Improving Tactical Performance with Cognitive Training

The Debrief with Jon Becker · October 9, 2024

Guests: Jeff Selleg (NTOA), Dr. Henry Mahncke (Posit Science / BrainHQ), Dr. Brittany Loney (Elite Cognition)

Jon Becker: Imagine if you could train your brain to give you better situational 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 Selleg from the National Tactical Officers Association, Dr. Henry Mahncke 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 Jon 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!

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 “Udal Loop” is a Stalworth concept in tactical thinking used to explain everything from the smallest tactical movement, to the largest of 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 under the assumption that the 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. Put 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 “neuroplasticity”.

This new science has led to a rapid expansion of brain training practices in Elite Tactical units, as well as professional sports teams, who are utilizing neural training techniques and applications to improve performance. Everyone from Tom Brady to our tier one 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 Officers 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 is clearly the market leader in the space and the partnership with NTOA 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 Selleg from the national tactical Officers Association to learn about the NTOA's efforts in this area.

So Jeff, thanks for being here.

Jeff Selleg: You're welcome.

Jon Becker: Talk to me a little bit about the NTOA's cognitive development program?

Jeff Selleg: So at the NTOA 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 brain housing unit of the system. So we work as a holistic cognitive development program both the mind and the brain as an organ. So to work on your mind your seat of consciousness, we do emotional intelligence coaching hardiness, and resilience 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.

We want to have a holistic response to overall fitness and longevity of the officers and deputies in public safety.

Jon Becker: The differentiation between the brain and the mind. If I'm understanding you correctly, the brain is the mechanic, it's the machine that is going to run. The mind is how the machine is run.

Jeff Selleg: 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.

Jon Becker: So why did the NTOA decide to partner with  BrainHQ?

Jon Becker: Well if you go back 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 liason.

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-bop-beep-bop-beep’ in the back seat. And he's like “What are you guys doing? Are you playing games? We're trying to do this recon of a training site”. They're like “Oh no-no we have to do our brain fitness exercises every day or the star major jumps on us.”

So at a break  they showed him what that was and he got a subscription. As he got used to it going back about 2015, he did it over and over he introduced other instructors to it. So we had like a little pocket of instructors using it.

Fast forward to 2020, and our executive director is in Colorado Springs, he has children that have been 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 SOCOM. But I think cops could really get a lot of benefit from it”.

So he introduces our executive director Thor Eels 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, “Yeah we're using it”. But they had just gone and got a general subscription to the product through the  BrainHQ website.

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.

So we started doing some research into it. What we found was every time we got into the studies and looked in the method 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 when we looked in the methods part of it they were using the Posit 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 every one of them came back to  BrainHQ. And that really piqued our interest.

As an organization we started talking to Posit Science and  BrainHQ but we wanted something that was specific to the needs of Public Safety and Domestic Special Operations.

They designed a six exercise program that takes about 12 weeks to complete, specifically for us. It's very-very similar to the SOCOM program for ground troops in SOCOM.

Jon Becker: If I am an operator (and I see the NTOAs doing this) what am I hoping to get? For lack of a better term what's in it for me?

Jeff Selleg: What's in it for you, so I think Tom Brady's quote is the best. Tom Brady is 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'd 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’s cycle is at the foundation of everything that we do at the NTOA. 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 and previous experience. We did everything we could in our 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. We can actually work on the analysis and synthesis node of Boyd’s cycle, and the entire observation phase. 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.

What we can offer them is a significantly reduced cost to get into the program.

BrainHQ and Posit Science allow us to bring it to market at a 60% discount, the same discount NASA gets, the same discount SOCOM got. They call those “needle movers”. SOCOM is a needle mover for  BrainHQ. Out of 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 Public Safety people are getting it. And really out of the goodness of their own heart they did that. So that was another big part for us.

We spent a lot of time feeling them out and corresponding with them because in our profession reputation's everything, and you can burn up that capital quickly. So we wanted to make sure they were a good fit for us.

Jon Becker: So from the NTOA's perspective, what would you recommend? If I'm a team leader and I completely agree with you Boyd’s 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.

Jeff Selleg: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: Just the ability to sense better has value, right?

Jeff Selleg: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: 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?

