Brain stimulators are a hot item in sports training … do they help?

The San Francisco Giants just happen to be the baseball team that I usually root for.  Unfortunately, they’re having a terrible year, and after a 7-game losing streak (and counting) are currently deep in the cellar in the National League West.   “There’s always next year” is the baseball fan’s old lament.  But alas, the Giants have 6 minor league affiliates, and all of those teams are ALSO in their respective cellars.  Just a year ago, the Giants made the playoffs, and their minor teams were at least hanging in there. This year, for this old baseball fan, now and into the future, all is darkness. In Spring Training earlier this year, the Giants announced that they were using a new brain stimulation strategy as a part of their player-training regime after being convinced by a brief trial that it seemed to differentially improve the performance of trained minor leaguers.  After recording faster running speeds and movement initiation times in 9 individuals who had used the “Halo Sports” brain stimulator (vs 9 non-stimulated ‘controls’), the Giants provided these head-worn devices to minor and major leaguers on all of their teams and affiliates. Could the use of these devices have anything to do with their slide into baseball oblivion? On the one hand, the answer might be ‘yes’.  Brain stimulation in this form has been argued to broadly increase the state of depolarization (read ‘excitability’) of neurons in the brain.  If that were to actually b...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Brain Fitness Brain Plasticity Brain Science BrainHQ Source Type: blogs