ELEMENTS
FOR THE GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS, BRAIN ZAPPING COULD PROVIDE AN EDGE
By Alex Hutchinson
,JUNE 15, 2016
Do gadgets like the brain-zapping headphones developed by Halo Neuroscience—and worn by James McAdoo and other players on the Golden State Warriors—really work?
Back in March, James Michael McAdoo, the power forward for the Golden State Warriors, tweeted out a photo of himself in the training room, sporting a pair of slick over-the-ear headphones. Though you couldn’t tell from the picture, these particular headphones incorporated a miniature fakir’s bed of soft plastic spikes above each ear, pressing gently into the skull and delivering pulses of electric current to the brain. Made by a Silicon Valley startup called Halo Neuroscience, the headphones promise to “accelerate gains in strength, explosiveness, and dexterity” through a proprietary technique called neuropriming. “Thanks to @HaloNeuro for letting me and my teammates try these out!” McAdoo tweeted. “Looking forward to seeing the results!”
On Thursday night, McAdoo and his teammates will seek the eighty-ninth and final win of their record-breaking season, as they defend their National Basketball Association title in Game 6 of the final series against LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers. The headphones’ apparent results, in other words, have been impressive. Although a Halo spokesperson declined my request for comment, a Warriors trainer confirmed that an unspecified number of players have been trying the device. This fits in with the team’s techno-utopian narrative. Since the bumbling Warriors franchise was purchased by a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, in 2010, it has acquired a reputation as “tech’s team,” playing with the wonky, numbers-driven approach of Sand Hill Road. The Warriors have also been enthusiastic early adopters of technology ranging from “intelligent sleep masks” for countering jet lag to body-worn sensors that detect pressure on the knees and ankles. Given the Warriors’ unprecedented dominance, this is an approach that other teams are likely to emulate.
It's real. They are serious. "The New Yorker" people who published that article were serious. It is also unintentional self-mockery by "The New Yorker." (I will also link to some intentional mockery of "The New Yorker.") "The Fall of the Golden State Warriors" was a good thing.
FOR THE GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS, BRAIN ZAPPING COULD PROVIDE AN EDGE
By Alex Hutchinson
,JUNE 15, 2016
Do gadgets like the brain-zapping headphones developed by Halo Neuroscience—and worn by James McAdoo and other players on the Golden State Warriors—really work?
Back in March, James Michael McAdoo, the power forward for the Golden State Warriors, tweeted out a photo of himself in the training room, sporting a pair of slick over-the-ear headphones. Though you couldn’t tell from the picture, these particular headphones incorporated a miniature fakir’s bed of soft plastic spikes above each ear, pressing gently into the skull and delivering pulses of electric current to the brain. Made by a Silicon Valley startup called Halo Neuroscience, the headphones promise to “accelerate gains in strength, explosiveness, and dexterity” through a proprietary technique called neuropriming. “Thanks to @HaloNeuro for letting me and my teammates try these out!” McAdoo tweeted. “Looking forward to seeing the results!”
On Thursday night, McAdoo and his teammates will seek the eighty-ninth and final win of their record-breaking season, as they defend their National Basketball Association title in Game 6 of the final series against LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers. The headphones’ apparent results, in other words, have been impressive. Although a Halo spokesperson declined my request for comment, a Warriors trainer confirmed that an unspecified number of players have been trying the device. This fits in with the team’s techno-utopian narrative. Since the bumbling Warriors franchise was purchased by a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, in 2010, it has acquired a reputation as “tech’s team,” playing with the wonky, numbers-driven approach of Sand Hill Road. The Warriors have also been enthusiastic early adopters of technology ranging from “intelligent sleep masks” for countering jet lag to body-worn sensors that detect pressure on the knees and ankles. Given the Warriors’ unprecedented dominance, this is an approach that other teams are likely to emulate.
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There’s no question that tDCS can have real effects. In the past five years, researchers have published more than two thousand studies exploring the technique’s potential for goals as varied as enhancing learning, fighting addiction and depression, and improving walking ability in patients with Parkinson’s disease. One case study, published in the journal Neuroscience Letters in 2014, describes significant improvements in “trunk peak velocity” during tango dancing in a seventy-nine-year-old Argentinian man with moderate Parkinson’s—a finding that, with a little imagination, might evoke the Warriors swingman Andre Iguodala’s smotheringly intimate pas de deux with James in the defensive end. There’s also no question that tDCS hype has long since diverged from what researchers (or the vibrant D.I.Y. tDCS community) have actually demonstrated, triggering a skeptical backlash. At a conference in April, György Buzsáki, of New York University, presented results from a cadaver study showing that only about ten per cent of the electric current that is applied to a skull even makes it into the brain, prompting one tDCS researcher to describe the field as “a sea of bullshit and bad science.”
The idea that tDCS might help athletes has been around since at least 2007, when Italian researchers showed that stimulating the motor cortex reduced neuromuscular fatigue and increased endurance in the left elbow flexors of a group of volunteers. A subsequent Brazilian study, stimulating areas of the brain associated with effort and self-monitoring, boosted endurance performance in cycling. Not all the results have been positive, though: at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Boston earlier this month, for example, another Brazilian group presented data showing that tDCS failed to improve performance in an intermittent sprint test—the type of challenge that simulates the demands of court sports like basketball.
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The company says it plans to submit research to peer-reviewed journals, but that hasn’t happened yet. For now, it’s sticking to a reliable Silicon Valley script, distributing the devices to high-profile athletes like the U.S. Ski Team and the Warriors.
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More generally, the whole narrative of a team guided by Silicon Valley principles and harnessing the latest tech has probably given Warriors players the sense that, for every foul shot or inbounds pass, someone has handed them the lucky ball. Will other teams be able to match that edge by adopting brain-zapping headphones? They may decide to try, simply to avoid the sense that they’re falling behind, much as the rest of the league has scrambled to master the SportVU motion-tracking system, which the Warriors (and five other teams) adopted three seasons before the N.B.A. installed it in every arena, in 2013. It’s possible that these teams would be better off finding their own narratives of superior self-efficacy, ones not shared by all their competitors. But, if they’re going to emulate the Warriors, they should at least consider other possible explanations for the team’s success...
Alex Hutchinson lives in Toronto.
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It's real. They are serious. "The New Yorker" people who published that article were serious. It is also unintentional self-mockery by "The New Yorker." (I will also link to some intentional mockery of "The New Yorker.") "The Fall of the Golden State Warriors" was a good thing.