Jeff Selleg: I recommend that you reach out to the NTOA and reach out to me. Let's talk about it, or go look at the science, be a good researcher, be your own advocate. Every published research study involving  BrainHQ 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 BrainHQ tab and you go through all the BrainHQ 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 proof's in the pudding. 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, and started to get into retirement mode. I got my retirement job at the NTOA, and I was going through that, ’can't remember stuff syndrome’ and I've seen a marked difference in my memory since then; for me that's enough.

Jon Becker: Next I spoke to Dr. Henry Mahncke from Posit Science who is a neuroplasticity researcher who helped to develop  BrainHQ and was personally responsible for some of the breakthroughs in this area.

Henry Mahncke: My name is Dr. Henry Mahncke. I'm a neuroscientist by training. I did a PhD in neuroscience at the University of California San Francisco. 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.

Jon Becker: So Dr. Mahncke talked to me about the science behind training your brain. What are we doing when we're training our brain?

Henry Mahncke: Well the 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 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's like a computer chip inside your skull. It's got wires, carries electricity, processes information, sounds exactly like a computer chip.

But that led to some really wrong ideas about how the brain actually works. The biggest wrong idea led to which is, hey we know that computer chips are hardwired right, once they get printed the work 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. That is 100% not how the brain work.

In fact, if you and your listeners walk away with anything for our conversation today I hope it's that understanding that the 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 and a better processor of information and that improves all kinds of cognitive abilities.

So where this came from is a lab at UCSF that turned the world of Neuroscience on its head in the 90s. 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 could 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.

Jon Becker: 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. 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.

Henry Mahncke: Yeah that's very much true. And one way we might know this is if you just look at the Spectrum of human performance in an average healthy person 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. 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, 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 fitness in the sense that hey a little bit of that is genetics. And a lot of that is what you have been doing with your brain over the past years that has reshaped it, rebuilt it and rewired it in certain directions.

So before we even talk about the details of computerized brain training exercises, let's just look at normal life. Let's say you're a top tennis player right to pick something that's got some physical and some cognitive aspects. It's pretty easy to imagine that a top tennis player has pretty fantastic speed of processing in their brain, pretty fantastic executive function, the ability to make the right decision quickly and under pressure. Where did that come from? Were they all born that way?

No, they weren't all born that way. Their brains got faster, their brains got improved executive function because as a result of the I guess what I might call implicit brain training that they had been doing by developing their high performance skills. 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 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.

Jon Becker: Well we've seen this with top athletes. There's the stories of Tom Brady and his brain training exercises, and how he felt it improved his ability to see what was going on in the field and make decisions. This is not completely new science in that regard, it is something that top athletes have been doing for a while.

Henry Mahncke: That's true. When we started our company  BrainHQ we started building these brain training exercises, we wanted to take this science of brain plasticity out of the lab and into the world to help people.

Frankly when we first built these exercises we thought “Well who's this going to be for?” Well probably older people. Everyone slows down, and experiences some memory problems on the average. It might be really helpful for people who've had their brain damaged in some ways. 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.

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 a call. He said, “Hey, did you know Tom Brady's been using  BrainHQ exercises?” We said, “Well we have an excellent commitment to patient privacy here at BrainHQ. We had no idea he was using  BrainHQ exercises”. He's like “You want to come talk to him about it?” “Well we sure do.”

So we got on a plane and went out to Foxboro. He's playing for the Patriots at that point in time and 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. When we talked to him about “Hey, why are you doing  BrainHQ?” We expected what he was going to tell us frankly was for concussion recovery but that's not at all why he was using  BrainHQ.

He was using  BrainHQ and 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”. Think about me: I get the snap, I've gotten 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 plays that the coach Belich has given us. and there's well more than a hundred. There's a lot to remember. I have to use my visual attention. 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 are covered or off their route”. I got to do that kind of target selection and then I have to throw the ball quickly and accurately if it's a passing play, and hit that receiver and again all that in three or four seconds; that's incredible brain performance.

So what he said was, “Hey, I came to  BrainHQ because I wanted to sharpen my brain performance”. In the same way, he said that “I think about optimizing my physical 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 Bowls after that which was a pretty incredible performance.

I'm kind of a science guy who spends a lot of time in a 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. What it taught us was that in the same way that physical training is good for all of us, no matter where you are in your physical performance, physical training is going to boost you up. It really showed us that cognitive training and brain training works exactly the same way.

Almost no matter where you are on 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 an injury or maybe you're like Tom Brady 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 the 99th percentile. That's what we showed that we could do.

