gap, that difference between a "ba" and a "pa." Well, if you can't really distinguish that gap, hey, you're gonna have a lot of auditory information processing problems, right? You know, if it happens when you're a little kid, you might get diagnosed with dyslexia or a specific language impairment, and you might never really figure out why the bees and peas look different. This all kind of sounds the same to me. But hey, you're an adult, and you're working on a tactical unit, you know, it might be that, hey, when you're entering that building, you just can't quite hear what your commanding officer said with all that background noise, because you can figure out what sound is which. Well, let's make that better, right? Let's not just leave you, let's make it better. How do we make it better? Well, there's an exercise in brain-each-cute called "Sound Sweeps," and the way it works is this. Auditory exercise, you're gonna be listening to it on headphones or on your computer. You're gonna hear two little whistles. I'm gonna do my best to whistle for you here, right? You're gonna hear two little whistles, and one might go up and one might go down, like, (whistles) right? Now, if they're slow and there's a lot of time, it's pretty easy to say, well, the first one kind of went up and the second one went down. You're always gonna hear two, they might both be up, they might both be down, all the kind of patterns are there. But of course, it's a brain training exercise, it's adaptive, like we talked about. So if you get that right, well, the next two are gonna be faster and closer together, and they're gonna get closer and closer together, as you get them right. Of course, it's until we hit your threshold, you can't get them right anymore. Now, again, sounds easy, I encourage you to give it a try and do it at some point, you'll find that it gets hard. Now, first of all, one thing that's amazing about this is you can sit in a room with different people, and hey, some people are gonna get right down to maybe 30 or 40 milliseconds, they can tell the difference in other people, like 200 milliseconds. Whether even two, I couldn't hear which one came first, they both sounded the same. You know, their brains are slower and noisier, they're not processing that input as quickly and accurately. And it's incredible to watch two people who seem cognitively normal when you talk to them, and to see these incredible different levels of underlying sensory performance. So we can make that much better, we can do it, and we make the whistle shorter, we make it faster, and of course, we're training high sounds and low sounds, and very slow rap sounds and very fast-round sounds. And why are we doing that? We want you to make you a better whistler. I don't care how good a whistler you are, right, if you are a good whistler, good for you, but that's not what we're here for, right? What I want is for your brain to be able to process those short pieces of information quickly and accurately, then because to go back to speech reception, those little whistles are actually the fundamentals of the speech sounds that we make when we're talking to each other, and if we can make your brain a better processor, so it gets those fast little whistles right every single time quickly and accurately, well, you're gonna hear everything around you in noisy environments, in stressful environments, you're gonna hear all of that speech more quickly and accurately and be able to act on it. So every brain each cue exercise works on those basic principles. Speed, accuracy, adaptivity, generalization of the stimuli, engagement of attention and reward systems, and we just pick what we're pointing that out with the stimuli that you see or you hear. You do that with little whistles, we're pointing it at early auditory brain systems to help you be a better speech processor, but we can take that same basic concept and we built an exercise which shows you different facial motions and you have to recognize them very quickly. And hey, now we're targeting a whole different part of your brain, we're targeting part of your brain that has to do with social cognition, we make that faster and accurate as well. So that's how all of these exercises work. - What is the recommended, what is your kind of your recommended workout regimen for somebody that is doing tactical stuff? How often, how much, how many sets, how many reps? - Yeah, so how much brain training do you have to do to improve your brain? Well, the great news is the science shows us, you have to do some, right? It's not magic beans here, right? It is exercise, but it's less than you think. So study after study shows that we are seeing significant brain changes in terms of speed, accuracy of performance and turning brain activation. And as little as 10 hours of training, over a few weeks or two months. And the way we've built our brain training exercises is, hey, we know people are busy, they got to fit them into their lives. So finishing just one level of brain training usually takes two or three minutes. And most people who are tactical officers are doing it, in short person time, 10 or 15 minutes when they have a little bit of downtime during the day. And then a couple times a week to kind of build up to try and aim for maybe 10 hours of training over two or three months to get that minimum in. And now other people do it differently. We have people who sit down and they do it for 30 minutes at a time or 45 minutes at a time and they're just doing it twice a week, for example. But you can break it up in that helpful way. And the other question that comes off often is, well, how long