#ICYMI - Brain Training – Neuropriming & VR Technology

In case you missed this episode on the Playing with Science channel… This week hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice are getting into your head when they investigate neuropriming and VR technology training in sports with Brett Wingeier, co-founder of Halo Neuroscience, and Michael Casale, Chief Science Officer at StriVR.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 0:11Gary O'Reilly?

  And this is Playing with Science. Today, we take a trip into the inner space of an athlete's brain and find out how and what science is beginning to do to increase the motor cortex's ability to improve control and use of the body's muscle fibres.

• 0:31Chuck Nice?

  And helping us plot our course through the neuropathways. We have two guests that are at the forefront of this inner space exploration. Co-founder and chief technology officer of Halo Neuroscience, Brett Wingeier, who will tell us about neuropriming, while chief science officer at Striver, Michael Casale, will unlock for us the neuroscience behind virtual reality training.

• 0:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So, we are going to go to the forefront of science of the brain and its application for athletes, be they weekend warriors or elite athletes, and then find out what it's like to actually put all of this science into a practical environment.

• 1:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's fascinating stuff and it seems like that this is where the whole industry is going. If you're not doing something with the brain, then you're not doing anything at all.

• 1:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, we've worked from the head downwards in developing the way that we train, developing the efficiency with the dietary, the nutrition, the strength, the conditioning, and everyone's gone, "Well, without the brain, none of this other stuff south of the brain works."

• 1:39Chuck Nice?

  Kind of makes sense.

• 1:40Gary O'Reilly?

  "Let's kind of engage the brain thing."

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:42Gary O'Reilly?

  And then pow, people have unlocked what looks like a Pandora's Box in a positive sense.

• 1:48Chuck Nice?

  Yes, unless you're dealing with my brain, in which case you've unlocked nothing.

• 1:52Gary O'Reilly?

  And in mind, there's a bit of dust tucked away just in that corner there. That's the one, yeah. S, guest time.

• 2:00Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Let's get to our first guest. Joining the show right now is co-founder and chief technology officer at Halo Neuroscience, Brett Wingeier. Brett, how's it going, man?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  I'm doing fantastic. How are you? It's great to talk.

• 2:14Gary O'Reilly?

  We are good. I love this, chief technology officer at Halo Neuroscience.

• 2:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  That would be me.

• 2:21Chuck Nice?

  That halo sounds so futuristic, but the future is now. You guys, basically, well, tell me, did you invent this, this brain doping headset? Uh, or, or what exactly is the halo headset? And what is neuropriming?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Well, so, so first of all, we wouldn't call it brain doping, but we can talk about that in a minute.

• 2:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay, well, then I'll, then we will not call it, we will not call it brain doping, although that sounds like the coolest thing ever.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it, the, the term gets used and, uh, you know, it, it packs a punch. So I completely understand, but, um, you know, to, to, to, to answer your question, the basic science has been around for a long time. Um, the basic science behind, uh, helping your brain get better with brain stimulation. But what we invented was the technology that takes it from something you do with, with wires and sponges and little beige boxes in the laboratory, and took that and put it into a, a package, a product that an athlete can take, take to the gym, to the field, um, to the, to the top of the slope and, and do what they need to do.

• 3:32Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's no longer Dr. Frankenstein? Cause that's the whole, that's the whole sort of image you've just painted, in my mind at least, anyway. So, okay, we've gone 21st century with it and we've got these really cool looking headsets. So what is, as Chuck asked, neuropriming?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  So neuropriming is brain stimulation that helps your brain optimize itself faster. Um, a, a huge part of the benefits you get when you, when you train or you practice. Um, you know, that applies whether you're, whether you're a steer, whether you're a, a, a powerlister, a NFL player trying to improve your vertical leap, or, or even, even a piano player or a surgeon or something. A huge part of the benefit you get when you practice is your brain getting better at controlling your body. So with neuropriming, we can speed that up. Your brain gets better faster and you get better results faster.

• 4:28Chuck Nice?

  So this kind of reminds me of a neuroscience saying neurons that fire together, wire together.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 4:40Chuck Nice?

  And so what happens is repetition causes a synaptic of, I don't know, imprint, let's call it. So there's a synaptic imprint on your brain when you do anything repetitively. So when you're neuropriming and you say this helps faster, what exactly are you stimulating in the brain to help that process?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you're speaking my language here. I think you just gave like half of my talk here.