Jon Becker: What aspects of the way we use our brain are trainable?

Henry Mahncke: 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 an 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 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 the signal noise ratio, which is that you imagine you're listening to a radio. I think all of us have been listening to the radio at some point and it's been off a little bit, there's static, there's noise in the background.

When that happens it becomes harder to hear what someone says, it becomes harder to pay attention to what's coming across that radio 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. It turns out your brain can actually have an internal level of noisy information processing like that. So 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 with brain training exercises (and we could talk about how in a moment I suppose) is we can improve that signal-to-noise ratio in your brain kind of like bringing 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 able to pay attention to them and remember them 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 recognize more quickly, “Hey, is that person angry or are they afraid?” Which might be a really important decision to make at a key moment.

So 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 to noise ratio of that information processing. 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.

Jon Becker: Got it. So break down for me if you would like the kind of big picture areas. Put my brain into buckets for me as far as what I do with it, and how I use it.

Henry Mahncke: Hey what does the brain do and what parts of it might we want it to do better. One kind of framework you can look at is first perception, and deeply related to that is attention. 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 have to put them in working memory so you can manipulate them, act upon them, and then finally there's executive function. I need to make a decision and I need to make the 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 well, “Hey, all of that exists in vision 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 perception, attention, working memory and executive function across Vision across hearing you know can be sharpened with the right kind of brain training and by sharpening a person's going to experience 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. Let's talk about spatial awareness, and we've had conversations with SOCOM tactical operators and spatial awareness is one of the key cognitive skills that they wanted to work on at SOCOM.

What I mean very specifically by spatial awareness in a tactical officer framework is you enter 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 fundamentally what's a target and what's a 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 an automatic function of our brain but of course it's incredibly different across different people.

Again, in the same way that one person might be able to run 100 yards and one person might be able to run 26 miles, people are going to have incredible differences and their ability to go in a room and become spatially aware of everything that's around them.

Well let's say we wanted to take a person, let's say you got an officer and the big problem they have is they enter the room and they just never notice what's off in their peripheral vision. They get captured immediately by what's in front of them, and what that means is that a threat that's off in the side of the room they don't pick up on and that becomes a danger.

How can we improve that core tactical ability? Well one of the exercises that we built is 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. If you want to tell which one's which you got to 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 it might be at the 1:00 or the 3:00 the 7:00 wherever. 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 if I put that on the screen for six seconds. Anyone could do it. A child could walk into a room and do it. You just look and see. Six seconds isn't fast enough as you know for the kind of work that tactical officers do.

How does the exercise work? Well you get it and hey we're going to make it a little faster. And you get it 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 we'll back off a little bit, make it a little slower. 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 in front of you but keep enough attention that you're seeing what's in your peripheral vision.

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 will change how the background works so it's harder to pop these things out against the background. By comprehensively working that ability well your brain is going to rewire itself.

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? What clinical trial after clinical trial shows is yes, that because we bury these stimuli so much as you training them when you go out in the real world you are going to notice your entire field of view more quickly and more accurately.

If we work with people for example who are drivers we see that they have fewer auto crashes as a result because they become more aware of their peripheral vision, they notice a hazard 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 well you probably know how this kind of training works.

In a training exercise you go in the room and they're going to put a red card somewhere up on a bookshelf. And if you don't see that red card as you're going through the room you're going to get a dink because they need you to be aware of everything. And the guys and gals going through the training come back and they say, “Hey I was more aware when I went out of the room. I noticed that stuff off the bat as I came in.”

So that's one kind of specific ability that relates to that perception, attention working memory executive function framework in this case in the visual system, and you know that's how that ends up playing out in the real world and again that's a plastic ability that can be changed with this kind of training.

Jon Becker: So if I'm understanding you correctly what we have is these kind of four areas you know auditory and visual obviously, but we have these kind of four areas. So what we're going to do is we're going to challenge our perceptual 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 and push it in a variety of ways with an eye on just improving the processor. 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 in everything that we do.

Henry Mahncke: Yeah that's exactly. I love that analogy of let's take something we know we can improve like running. We know that if we go out and train we can run faster, we can run further and hey, it's not just on the track that we get better. When 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 you know “generalizes” is what a scientist would call it to a real world situation.