does this last? If I want this mental sharpness improvement, I've got to do this every day for the rest of my life. And the good news is, no, right? This isn't like a drug where, hey, you stop taking your heart medicine, your heart's not good pretty soon, right? This is more like physical training where, hey, if you do this for a while and then for whatever reason, you've got to take a break for a few months. We can definitely see that brain performance starting to decline over that period. But it's completely fine to take several months off and then come back in and kind of reboost yourself back up. And in fact, when we work with law enforcement agencies, that usually what we do, we get intense period of training over the first two or three months, then people can do it kind of as much as they like afterwards. Some people put it away, they got other stuff to do. Some people want to keep at it because, hey, they realize, hey, having a better brain is going to give me a better life. But then we come back in a year later and everyone kind of does that booster training to bring them back up to a good level of performance. There's kind of an initial ramp up where you improve the processor speed and then it's more of a tune up on a regular basis to maintain that processor speed. Yeah, I think that's right. It's like learning any skill in that sense, right? I mean, I mean, I mean, I take firearms training, right? When you first learn how to shoot, let's say, a pistol accurately at a range, right? I mean, that initial ramp is pretty, pretty significant, right? You go from maybe not being able to do it all to becoming pretty good. And, hey, regular range practice is a great idea, but if you take off for a while, you don't fall right back down to being a beginner, right? Off the bat, you need to come back in and tune yourself up on a regular basis. And that's because range training is brain training, right? It's very specialized kind of brain training, but hey, the reason you got good with a pistol on a range is because, hey, you rewired your brain from a brain that didn't know how to do all of the sensory and the motor actions required to shoot accurately, to a brain that didn't know how to do those things. And you got to buff it up now and then to keep that wiring in place, the kind of things we're doing with brain training exercises, you know, they work exactly the same. Talk to me for a minute about the brain HQ's partnership with the NTA, how did that come to be and tell me a little bit about it? You know, we got introduced to Thor Eels at the NTA a few years ago and you just really hit it off with them right off the bat. You know, on positive sciences end, on brain HQ's end, you know, we had been thinking a lot more about how to take this brain plus to see based training and use it for performance enhancement. We've been working with sports, folks in sports. Tom Brady, I mentioned a number of other folks. We had also been starting to work with folks in the military around SOCOM and it become clear to us we could use this science to take great brains and make them even better, if I may put it that way. And we met Thor at the NTA way and, you know, just really kind of clicked with their mission of, hey, in order to make top tier law enforcement officers, hey, people need training and they need training of all kinds, right? NTA offers tons of training around practical performance and decision making and the kind of stuff that every LEO needs to stay sharp. But, you know, the vision was, hey, by adding brain training to that, by thinking of brain training as a regular part of what it takes to become and then stay top performing law enforcement officer, that hey, we could bring these things together and really help people who, you know, have a really tough job, you know, be their best, give them the underlying brain skills, the brain health performance that they needed to be their best. And I think one thing that was really important for us in it is, hey, when we make brain H2 available to a law enforcement organization, hey, everybody gets it. You know, this isn't about saying, well, your brain's not so great, maybe you need to tune up, right? This is about saying, hey, no matter where you are, we can help you make your sharper and faster and better. And, hey, that's gonna help you be better at a very tough job and a job that you love. So, it's been a great relationship with NTAA and, you know, happy to see that we're serving more and more law enforcement organizations over the past year with this. So, when we started to work with NTAA, of course, one of the first questions was, well, who's the best? what brain training exercises should a law enforcement officer do, should attack the officer do. Now if you ever come to brain HQ you can see there's dozens and dozens of brain training exercises and you know there's hundreds of levels of brain training. We have people who have been using brain HQ every day for five years and you know they're just working the way through all the content. That's probably great for anyone's brain but you know in a realistic world time is really important. People in law enforcement are incredibly busy with all of the work they need to do on all the training they need to do. So we spent a lot of time talking with the folks at NTOA to try and take you know our knowledge is neuroscientists and connect it with their knowledge of law enforcement and tactical operations to say hey what are the brain abilities that are the most important to be successful and safe in that in that line of work. And you know you can make an argument for everything right