• 5:11Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry. All right, we'll erase that part.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  You're spot on, like neurons that fire together, wire together. And what neuropriming does under the hood is it actually does, it makes your neurons a little more likely to fire together. Yeah, stepping back, when people first started using this technology, you know, when it was first created by scientists, everybody thought it was, you know, kind of juicing up your brain a little bit, you know, making it more excitable. Turns out that's not the case. What the electric fields do is it makes your neurons just a little more likely to fire together when they fire, and that's what speeds up neuroplasticity.

• 5:55Gary O'Reilly?

  So we would call that as an athlete muscle memory way back when.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, you're like the cleanup team on the freeway where you're getting rid of all of the rubbish that's blocking this ability for these things to travel at a speed we haven't yet realized they can travel at. I know I'm really sort of downgrading your work, so I apologize.

• 6:18Gary O'Reilly?

  But how fast can we go? Well, I mean, is there a speed limit on this particular freeway? Or can we really just whatever? If we if we tap this the right way, this thing could be unreal.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you know, the the the brain is, the brain is amazing. The brain is, I mean, it's, yeah, I I all of us, all all of us have this amazing untapped potential. And, you know, there there's not, you know, there there's not enough time or physiological resources in your body to to train. Yeah, to to to, you know, to to, you know, to to to unlock that potential a lot of the time. So, um, you know, the it's not magic. I I I love to say that it's not magic. It's really important to say because, you know, every when you train, everybody gets better. But helping, getting results from that training a little bit faster.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  If you're, if you're an athlete who really cares about performance, especially if you're training at an elite level. And, you know, you're you're limited by recovery, you're limited by the amount of time you can spend out there. Even if you're, you know, if you're kind of a weekend warrior like myself, you're limited by, you know, startup and kids and stuff like that. So being able to get more results a little bit faster, it ends up being super meaningful to an athlete.

• 7:36Gary O'Reilly?

  So, um, Chuck, go back, if we can go back, because I'm I'm really interested in the terminology here. Because I I I love being taken to school for this stuff. What is the process, plasticity within the brain? And how you are through this neuropriming, beginning to get the brain into this plasticity? And then elevating it even further to do exactly what you've just described?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Right, right. So neuroplasticity is your brain's ability to optimize itself. And first of all, that's what your brain loves to do. Uh, you know, I I'm talking to you here, you know, you're you're learning stuff, you know, I'm learning stuff from you. And both of our brains are, they're doing neuroplasticity right now. You know, every, every step you take, your brain is learning a little bit from that and optimizing itself. Um, the way that happens under the hood is. Um neurons, neurons fire, neurons fire, you do your thing. And, uh, you know, let, you know, take, um, you know, take, take training for a ski jump, for instance.

• 8:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  You know, you've got, you know, you, you get that, you get down there to the end of the ramp. And everything fires in exactly the right way to have a smooth, coordinated, uh, smooth, coordinated jump off the end of the ramp. And then you, you know, you, you get that loft and you hold your position, you get an amazing jump. So the, the outcome, that positive outcome means that the stuff that, the stuff that fired together, wires together. Fires together, wires together, you know, that is exactly what you said. The, the patterns of neural firing that led to a great outcome are reinforced. And that, and, and, and, and that's neuroplasticity.

• 9:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Ah, so it's not just muscle memory. You've got a, a historical memory of this is what it took at a microscopic level, at a cellular level to achieve this particular distance in a jump, which is what I was aiming for, or this particular speed down a slope, or, or whatever your event, whichever your sport. So it's not just the muscle memory of, oh, when I need to do this, the muscles fire in a certain way. You're talking about this is the euphoria, this is the level of technique and performance I'm looking for, and you're working on that level as well.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the, the, the, the reason I mention that is because, is because it's so important for closing the loop, um, to, to, to train, to train mindfully. And, and we talk about this a lot because this is really important to using neuropriming. If you, you know, if, if you go out there and you just go through the motions, then It's probably going to be counterproductive. If you use it sitting on your couch, then maybe you're going to get better at sitting on your couch.

• 10:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. I like that. That's good.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:29Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry. I really, I don't really, but I really don't think 100% effectiveness can be improved upon. Brett. I'm willing to try. Yeah. Even though, yeah, I'm willing to give it a shot.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  We, we all have some unlocked potential, uh, some potential to unlock there. You know, maybe you're just at 99%.

• 10:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, it's true. So let me ask you this. With respect to, um, uh, what you were just talking about, I, I assume when you're looking at athletes, that you're primarily focused upon the motor cortex if you're looking at, um, physicality.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Uh, exactly.

• 11:00Chuck Nice?