And that generalization can sometimes be a little bit hard. Certainly, there are certain kinds of exercises where you're going to lift weights in a certain way and one muscle is going to get better and that's it; that's not the muscle you needed when you needed it. What we've learned from a lot of physical fitness studies over the years is how we can train very generally so that we get stronger and faster. Hey, that's not just true in the gym but it's 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 we can train the brain in such a way that we're not just getting better at what we did on the computer, but then we're out in the real world that the processor has been upgraded.

The fundamental clock cycles of your brain are ticking off faster so that you're taking in information faster, you're acting on it faster, you're doing the thing faster. That's what we want to see with the careful design of the kind of braining training exercises. 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.

Jon Becker: If you think of this in a tactical situation the ability to perceive, the ability to see and hear, obviously you don't have to be a math major to figure out how that matters. The ability to focus attention, the ability to spot what matters in this case 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 the clearing of the room and the handling of the weapon and the movement of the team members. You can see where you could build a supercharged house that then you take to any operation you're going to be more operationally effective. I think that's why we're seeing so many of the tier one units, and the national level units all over the world begin to engage in cognitive training.

Henry Mahncke: Let's expand on this idea of training a little bit. Anyone who's in a tier one unit in a national unit who's a tactical officer they've done a lot of training clearing buildings for example. They know how to sweep from room to room and they have been taught, if I might say almost the book learning of “Hey what am I supposed to do as I enter a room step by step? Look here - do here - check act.”

They've been taught all that but nonetheless some of them are better than others and what are the limits that they're running up to it. 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?

In my view often the limit is not the 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 areas to put that learning to work. If you could 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 a threat and what's not a 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. You might have been taught like oh I don't know what's a good example of how to climb a wall to get over it-- a certain pattern way you want to get up it real quick. 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. Same logic here for clearing a room. 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 and the working memory to put that to work”, you're not going to be good at it.

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 be the kind of asset that you're capable of being.

Jon Becker: It's interesting in talking where my day job is working with elite units, and you talk to them about selection and for most units where guys bounce out out is CQB or CQC it's in that close quarter environment where there's a lot of stuff going on and you talked to the trainers and you go like “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.

It strikes me that you know cognitive training would address both of those capabilities. We're going to make you more able to process information, and also more able to discern the information that matters.

Henry Mahncke: That's exactly right. I've actually spoken to SOCOM folks about this as well. If you ask them hey what is it when someone fails out of CQC, they just cannot go forward. In SOCOM by the time they put you in CQC they want you to succeed. This isn't the part where they want you to wash out fundamentally. When you make it there they've invested tons of time and money they want every single person to make it through-- not every single person does. Why don't they? It is because in many cases that underlying cognitive ability just isn't as sharp as it need to be.

Now as a side, 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 or the attention or the working memory to do it? Well a lot of people coming into into Special Forces certainly a lot of people come into law enforcement they come from-- I don't know what's way the best way to put it Jon-- let's say “active lives” they had a lot of things that have happened to their brains and their heads already and some of that has shaken them up a little bit and you get a little bit. Maybe you fell off a motorcycle eight years ago. Maybe you took a tumble down the stairs during an exercise and got bounced around a little bit. That's maybe taking your speed and your attention, you're working memory down a notch. So you get into a training environment like that and that underlying cognitive ability just isn't where it needs to be.

Again, with the kind of brain training exercises we can sharpen that signal to noise ratio, we can get that information flowing faster, and more accurately through 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.

Again, just to bring it back to physical fitness you had a if you had a training exercise in you know again in SWAT and  SOCOM and the guy just couldn't carry the pack for far enough, well we know what to do about that. We can get a guy strong enough that they can carry a pack. 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 their executive function isn't 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.

Jon Becker: We all know that you can get physically fit. 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 know you do have this kind of fixed mindset when it comes to cognitive ability, “Oh that guy's really smart. That guy's really dumb. That guy sees pretty well, that guy doesn't.”

Henry Mahncke: We have a fixed mindset about cognitive performance in that, we don't about physical for performance. We know we can make people faster and stronger that's not a mystery to anyone. Why do we have that fixed mindset about cognitive performance? Well you know a lot of it's just bad education. How many kids got told they weren't good at math? “Well I'm never going to be good at math shouldn't work on it”. How many kids got told they weren't really good readers? How many kids just got told they were dumb at some point? “Well hey the teacher told me I was dumb I guess that's it”.

