By harnessing brain power and speeding up ability to process information, players are being helped to fulfil their potential

Four years ago, Arsène Wenger was asked what he thought would be the next game-changer in football. His answer was neuroscience. “Why? Because we are at the end of the improvement of physical speed,” Wenger said. “In the last 10 years, the power and speed of individual players has improved, but now you have sprinters everywhere. The next step will be to improve the speed of our brains.”

Neuroscience is the study of the human nervous system, particularly the brain, and all the multitudinous connections and interactions that go on within it. It is a branch of science that, in the popular imagination, summons up images of electrodes and scanners and illuminated sections of the cerebellum. In football, it has also become a term to refer to a better understanding of the mental skills and qualities necessary to succeed in the game.

Florida scientists use AI and virtual reality to create 3D renderings of brain formations of mice, whose neuron types are like humans’

Neuroscientists at a Florida university have pioneered a technologically advanced method of brain mapping they believe can help demystify Alzheimer’s disease, autism and related disorders, and offer hope of more effective treatments for traumatic brain injuries.

A team at the University of South Florida’s (USF) auditory development and connectomics laboratory is using virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence to create a high-definition visual timeline of the journey of billions of neurons in the developing brains of newborn mice.

The historian’s wide-ranging exploration of wistful reminiscence cautiously champions its benefits to society and challenges the view that it is dangerous and foolish

Agnes Arnold-Forster was once a very nostalgic child. An avid reader of Enid Blyton novels, she tells us, she unsuccessfully begged her parents to “divert me from my 1990s London primary to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall”. Although her training as an academic historian naturally taught her to be suspicious of such yearnings for an imaginary past, she has now written a book that combines wide-ranging historical analysis with a (cautious) “defence of nostalgia”.

While neuroscientists sometimes treat emotions as human universals, historians are keen to show how the words we use to describe our feelings, and indeed the feelings themselves, change with the times. “Nostalgia was one of the most studied medical conditions of the 19th century,” Arnold-Forster explains, believed to cause “palpitations and unexplained ruptures in the skin” as well as depression and disturbed sleep. It was first diagnosed among 17th-century Swiss mercenaries and referred to “a kind of pathological patriotic love, an intense and dangerous homesickness”. (Since sufferers were assumed to be missing the pure mountain air, one doctor suggested they should be put in tall towers to recuperate.) It was not until the early 20th century that homesickness and nostalgia in the current sense began to be seen as distinct.

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If things work out as hoped, brain implants will ultimately restore communication for those who have become paralyzed due to injury or disease. But we're a long way from that future, and the implants are currently limited to testing in clinical trials.

One of those clinical trials, based at the University of California, San Francisco, has now inadvertently revealed something about how the brain handles language, because one of the patients enrolled in the trial was bilingual, using English and Spanish. By tracking activity in the area of the brain where the intention to speak gets translated into control over the vocal tract, researchers found that both languages produce consistent signals in this area, so training the system to pick up English phrases would help improve its recognition of Spanish.

Making some noise

Understanding bilingualism is obviously useful for understanding how the brain handles language in general. The new paper describing the work also points out that restoring communications in multiple languages should be a goal for restoring communications to people. Bilingual people will often change languages based on different social situations or sometimes do so within a sentence in order to express themselves more clearly. They often describe bilingual abilities as a key component of their personalities.

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The scientist leading a study into how the urban environment affects our wellbeing on the surprising and lasting psychological benefits of even just a small dose of nature

Andrea Mechelli, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, is professor of early intervention in mental health at King’s College London. He is the project lead on Urban Mind, a research study co-developed with arts foundation Nomad Projects and landscape architects J&L Gibbons which since 2018 has been looking at how aspects of the urban environment affect mental wellbeing globally. Its recent findings suggest that nature – and certain features such as natural diversity and birdsong – can boost our mental health.

We know being outdoors – walking, jogging or playing sports – is good for our physical health, but what role does nature play in our mental health?
Several studies show that people who live near parks, canals, rivers – any green space – are less likely to struggle with mental health issues. And this is the case even after we account for individual differences in socioeconomics. The risk of developing depression is about 20% lower in people who live near or spend a significant amount of time near green spaces. But what we don’t know is which specific aspects of the natural environment are beneficial.

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Unraveling how consciousness arises out of particular configurations of organic matter is a quest that has absorbed scientists and philosophers for ages. Now, with AI systems behaving in strikingly conscious-looking ways, it is more important than ever to get a handle on who and what is capable of experiencing life on a conscious level. As Christof Koch writes in Then I Am Myself the World, "That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation." His explanation—bounded by the limits of current research and framed through Koch’s preferred theory of consciousness—is what he eloquently attempts to deliver.

Koch, a physicist, neuroscientist, and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent his career hunting for the seat of consciousness, scouring the brain for physical footprints of subjective experience. It turns out that the posterior hot zone, a region in the back of the neocortex, is intricately connected to self-awareness and experiences of sound, sight, and touch. Dense networks of neocortical neurons in this area connect in a looped configuration; output signals feedback into input neurons, allowing the posterior hot zone to influence its own behavior. And herein, Koch claims, lies the key to consciousness.

In the hot zone

According to integrated information theory (IIT)—which Koch strongly favors over a multitude of contending theories of consciousness—the Rosetta Stone of subjective experience is the ability of a system to influence itself: to use its past state to affect its present state and its present state to influence its future state.

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