  If, is there, and I'm not talking about just Halo, because I know that's for athletes, but could there be applications for this where you're stimulating other parts of the brain? I mean, we know from a, from a, from a neuro, um, synaptic standpoint, that when you learn new things, what happens is you create new neural net pathways and that actually stimulates, you know, that can happen anywhere in your brain. Could this be used to, uh, to actually help other areas? So for instance, I don't know, like if you're a chess player or like you mentioned earlier, like if you're a surgeon. This is where you were gonna go. Yeah. Yeah. So it's technique. It's technique, it's performance, yeah, everything. Uh, could that be the case?

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, for sure. You know, the, the, the brain, the brain is a big place. The brain is everything. So, you know, step back to the science. There's great scientific results on things like improving, uh, improving, improving memory, creativity. Um, you know, flip to the medical side, stuff like, stuff like depression and, you know, chronic pain. Yeah, there's, there's great research out there.

• 12:06Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so now stop right there, because I have a really, a weird question about that. There's some research out right now where mild, so what you guys do, and please, you'll have to explain how the Halo headband works when you answer this question. Um, there's some research out there right now that mild electrical stimulation can help with chronic pain and anxiety. So can you relate that to the Halo headband and what it's doing for athletes in the same kind of way?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a little bit, it's a little bit different mechanism.

• 12:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Really, you know, it's pretty much the same technology. So, so what, what Halo's doing is neuropriming, and that's increasing neuroplasticity, your brain's ability to optimize itself.

• 12:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  During training, where and when you want it. So if you're, if you're looking at something like chronic pain or anxiety, um, probably the best way to do that is you stimulate different part of the brain. Um, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. See, if you go kind of the, the top left of your forehead, that's where that sits. And if you, if you stimulate there, then it's, um, it increases what's called cognitive control. And cognitive control is your brain's ability to, it's your brain's ability to do what it needs to do instead of what it wants to do. Um, so if you look at that in anxiety, stimulate there and, and it probably gives you the ability to, to step back a little

• 13:42Speaker 02

  and understand, well, you know, it's, it'll, it'll be okay.

• 13:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, Brett, are we talking about an override program here?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, cognitive control.

• 13:52Gary O'Reilly?

  If I'm, if I'm an endurance athlete, or I'm in, say, say I'm, uh, let's, let's go warmer and go summer athletics, Olympics, that's a, so, so I'm an 800 meter, I'm gonna go into an anaerobic day, all of those things where, man, my body hurts like I never knew it could hurt, but I have a race to run and I don't like coming second. You know the kind of person I'm talking about.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. The elite athletes, um, and I've spoken to so many, tell, I mean, I've been sitting there going, you don't feel pain, do you? And I can't ask the question, but all of a sudden, if you take the ability to feel pain or diminish that ability to feel pain.

• 14:30Gary O'Reilly?

  These guys are gonna be able to perform at their peak for longer, which therefore is...

• 14:35Chuck Nice?

  I could run until my feet are bloody.

• 14:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, you could.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, here's the thing for endurance sports. You know, endurance athletes are already so enormously goal-driven and so able already to just to separate themselves from that. I honestly think there's a better way to look at this for endurance sports. And so I was a collegiate rower, I've done a lot of masters of rowing since. So, you know, a lot of my thinking comes from this, but, you know, it goes back to muscle memory. If you, the more you engrain good technique in your muscle memory, then the better you are at keeping your act together when it starts to hurt.

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  And holding form and not just starting to flail. And if you look at the thing that, you know, there's this cascade of failure when you start to, when you start to drop your form, it starts to hurt more and it just goes downhill.

• 15:38Chuck Nice?

  That's what they say, that if you're able to hold form, then first you you decrease fatigue by holding proper form all the way through.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. And that's, you know, there's, there's good data with, with brain stimulation in endurance athletes. And I, I think this is why. I think it's anything that can engrain good form better in your muscle memory, it just lets you keep your act together for longer and it, it just interrupts that whole cascade of fatigue and pain and breaking form even more. That, you know, that's what, that's what makes everything go to hell at the end of a race.

• 16:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I learned, I learned that from my sex coach, yes.

• 16:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Brett, don't be offended, this is where every show basically ends up, in this particular department of the store. If we look, if we look at your, your hardware, from what I can understand, you use it for about 20 minutes and then for an hour afterwards, you're able to utilize what it's given you. Are you in the process of being able to expand the length of time you can use it? And therefore elongate the period at which it becomes beneficial to the muscles and the fibers that you're trying to activate and speed things up?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Well, so, so, so here's the thing, the, the, what you get when you use the headset for twenty minutes.