In the broader work that we think about society that is 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 to be better at things.

I do think a lot of people absorb that. They took the SAT and they got a certain score and they feel like “Well this is my score you know my slot in life has now been determined as a result of this. I think we just got to get past that as a society.”

We got to get past it for kids. We got to get past it for young adults who are working on and figuring out what they want to be in life. We got to get past it for older adults when we often think about just writing people off because their end of their career. All of that is just wrong the science is in on this front. It takes a while to change society's views after the science is in but e are certainly well on the way to doing that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think one of the most striking things for me with neuroplasticity 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. 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.

It strikes me that cognitive training not only will make us a better Tactical Operator, it'll make our brains last longer, it'll make careers last longer. It has the potential here to really significantly improve our lives across the board.

Henry Mahncke: Why is it that people say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Well, one reason is that hey certain things do happen over time the brain becomes always capable of change. But hey we all know it's a little bit harder to change as we get older. Another thing that happens is that we kind of get into a rut, and we like being good at things.

Imagine you've started to develop a great set of skills and you're getting a lot of positive rewards from your teammates, and your work and maybe even your family about how great you are at a certain line of work. Well that feels good, feels good to be good and that's a good reason to keep doing them.

Well that's great you're contributing to society and a maybe bigger way because you got these skills but maybe your learning is no longer there. Maybe you're not challenging yourself to develop as much because let's face it if you're going to learn something new, if you're going to challenge yourself in a really new way. You're gonna fail at first. You're going to fall down you're going to have to lie there in the dirt for a little while and reflect on what a beginner you are. For a lot of people that's just not fun past a certain age.

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 at an earlier age, that's what starts to turn the brain off.

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. The brain doesn't care about thinking at all. The brains for learning and changing and adapting.

The reason we as humans have these like gigantic brains. One of the biggest brain to body rate ratios in the entire animal kingdom is because we are so adaptive. 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 to Coast well our brain starts to turn off and doesn't not really need it anymore. It starts to shrink in those kinds of way. 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 going to wrong, we're going to be wrong, we're going to fail, we're going to mess it up, we're going to need to keep trying, we're going to 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.

Jon Becker: Well one of the things that struck me when I started playing with  BrainHQ was yeah, you're you're going to suck at every single one of these games when you start. It adapts very well to what you're doing and it does tune pretty well on your efforts. 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 going to fall on your face-- I mean my kids saw me fall on my face-- but if you're going to fall on your face, it's a fantastic place to do it, rather than doing it in front of your team on an operation.

Henry Mahncke: Yeah. In order to drive brain plasticity, or rewiring of the brain I have bad news you can't get them all right. That's kind of too bad. Most people like to get them all right. We're used to taking a test, what score do you want to get? I want to get 100%. That feels good makes me feel like hey I'm good at this. Well brain training doesn't work that way unfortunately. You're going to train your brain. You have to be at a difficulty level for whatever specific thing you're training for, whether it's auditory attention or visual decision- making. You got to be at a difficulty level where you're getting a lot of them but some of them are a little bit beyond your ability. Some of them you're going to get wrong. Why do we have to do that? It's not very much fun. Well we have to do that because hey the brain only changes when it has to.

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. It doesn't need to do anything differently.

Now at the same time if you give the brain only tasks which are too challenging for it, you get them all wrong. The brain doesn't change then either because it can't really quite get a “toe hold” so to speak on how to get this.

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 but that means you're getting 20 to 30% of them wrong each time you do it. That's true if we're working with a person who's 89 years old and has early stage Alzheimer's disease-- they're going to get work with a SOCOM Special Forces operator they're going to get 20 to 30% of them wrong.

The difference is hey which 20-30% 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. It's a really interesting mindset issue that we all just need to get a little bit more comfortable with the idea that when we're training we need to push ourselves to that level.

There's a great physical fitness example if I may for just a second. If you go to the gym and you're lifting weight you know if you can do every rep and every set over and over and over again, good for you probably feels good but you're probably not building at that point. We all know that hey if you're going to lift you need to push yourself and when you break well have a spotter that's a good idea, but that's when those changes and gains are going to occur and exactly the same thing is true in cognitive Performance training as well.

Jon Becker: So let's talk about the mechanism of  BrainHQ and like physically how it works and what I'm doing. When I'm using it, I'm doing the exercises. What is going on there?