everything's important when you have a demanding job like that. To hone it down what we landed on was a speed and attention and working memory exercises generally focused on the visual system and then we added some specific face emotion training exercises to that as well because of course being in contact and understanding the intent of people that you're in front of as law enforcement officer is so incredible. Important. So we boiled it down we curated it to six exercises and really about 10 hours of total intended training for the law enforcement officer course and that's been really successful right. You know we know that's a big bite 10 hours is a meaningful amount of time and a law enforcement officer's life over the course two months but we see we see tons of folks getting through it and then coming back to us with incredible stories about the changes that they've noticed in their everyday life and in their in their tactical life as a result of doing this brain training. So it's been incredibly rewarding work for us to do as a result of that. So give me some examples of you know what you heard back from from tactical operators after using the system and kind of the effect it's had on them. Yeah I'm a scientist I think a lot of bar graphs and p-values and things like that but in the end doing brain training doing brain each queue you know it changes your brain and people notice the difference in their lives. This isn't just something you do and you're like well but I didn't really you know I guess my boss told me to do that all done. We talked to officers who finished the training and they come back and tell us frankly some pretty incredible stories. One officer came back to us and said he'd been doing building clearing exercises and he just came into rooms and he was so much more aware in his peripheral vision of the environment as he entered each room. He just faster and stuff was just popping out of him and and as a result he said hey I've never been better at clearing buildings in my entire career. This has been a guy who's served for quite some time and that's a great example right if you train a lot on spatial awareness and speed and attention in your peripheral vision you're going to get sharper and you're going to notice stuff well out of the corner here I right. But people come back and they really do experience that. But probably the most compelling story was an officer who said he had been involved in a car jacking situation right he walked up to a car and he knew there was going to be trouble and you know looked in and the driver pulled a weapon on him and you know that's an incredibly dangerous situation. It's dangerous for the officer. It's dangerous for the for the person who's involved. I was committing the car jacking and hey to step back it's something that we all know shows up in the newspaper and in a way that is you know bad often right and the officer said hey you know what he said it it's not even the time slowed down but I just felt that I had plenty of time to make the decisions I was going to make about how to how to take control of that weapon and and make that situation as safe as possible. And he you know what it was so interesting to me about that conversation was that sharper brain you know we're not we're not using brain training exercises to tell an officer what they already know how to do right which is how to take them out of a situation. But we're building brain training exercises that give an officer the the time the brain time what might say to put that training and that expertise to work. And so hey it worked out he got controlled the situation safe for him in the end safe for the guy he was arresting which is good on both sides and that's a police department that didn't have to end up being in the news the next day because something went horribly wrong and that's that's what we want we want people to have that fully capable shark fast brain so when they're out there doing an incredibly dangerous role-world things they they have the brain resources they need to do that do that incredibly tough job. Finally I sat down with Dr. Brittany Loney. Brittany's a previous guest on the debrief who has spent her career trying to improve the performance of US special operators. If you've not listened to my prior conversation with her I would strongly encourage you to do so because several of the topics discussed in this episode are built upon our prior discussion. The main thing I wanted to understand was how Brittany utilized brain HQ with US forces to capture some of her lessons learned. So Brittany talk to me about how in your work with special operations forces you've used brain HQ. We've used brain HQ to help train the human sensor. Specifically we're trying to train their eyes and ears to operate better when they're out in the environment. For example to improve the observation skill so that they can respond and make decisions more effectively. So you know what first glance when you start using brain HQ it seems like a game right I mean it is a game and and you know I understand the science and we've talked about the science but is is just playing the game enough? No not for any brain training app that is out there you have to make the transfer explicit. So for example if you're playing brain HQ and you're getting better at a certain game you need to ask yourself how am I getting better at this game and if it's a specific strategy how do I transfer that strategy to my operational environment? So let's push on that a little bit so give me an example if I'm if I'm playing a sensory game that you know the one part of brain HQ that tries