• 17:02Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Is, you know, that, that doesn't give you increased performance by itself.

• 17:06Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  That, that gives you the ability to get more from the focused training you do during that period.

• 17:13Chuck Nice?

  Ah-ha.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  So, so, so the gains you get are real gains, like anything else.

• 17:18Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  And so, so if you pair that, if you pair that, you know, twenty, sixty minutes with, with the, with hard, smart reps, whatever you're doing.

• 17:30Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Ingrain it in your muscle memory, then that's, that, the, the benefits of that training are gonna stay with you like, like any other kind of training.

• 17:38Chuck Nice?

  I get, that, that, hence, hence the neuro priming, just like when you prime a pump, you pump it, pump it, pump it, pump it, and then you let it go and everything gushes out.

• 17:47Gary O'Reilly?

  So what you've done is you've, you've added another component to the virtuous cycle of an athlete's training program and regime.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 17:56Chuck Nice?

  Ah, it's very, very cool.

• 17:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Isn't that?

• 17:59Chuck Nice?

  That is, I mean.

• 18:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Where do we go? Do we change? How deep can we go into the brain tissue? Here we go, here's the questions, I'm gushing. How deep do we go into the brain tissue? Do we play with the frequencies? If we do, can, does that then alter? We've already touched on the fact that geographically around the, the brain, we can do different things because of certain things are contained within certain areas of the brain. Just how much more? I mean, a, a, as a percentile, how far are we into a hundred right now with this?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  So, you know, we're, I, I, I feel like we're kinda lucky to, you know, to be, the, the field is just beginning. And we're kinda lucky to be, to be having, to be having great effect even at the start because, because so much of the important stuff in the brain is, it's, it's, it's right at the surface in the cortex, it's in this motor cortex, which fortunately for, for us and for our users is, is right under the band of a pair of headphones. But the, the, the thing about the brain is, the more you, the more you individualize stuff and the more you personalize it. Um, you know, the, the, the brain gets bored. There's, there's this enormous field out there that's, that's starting to be explored by not, not just us, but scientists all over

• 19:13Speaker 02

  the world. You know, how do we, how do we make this better and better? How do we, how do we go deeper? How do we focus it more? And, and how do we take you as an individual athlete and, and craft the program? Um, just like, just like your trainer crafts a, a workout for you. How do we, how do we craft the optimum neuropriming exactly for your brain? It's a, it's a hugely exciting thing.

• 19:36Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's not as simple as me just plugging your headset into the national grid?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the, the, the, the cool thing is, um, the, right now, um, right now it works, um, because everybody's brain is different, but also, um, you know, there's, there, there are a lot of commonalities. And the key is you pair it with training. So you, you pair, you pair the stimulus that, that elevates neuroplasticity across the board.

• 20:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Um, pair that with the training on exactly what you want to do. And, you know, so, so, so in a lot of ways, in that sense, it is, it is, uh, it is personalized.

• 20:14Chuck Nice?

  I just, I just, I just had a sci-fi flash forward.

• 20:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Did you?

• 20:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Where, because what you're doing with this neuropriming is electrical in nature, which means that you could actually take the signal that, that is created during the training. You could record that and then somehow recreate that in another person's brain, thereby giving other people the benefit of somebody else's training.

• 20:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Let me think. Does the person you're thinking of, the, the, the letters U and B? I'm getting Usain.

• 20:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, dude. I mean, yeah.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 20:57Chuck Nice?

  I mean, it's, it's almost like the matrix. It's like the matrix where you, where you jack into the brain and you take somebody else. So it's just like, I need to learn how to fly a helicopter right now. And then they jack you in and it's just like downloading program. Boom. Like this could be like the beginning of that, man.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  You know, there's a wide world of stuff, you know, next, next 20, 50 years in the brain, it's going to be an amazing time. You know, we're not there yet. That's not what Halo's doing, but you know, that's, it's, it's, you know, it's, the brain's amazing.

• 21:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's good stuff, man. Oh, man, I'm so sorry. We're out of time, but this is really exciting stuff, man.

• 21:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 21:36Gary O'Reilly?

  I think you fired some synapses.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Good.

• 21:39Chuck Nice?

  You either fired some synapses or fried some synapses.

• 21:45Gary O'Reilly?

  I think we did. I think you've been able to achieve both, but in a positive way.