Henry Mahncke: So how does a  BrainHQ exercise work? Let me tell you about some scientific principles and then I'll walk through the specifics of what exercise. So just about every BrainHQ exercise works by training speed. We want your brain to be a faster processor of information. Just about every  BrainHQ 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  BrainHQ exercise is adaptive. It's going to get harder as you get the trials, get a little easier if you get them wrong and that way it homes in for exactly the level of challenge for your brain. Every BrainHQ exercise is designed to generalize to real world performance. That means as scientists we have worked on the stimuli that you're going to see on the screen or hear on your earphones so that they relate to real world things you're going to encounter in helpful ways. Then every BrainHQ exercise taps into your attention taps 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 BrainHQ 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 want to pick up on the way out the door. You need to hear that and pay attention to it ideally and store it in working memory. So you get to the store and remember it. But hey it's useful if you're a tactical officer you might be entering a building and getting instructions over the radio in a noisy fast-paced environment and you need to have a sharp speech processor in your brain to hear what's being said and act on it.

How can we build that better speech processor? Well here's a fun little exercise everyone can do along at home now: If you put your hand on your voice box here Adam's Apple and I want everyone to do this and I want you to make the sound “ba”  like a bottle “ba”.

Now when you do that you might notice “ba” that your lips open at 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 papa. 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. We're talking about thousands of seconds there. 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 during their entire working career. 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 is the difference between a “ba” and a “pa”. Well if you can't really distinguish that gap, you're going to have a lot of auditory information processing problems. 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 do B's and P's look different. This all kind of sounds the same to me. You're an adult and you're working on a Tactical Unit, 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 couldn't figure out what sound is which.

Well let's make that better. Let's not just leave you. Let's make it better. How do we make it better? Well there's an exercise in BrainHQ called “Sound Sweeps”. The way it works is this auditory exercise you're going to be listening to on headphones or on your computer. You're going to hear two little whistles. I'm going to do my best to whistle here. You're going to hear two little whistles and one might go up and one might go down.

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 going to hear two, they might both be up, they might both be down, all the kinds 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 well the next two are going to be faster and closer together and they're going to get closer and closer together as you get them. Of course, until we hit your threshold and you can't get them anymore. Now again it 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 know you can sit in a room with different people and hey some people are going to get down to maybe 30 or 40 millisecs they can tell the difference in other people like 200 milliseconds. Were there even two I couldn't hear which one came first they both sounded the same. Their brains are slower and noisier. They're not processing that input as quickly and accurately.

It's incredible to watch two people who seem cognitively normal, when you talk to them and just see these incredible different levels of underlying sensory performance. We can make that much better again if you do it. We make the whistle shorter, we make them faster and of course we're training high sounds and low sounds and very slow ramp sounds and very fast ramp sounds. Why are we doing that? We want to make you a better whistler. I don't care how good a whistler you are if you are a good whistler good for you but that's not what we're here for. 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. If we can make your brain a better processor so it gets those fast little whistles every single time quickly and accurately, well you're going to hear everything around you. In noisy environments in stressful environments you're going to hear all of that speech more quickly and accurately and be able to act on it.

So every  BrainHQ Exercise works on those basic principles: speed, accuracy, adaptivity, generalization of the stimuli, engagement of attention and reward systems. 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 at early auditory brain systems to help you be a better speech processor. We can take that same basic concept and we built an exercise which shows you different facial emotions and you have to recognize them very quickly and now we're targeting a whole different part of your brain we're targeting a 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.

Jon Becker: What is your recommended workout regimen for somebody that is doing tactical stuff? How often, how much you know like how many sets, how many reps?

Henry Mahncke: So how much brain training do you have to do to improve your brain? Well the great news is science shows us you have to do some-- it's not magic beans here it is exercise but it's less than you think. Study after study shows that we are seeing significant brain changes in terms of speed and accuracy or performance and turning brain activation, and as little as 10 hours of training over a few weeks, or two months. The way we've built our brain training exercises is we know people are busy and they got to fit them into their lives.

So finishing just one level of brain training usually takes two or three minutes. Most people who are tactical officers are doing it you know in short burst of 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 to aim for maybe 10 hours of training over two or three months to get that minimum in.

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.