me crazy is the the double decision game where you have you know a car in a truck that looks just a little too much alike and you're having to pick up an object that's in your field of vision how do I port playing that game to being a better operator in the field? So you would think to yourself you know how my observe in the environment to be able to pick up on these things how am I able to remember this information using actually what's called working memory capacity and then it's transferring those skills to be okay how is this similar to me as an operator? In what ways do I have to use these similar skills in an operational context and once you draw the parallels between the game and the operating situation then you're going to have a much higher likelihood of the brain training transfer in a relevant manner to that operating environment. So so we're like for instance you know if I'm playing one of the sensory games I'm thinking about how I would use those skills in the real world. Exactly so if it's something that's auditory you could ask yourself let's say you're having to pick up on background noise in the actual game and there's distractions kind of in front of it you would ask yourself and what situations do I have to pick up someone or something in the background when there's a lot of heavy distraction on the front end and how am I going about doing that in the game and can I do that similar thing operationally? So is it as simple as visualization as it is simple as this thinking through you know okay let's take your example wow there's a lot of foreground noise so for instance if I'm responding to an active shooter where I have alarms going off and people yelling and sirens and I'm listening for shots fired this example is it is it visualizing those scenarios is that is that the what causes that transfer? That definitely helps because you're starting to build the strategy into the mental blueprint for the operational situation but then it's even practicing that in training or in a situation that could be similar it might not be an active shooter situation but if there's ever situations where again background noise matters more than foreground noise it's making sure that you start to apply those in training as well so the mental imagery is one step and it's kind of the first step of the bridge but what gets you to the other side is now you start to integrate it within training as well. So if I'm a team that's using brain HQ is it is it a good strategy for me to begin to shape my training environment to heighten those kinds of specific skills and traits? Yes I would I would figure out ways that you can make it operationally relevant and even in some way have that happen in a situation itself it doesn't have to be every single training environment but the more you can consider having attention control mechanisms integrated within training and having to have heightened sensory awareness that's going to be better overall but you don't have to do it in every single training iteration. So one of the units that I work with I was watching them do some movement training and they had stuck numbers up on the wall and you know the team were at the event and they said okay what were the numbers [BLANK_AUDIO] And and surprisingly high amounts of recall and I said, well, why do you do that? Why are you putting numbers on the wall? They said they need to look around. They need to notice everything that's going on in the environment. They need to see things that are not just a target with a gun in his hand. And by making them identify, you know, objects, spaces, colors, signs, numbers, words, you're forcing that broadening of perception. So it's interesting. And now equating what they said with what you're saying of tying the skills from brain HQ into the real world. Yeah. And I love that technique of what they were doing because they were also priming memory of sometimes you can be in a situation and think something was irrelevant. And then later you look back and you're like, wow, I wish I would have got to look at that thing because it turns out to be highly relevant. And I think drills like that can help the team get a tune to maybe you don't think it's relevant for decision making in this moment. But may it be highly relevant to have to report later in another situation or to complete the overall operating picture. What are some other stimuli that you would suggest in the real world teams apply or other techniques that they can use to help them flesh out the training and make the transfer of cognitive training? With scanning type of tasks, we've looked at where the blind spots and it could be as simple as putting numbers in different spots. But we've tried to look, does the team tend to have a blind spot without going in and priming them that there will be numbers somewhere. We don't tell them they'll be there. We just put them there and then what do they tend to report back? Okay, they keep missing, you know, maybe the bottom left corner. Well, that's a problem because if something was in that bottom left corner, they're not primed out of scan that. So my first step would be to gain an assessment of if are there visual blind spots? And you can do that through all different types of mechanisms. But then once you figure out where there's visual blind spots or what happens to get missed the most, you can strategically start to put things in those spots to make sure that they're scanning encompasses the full environment. And even if it has to be 360 from the ceiling to the ground, all of those can end up helping them get a more complete picture. But I would make sure it stays