• 21:48Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 21:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Brett, thank you so much. I mean, Brett Weinga from Halo Neuroscience. If you haven't heard of them, check them out. And if you've got enough of those pennies left, go buy yourself a headset and make yourself an elite athlete, or at least take yourself towards being an elite athlete. We're going to take that break. Coming up, we'll take a look at the neuroscience of virtual reality training with none other than the chief science officer at Striver. Don't go away, we're back shortly.

• 22:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 22:24Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 22:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, he certainly is. And this is Still Playing with Science. And today we're exploring the way athletes can dope their synapses using brain technology to improve their plasticity, how they get going, how they fire things up. Don't like to be called brain doping, does it?

• 22:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they don't like it, but you know, it's a cool term. I don't care what anybody says. Brain doping is awesome. It's like your brain's getting high on itself. I wish I could do that. Kidding me? All this money I'm paying my dealer?

• 22:56Gary O'Reilly?

  And moving on quickly, and joining us now to talk about, that skipped us on a few beats, Jerry, us now to talk about neuroscience behind the virtual reality training is Michael Casali, who is chief science officer at Striver, our good friends at Striver. So, Michael, thank you so much for actually still being here after that introduction.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  It is, it is Friday afternoon.

• 23:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, yeah, it is.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  I totally get it.

• 23:28Gary O'Reilly?

  It is one of those days, but it seems to be Groundhog Day.

• 23:31Chuck Nice?

  It's so cool to have a, um... A titled Chief Science Officer. Gary and I were talking like, it sounds like something on the USS Enterprise.

• 23:41Gary O'Reilly?

  I really do hope you've got a badge on your sort of.

• 23:43Chuck Nice?

  On your chest like, you know.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Where I go, people know I'm a science officer. They don't know quite what it means, but they know I'm a science officer.

• 23:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Do they salute?

• 23:53Speaker 03

  That's a great idea. I think.

• 23:54Gary O'Reilly?

  I think you should make them salute.

• 23:55Chuck Nice?

  You ought to start that. Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Science salute. That's right.

• 23:58Chuck Nice?

  It's funny. I'm doing a lot of reading, you know, first of all, let me just say congratulations to Striber.

• 24:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Chuck Nice?

  On how widely adopted you guys and your technology is being accepted across different sports platforms. And maybe you can talk to us from a neuroscience perspective as to why you think that is happening. You're seeing a really increased adoption of this technology.

• 24:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Sure.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Right. So I think for any athlete and even if you're a casual athlete, for you to be able to participate in the game, there really is no substitute as far as your performance improvement goes. Now, obviously with professional athletes, between the travel, the injuries, the off season, this this access to the real world, the real games, isn't always available to them. Obviously, they do things to try to surrogate that. They do practices in the off season, scrimmages, they'll do weights, they'll do drills, they'll even look at film. And so that that last point, the film session, is something that we found a really valuable opportunity that we thought to improve.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  And so the idea of being there, if you look at the current film sessions, they're often done in a, you know, kind of disenfranchised, detached way, right? It's a guy sitting, maybe he's paying attention to the video, maybe he's not, or she. And there's a coach and they're instructing them, but it's this really kind of passive experience, right? So it's that they're looking at something, that they're having to kind of manipulate the information that's coming from a 2D environment, from a third person perspective. And so that information doesn't always resonate. With the experts, they're able to probably do a little bit better job of taking that information and understanding how that would apply in the real world. Situation, but for for many athletes, especially the young ones who are up and coming, it's really critical for them to get in the game. So, you know, with virtual technology

• 25:52Speaker 03

  and the ability to kind of get that easily, and this this is only a recent thing in the past few years, where folks have been able to get virtual technology in offices in their homes for a relatively cheap price. Um, this has allowed us to be able to put folks into the game in a way that they haven't before. So to get that first person perspective, to get that experience of what it's like to kind of nail down the timing, to feel the stress and pressure of being a quarterback, of being a point guard. And so these things are really important. Uh, from a neuroscience perspective, we know that in order to really facilitate transfer of training, which is which is the goal of any training, is to be able to apply it in the real world, it needs to map onto the same perceptual inputs that you would get in the real world, right? So it follows that if you're looking at a,

• 26:35Speaker 03

  you know, two D video from a third person perspective, those inputs, you might be learning something, but the translatability, how that actually applies in the real world is limited. By getting all those kind of same perceptual inputs, um, that hit the visual cortex, that hit the other sensory cortices, that ultimately play into the decision making, you're able to really experience firsthand what the real world performance would be like, not just some, again, you know, two D learning that may or may not transfer into the real world.

• 27:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So we we you hear about it a lot, the 10,000 hours equals the elite athlete.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 27:06Gary O'Reilly?