The other question that comes up often is: How long does this last? If I want this mental sharpness Improvement I got to do this every day for the rest of my life? The good news is no. This isn't like a drug where you stop taking your heart medicine and your heart's not good pretty soon. This is more like physical training where, if you do this for a while and then for whatever reason you got to take a break for a few months we can definitely see that brain performance starting to decline over that period.

It's completely fine to take several months off and then come back in and kind of reboost yourself back up. In fact when we work with law enforcement agencies is that usually what we do we got 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 adding because 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.

Jon Becker: There's kind of an initial ramp up where you improve the processor speed and then it's more of a tuneup on a regular basis to maintain that processor speed.

Henry Mahncke: Yeah I think that's like learning any skill in that sense. I'll take firearms training. When you first learn how to shoot let's say a pistol accurately at a range I mean that that initial ramp is pretty pretty significant.

You go from maybe not being able to do it all to becoming pretty good and regular range practice is a great idea but if you take off for a while you know you don't fall back down to being a beginner 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. It's a very specialized kind of brain training.

The reason you got good with a pistol on a range is you rewired your brain from a brain that didn't know how to do all of the sensory and the motor actions that are required to shoot accurately to a brain that did 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 work exactly the same.

Jon Becker: Talk to me for a minute about BrainHQ's partnership with the NTOA. How did that come to be and tell me a little bit about it?

Henry Mahncke: We got introduced to Thor Eels at the NTOA a few years ago and we just really hit it off with them off the bat. On Posit Science's end, on  BrainHQ's end you know we had been thinking a lot more about how to take this brain plasticity based training and use it for performance enhancement.

We had been working with folks in sports-- Tom Brady I mentioned and a number of other folks. We also started to work with folks in the military around SOCOM and it became clear to us we could use this science to take great brains and make them even better if I may put it that way.

We met Thor at the NTOA and really kind of clicked with their mission in order to make top tier law enforcement officers people need training and they need training of all kinds. NTOA offers tons of training around tactical performance and decision making and the kind of stuff that every LEO needs to stay sharp.

The vision was by adding brain training to that by thinking of brain training as a regular part of what it takes to become and then stay a top performing law enforcement officer. We could bring these things together and really help people who you know have a really tough job be their best. Give them the underlying brain skills and the brain health performance that they needed to be their best.

I think one thing that was really important for us in it is when we make BrainHQ available to a law enforcement organization everybody gets it. This isn't about saying well your brain's not so great maybe you need a tuneup. This is about saying, “Hey, no matter where you are we can help you make you sharper and faster and better and hey that's going to help you be better at a very tough job and a job that you love”.

It's been a great relationship with NOA and I'm 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 NTOA of course one of the first questions was what brain training exercises should a law enforcement officer do, should a tactical officer do.

Now if you ever come to  BrainHQ 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 BrainHQ every day for five years and you know they're just working their way through all the content. That's probably great for anyone's brain but in a realistic world time is really important. People in law enforcement are incredibly busy with all of the work they need to do and 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 as neuroscientists and connected 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?”

You can make an argument for everything, everything's important when you have a demanding job like that. But to hone it down what we landed on was speed and attention and working memory exercises generally focused on the visual system.

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 a law enforcement officer is so incredibly important.

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. We know that's a big bite. 10 hours is a big bite in a law enforcement officer's life over the course of two months. 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 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.

Jon Becker: Give me some examples of you know what you've heard back from tactical operators after using the system, and kind of the effect it's had on them.

Henry Mahncke: I'm a scientist. I think a lot about bar graphs and P values and things like that but in the end doing brain training doing BrainHQ it changes your brain and people notice the difference in their lives. This isn't just something you do and you're like “Well I didn't really you know I guess my boss told me to do that. Now I'm done.”

We talk to officers who finish 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 of his peripheral vision of the environment as he entered each room. He’s 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 served for quite some time. That's a great example.

If you train a lot on spatial awareness and speed and attention to your peripheral vision you're going to get sharper and you're going to notice stuff quote out of the corner of your eye. People come back and they really do experience that.

Probably the most compelling story was an officer who said he had been involved in a carjacking situation. He'd walked up to a car and he knew there was going to be trouble and  looked in and the driver pulled a weapon on him. And that's an incredibly dangerous situation. It's dangerous for the officer, it's dangerous for the person who's involved who's committing the carjacking, 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.

The officer said, “Hey, you know 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 take control of that weapon, and make that situation as safe as possible.”