really mission relevant. Let's say that ceilings never going to be relevant for someone. Then I wouldn't be putting things on the ceiling because I really wouldn't want their attention up there. But if it is relevant, then obviously you would want those things in each of those places. And we've also done things with using a radio for the auditory component. And maybe it's in a crowded place and they have to pick up on a radio playing newscast over in a corner. And it's just to enable them to get better at that auditory acuity for something that might not be in their foreground. So you speak about auditory acuity. What are the areas? What are the kinds of things that we can improve through cognitive training through these kinds of gigae games like Brain HQ? With Brain HQ, I think they're working a lot at the processing component. So simply be able to process the auditory aspects. And then also remembering it. Just because you process it doesn't mean you're going to remember it. There's a space between. And we can teach people a lot of techniques on once you've processed it. How do you remember it and maintain situational awareness to where it's not you're not having to repeat it and doing rope memorization? So I think Brain HQ is great on the processing. And then it would be what are the techniques to help remember this verbal or even visual information? That's where we spend a lot of our time is on how do you catalog all of this information that's coming at you in the environment without taking all of your cognitive load, which would cause you to lose situational awareness. So that would be I would use Brain HQ for the processing and then follow it up with more working memory and memory training. What other tools are you aware of that you think the community should be looking at? Like besides Brain HQ, are there other cognitive training devices? Are there other things that our teams can go out and look at? I really like self-regulation apps and I don't think there's one that's highly better than another one. I mean you've got headspace, calm. I think they're they're all pretty equivalent. It's just what does that person actually like? But then you also have interbalance by heart math, which is a self-regulation training tool where they use a optical sensor on the ear to help the person become better at intentional self-regulation. We use that quite a bit to help train someone's intentional self-regulation capabilities. And then there's another app that I like just for the content because it's positive content that helps me think a certain way and attack my day well and it's called Heroic. And it's a phenomenal app I listen every morning to a three to five minute video clip or auditory clip or you can even read it. It's got all the different forms and I use that to just set my mind for the day in an effective manner. And then he also breaks down wisdom from all these different self-development books that are out there and there's so many. It's just impossible to keep up with and he'll break it down into a 20 to 25 minute very applicable practical tangible strategies so you don't have to spend hours of your own time getting the essence of that book. And I usually screen which book I'm going to read using the Heroic app. So that would be another one. It's not technically cognitive training but I think it's helpful in terms of the mindset and really instilling certain belief systems in one cell. And then the last cognitive training app we tend to use is Elevate. BrainHQ is great for the sensory and the processing. I think low level and it doesn't mean better or worse. Just low level cognitive skills and then Elevate teaches higher level cognitive skills where they're teaching you how to be more concise. They work on writing things. There's math aspects in there especially if you're a sniper and you have to do math quickly. There's a lot of different components from a higher level cognitive function that Elevate will help train. Pretty talk to me about how we can use apps and games to improve our cognitive abilities to operate. I would say consistency is better than length of time. I would do five minutes a day every day versus one day a week of 30 minutes a day. I think consistency will always went out when it comes to cognitive training. I think we use it to keep our minds sharp and then make that external transfer explicit so that it becomes part of how we operate in a meaningful manner not just playing a game for playing a game. And I would probably also integrate it within physical exercise. I really like having people get physically stressed and then they have to use their self-regulation capabilities to be able to do well at the game so you're actually training self-regulation at the same time. And then they go and they spend three to five minutes on a cognitive drill then they go back to physical then they have to self-regulate to be good at the cognitive and so forth. So I would work them into physical exercise as well. This is a rapidly emerging area of science that holds the potential of significantly improving operator safety as well as effectiveness. Although it's still relatively new it's my hope that this episode is at least made you curious about how this technology may help your team. This science will no doubt transform the way US tactical units are trained and hopefully will lead to further breakthroughs in operator safety. I would encourage you to visit the Intuas website and learn more on this topic and would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this and other emerging technologies. Thank you for tuning in and please stay safe. [Music]