  You know, the the the quality of training. For me, that's not always possible. If we took, for instance, Alpine skiing, I've got to get the snow, I've got to get there when the snow's good, I've got to get in this chair lift, I've got to go up the mountain, I'm gonna spend a minute or two coming down the mountain to get back up, wait my turn to come. I'm not gonna get 10,000 hours. But all of a sudden, I'm sticking on this virtual reality headset, I'm there. I'm doing the mileage, as it were, I'm putting in those hard hours over and over again. It's not just for the athletes themselves, it becomes a coach's boon to be able to have their athlete go through all of this. And then you can turn around and say, this is closer to the finished article than three,

• 27:50Gary O'Reilly?

  four weeks, three, four months ago. So this is, this is why it's probably being embraced as far as I can see.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, in what you mentioned, I think we can kind of sum up as the phenomenon of repetition learning, right? And that's a pretty, that's practice, right?

• 28:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  In the latest terms. And that's, that's critical. And obviously, if you can get more practice, that's going to lead to better performance. And for a lot of these guys, and I'll take the quarterback example.

• 28:12Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  You know, during the week, they are seeing a kind of, almost a countless number of variations of the defensive looks. And so they have to be really good about, how do I learn this in just a few trials, as it were, or a few snaps during practice? Well, chances are, they're not learning everything to the best of their ability. They're kind of doing what they can with what they have, which is a limited practice time. To your exact point, to be able to then kind of multiply that, to get those additional mental repetitions, so that they can hone in on their decision making better. And we know, at the elite level, it's not necessarily all about who's the best athlete, but it's about who's the best decision maker, in a quick enough amount of time.

• 28:50Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  That's what, that's what we're really training with VR right now. At some point, I think, in the not-too-distant future, we'll be able to get more holistic experiences in the virtual environment, where you can actually move like you would in a real game, get hit like you would in the real game, maybe. But we're not quite there. But that said, there's still a lot of value for just the decision making component, all the cognitive components that we know are important. The training physically can take place anywhere. You can get, you can simulate what it's like to be, you know, in sprinting up and down a court by just doing that on your own. But you can't always simulate what it's like to kind of have a defensive trap in the backcourt when you're playing basketball.

• 29:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Or to have blindside defender coming at you when you're a quarterback. You can simulate that in VR and make those decisions accordingly. You can't do that watching a 2D video. And so, and again, from all the things that we know about how the perceptual inputs work and how that plays in the learning from the neuroscience, we know that that's a better way to learn. Now we have the ability to do it. So it's the last few years with this technology, these technology advancements that have really allowed us to do that. And so, and so teams are really making use of it. And it's great for us to be in a position to be able to kind of understand what their needs are from a training perspective, and then quickly be able to adapt the technology accordingly. So that's, yeah, so we've experienced a lot of success in that domain and hopefully continue to grow as we learn about what's valuable and as the technology continues to rapidly develop.

• 30:03Chuck Nice?

  Let me ask you this about, when you, when you talked about the, the situations, and I, I read where, especially in the NFL, Particularly backup quarterbacks uh benefit greatly from this because they don't get the reps during the week of for those who are not. Who was the Vikings quarterback, the young, the young player? Uh, well, I know Carson Palmer was using it. Uh, I forget the um.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Case Keenum was a big.

• 30:27Chuck Nice?

  Case Keenum, that's who it was. Case Keenum. Why did I ask you? Yeah, should have asked him. Yeah, Michael knew. I'm sure he actually gave it to Case Keenum personally. That would make a lot of sense, but he all of a sudden he just went pop. Yeah. So now here and and listen, they all swear by it because they said that basically it's it's a matter of getting the reps. Okay. And everybody knows that uh in order for you to play on Sunday, you know, the the big question is how many reps you got during the week. What are they seeing is what I want to know and where are you getting the imagery to put in the headset? Because I would think that you would, you can't, or can you? You can't manipulate these images, can you? Or can you?

• 31:06Chuck Nice?

  So let's for ins- for instance, I wanted to, I want to show a fake blitz to a quarterback and I want him to understand that, look, this is what a fake blitz is. Do you create that or did you film that or how does it work?