What was so interesting to me about that conversation was that sharper brain. We're not using brain training exercises to tell an officer what they already know how to do, which is how to take command of a situation. We're building brain training exercises that give an officer the time and the brain time, what might say to put that training and that expertise to work.

It worked out, he got control of 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. That's what we want. We want people to have that fully capable sharp, fast brain so when they're out there doing incredibly dangerous real world things they have the resources they need to do that incredibly tough job.

Jon Becker: 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  BrainHQ 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 BrainHQ.

Brittany Loney: We've used  BrainHQ to help train the human sensor. Specifically, we're trying to train their eyes and ears to operate better when they are out in the environment, for example; to improve the observation skill, so that they can respond and make decisions more effectively.

Jon Becker: At first glance when you start using  BrainHQ it seems like a game-- I mean it is a game. I understand the science, and we've talked about the science but is just playing the game enough?

Brittany Loney: No not for any brain training app that is out there you have to make the transfer explicit so for example if you are playing  BrainHQ 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?”

Jon Becker: So let's push on that a little bit so give me an example, if I'm playing a sensory game that you know the the one part of BrainHQ that drives me crazy is the the double decision game where you have a car and a truck that look 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?

Brittany Loney: So you would think to yourself you know how am I observing the environment to be able to pick up on these things? How am I able to remember this information using 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.

Jon Becker: So 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.

Brittany Loney: Exactly. So, if it's something that's auditory you could ask yourself, let's say you're having a pick up on background noise in the actual game, and there's distractions kind of in front of it you would ask yourself “In 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? How am I going about doing that in the game and can I do that similar thing operationally?”

Jon Becker: So is simple as visualization is it as simple as thinking through, 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 is an example. Is it visualizing those scenarios that is what causes that transfer?

Brittany Loney: 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.

Jon Becker: So if I'm a team that's using BrainHQ, is it a good strategy for me to begin to shape my training environment to heighten those kinds of specific skills and traits?

Brittany Loney: 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 heightened sensory awareness that's going to be better overall. But you don't have to do it in every single training iteration.

Jon Becker: 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. The team were at the event and they said, “Okay what were the numbers that were on the wall?”

Surprisingly high amounts of recall and I said “Well why are you putting numbers on the wall?” He 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. By making them identify objects, spaces, colors, signs, numbers words you're forcing that broadening of perception.”

So it's interesting I'm now equating what they said with what you're saying of tying the skills from  BrainHQ into the real world.

Brittany Loney: 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”. I think drills like that can help the team get attuned 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.

Jon Becker: 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?

Brittany Loney: With scanning type of tasks, we've looked at where are the blind spots. 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'll 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.

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 are not primed now to scan that.

So my first step would be to gain an assessment of if are there visual blind spots and you could 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. 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.

I would make sure it stays really mission relevant. Let's say the ceiling's 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.

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 a 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.

Jon Becker: So you speak about”auditory acuity”, what are the areas, what are the kinds of things that we can improve through cognitive training, through you know through these kinds of games like BrainHQ?

Brittany Loney: With BrainHQ, I think they're working a lot at the processing component so simply being 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 this space between. We can teach people a lot of techniques once you've processed it, how do you remember it and maintain situational awareness to where you're not having to repeat it and doing rote memorization.

So I think  BrainHQ is great at 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.

I would use BrainHQ for the processing, and then follow it up with more working memory and memory training.

Jon Becker: What other tools are you aware of that you think the community should be looking at? Like besides BrainHQ are there other cognitive training devices? Are there other things that our teams can go out and look at?

Brittany Loney: I really like self-regulation apps. 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 all pretty equivalent. It's just what that person actually like but then you also have Inner Balance by Heart Maath which is a self-regulation training tool where they use an 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 3 to 5 minute video clip or auditory clip or you can even read it. It's got all the different forms. I use that to just set my mind for the day in an effective manner.

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. He'll break it down into 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. I usually screen which book I'm going to read using the Heroic app.

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 oneself.

Then the last cognitive training app we tend to use is “Elevate”. BrainHQ is great for the sensory and the processing. Think low level-- and it doesn't mean better or worse just low level cognitive skills, and 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.

Jon Becker: Brittany, talk to me about how we can use apps and games to improve our cognitive abilities to operate.

Brittany Loney: 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 win 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.

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. I would work them into physical exercise as well.

Jon Becker: 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 has 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 NTOA’s 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.