• 31:18Speaker 03

  This is a great question. Um, and right now what we're doing is we're using 360 video. So we're using live footage um that we can then put into the VR experience for the quarterback to learn. Now, all this, all these images, because they're live video, they have to be shot with like extreme high fidelity of the perceptual place. So for, for timing is critical, milliseconds are critical. So we can't fudge that. In other training experiences that we're uh getting into now, the timing isn't quite as critical as it is in like professional sports. So you can, you have a little bit more room, uh wiggle room when it comes to creating the experience. And so you can start to kind of use other techniques and technologies. But for football, we've used 360 video. That does limit us in the sense that like you just mentioned, creating a blitz like on the blind side, we'd have to go out and film that.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Um, but as it turns out, we've really done a lot of work to create uh great efficiencies in that process. So at the last, you know, 15, 20 minutes of practice, uh if even that sometimes it's just 10 minutes, they will actually dedicate time to be able to look at the different formations they need to work on and stimulate those. And so whether it's, you know, different blitz packages, whether it's different, you know, defensive. formations that they haven't been able to get to that week. We'll go ahead and we'll set up the camera technology to be able to capture that in a really efficient manner. But that's the that's the limitation we're at with three sixty video. There are a lot of cool techniques coming online right now. And this is what you're alluding to, which will allow us to manipulate that space, which will allow us to be able to say, okay, now I want to move this player over to this position.

• 32:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  So that is like, it's kind of here, it's just not, you know, scalable, it's not as good and crisp as it should be right now, but it's getting. That's going to allow us to do a whole host of other.

• 32:51Chuck Nice?

  So what about this? What about the marrying your technology to video game technology? When you look at these games like Madden, okay, and you see how the way they and they're doing it digitally. They're moving the camera on the field digitally from a above the above the grid view to a quarterback first person perspective to, you know, a two shot, the whole deal. Is it possible you guys might be able to do something like that where you're taking, you know, basically what would be a construct? And then building the field and the team and then placing the player in that construct?

• 33:31Speaker 03

  That's exactly the ambition ultimately is to be able to do that, to manipulate ways, guys in ways which are really conducive to the training experience. We know it's better to have different looks of the same defense. Right now we're getting one look of that or maybe slight variations of that. That technology that they use to do that is really costly. It's really not efficient, but it's there, your point. And as we know with all technology, when it's there, it will eventually scale down and be able and it will give us the ability to use that when it's cheap enough and efficient enough. But there's a lot of value for obviously just what we're doing now, but that isn't the next level kind of thing that we need.

• 34:05Chuck Nice?

  Is it the quality that you require and the athletes will require?

• 34:09Speaker 03

  So the the point you made, so you you you mentioned the point about Madden earlier and that's something that I really want to address. So there are other folks who are kind of experimenting with this idea, but what if we just, because they value more to manipulate at this point, so they the trade off is that they use this kind of like video game like technology. And as you know from Madden, you can learn like concepts, but you don't know what it's like to make a decision under pressure. You don't know these guys are moving in a kind of a goofy way and maybe they kind of stop and start again and there's a glitch in the system. So it's really important that we don't miss. Train guys, right? So with Madden type of technology, you can maybe learn concepts, but you might not train the right perceptual inputs and therefore the learning doesn't translate as well. And or in fact, in some cases, you might be hurting learning.

• 34:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, you you could end up screwing a guy up because you throw his timing off. He's waiting for a player to stop in the glitch for a second.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:59Chuck Nice?

  That would actually...

• 35:01Speaker 03

  You laugh, but that's if you think about the way the brain...

• 35:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  The map side, that's exactly what's gonna happen if you do that at the time. But we've decided to not go that route for those principled reasons. I think other people have just decided, well, that's a cool thing to do. That's a feature they request. So we're gonna do it that way. And we know that that's just not a good way to train. So once the technology gets there, well, we can do both. And that is the ideal world. That's gonna open up so many more opportunities for us. But what we're learning now from these organizations, just about how to use it, how to integrate it in their current training, that's gonna help us when that technology comes online. We'll be ready to go to be able to implement right away with all the best practices that we're learning now from how to do this within these organizations. So that's really good. A good place that we're at.

• 35:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Is your technology best suited to sports, to positions within certain sports that are very technical, very technique, say golf swing, quarterback, you know, that kind of element that requires an awful lot of technique? Is that where you're finding it has its ultimate benefits?

• 36:04Speaker 03

  I would suggest more broadly that it's anything that really requires what, you know, you would call kind of course the experiential learning. And that just means any time you can't substitute the experience with words, or even like a different perspective. And so we're finding actually outside of sports, there's a lot of interest in what we do. And we've started working with big organizations on training even their employees, not sports players, but basically people who need to learn skills in the real world, who don't have the ability to do that because it doesn't lend itself well. So like being read in a manual, for example. So timing, definitely, because we're able to get that timing down in a realistic way. So the quarterback thing is an obvious example. But even other skills, like learning to make decisions on the fly, learning to improv, learning to kind of see things in context. And this can be a...

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Variety of things. This could be decision making when you're looking at like whether or not to send someone out to battle or not send someone out to battle or whether in in in a lot of instances, police are using this to know when to like shoot or not shoot. Um, and that's a really, these are kind of really powerful day to day things that we have to kind of deal with. Um, that impact a lot of people's lives. So even beyond sports, we're finding that the realistic decision making component of all of this is important. Anytime you need to kind of, you know, uh, replicate the stress of the environment, to replicate what it's like to have a lot of chaos in the environment. That's a good, that's a good place for VR to, to really shine. When it's something that you can learn from a book, then great. VR is probably the best case for that. So I don't want to limit it just to sports. We're finding a lot of value outside of sports. But obviously, sports was the first place that we started that.

• 37:35Gary O'Reilly?

  I love it. How amazing. It's, it's got real world implications.

• 37:40Chuck Nice?

  That's what it is.

• 37:40Gary O'Reilly?

  And you're taking from, in, in a sense of team sports strategies, or even just the sporting world strategy and implementing those into a real world scenario, but using your technology to achieve the same thing, which is a positive outcome.

• 37:56Chuck Nice?

  I love it. I just, I can't wait for you guys to come up with a parenting version. So I can just, I can just slap a headset on my kids. Oh, that would be awesome. Ah.

• 38:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Bang goes your dad of the year award.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I mean, if anything, you know, at the end of the day, the core things that are governing the learning. So the brain science behind the learning, what a quarterback has to do and the decision making. So that, that's the same decision making processes, the same neural processes that govern a lot of other types of learning. So it's not that just like there's a quarterback specific part of the brain, right? These are mechanisms that we have generally to learn other things. And so anytime those learning systems come online to help you learn, that's where VR is going to be really good for. And it goes beyond sports, like I mentioned.

• 38:42Chuck Nice?

  Amazing. So listen, I, uh, I was, uh, reading a thing about, uh, the US downhill, uh, ski team. Uh, I forget the, um, um, the athlete who was injured, used, uh, your Striver technology to help in the recovery, uh, which is what the article was talking about. And now is that just to stay familiarized with the motions or how do you help in the recovery?

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so again, I think the idea that you, and this is true for basketball, this is true for any other sport, probably a lot of other applications, but sports, the most obvious one, where if you're not able to get on the slope, or you're not able to get on the court or the field, your ability to kind of take in and process information like you would in the real world, so all the things that happen, the kind of speed at which things happen, the motion is something that you can always kind of replicate, I'm assuming that you're not injured, in a different environment, but what you can't replicate is what it's like to feel that pressure, that stress, to make that kind of like millisecond decision making, that's something that you can't do by just thinking about it necessarily, or even kind of watching yourself do it in a TV video, you actually have to see the

• 39:50Speaker 03

  same visual inputs and react to them the same way, that decision making, so, you know, obviously if you're injured, you're gonna have to go through that physical rehab process, but even when you kind of fully recover physically, you still have that kind of mental recovery, right, you have to kind of get adjusted to the game, they talk about this all the time when players come back on the court, you know, they may be physically fit, they may be physically fine, but adjusting to the speed of the game, as it were, or in the case of the skiing, adjusting to the speed of the slope, like that's something that is difficult, if not impossible, to get unless you're on the playing field, that's what we're trying to replicate, and that's where they find a lot of value right now, is being able to replicate those environments, because then when you're physically fine, you're mentally fine right there as well, right, you don't have to spend that extra time doing the mental recovery.

• 40:33Gary O'Reilly?

  You are endeavoring to keep game sharpness in place, within a manageable bandwidth.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:39Gary O'Reilly?

  That's so cool, man. And I must ask you, before we shamefully have to let you go, because we want to keep you here for ages, I think, how far away are you from the sort of impact sensor within the whole athlete, for instance, if I'm the quarterback, and I'm gonna be a very bad quarterback, I can tell you right now, but I need to know what it's like, not just the fact that there's a big guy coming from a right, the left, there's an even bigger guy coming straight, I need to feel the fact that, you know what, you should have thrown it, because boom, and I can feel that through my whole body, and I can, there's another level of education and learning, so please, how far away are we, are you, us, whoever?

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So to have it commercially available for us to scale it with our teams is probably a couple of years away. The good news is that technology exists and that's growing rapidly.

• 41:25Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:25Gary O'Reilly?

  You're on it. In other words, sir, you are on it. Yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're on it.

• 41:29Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  And it's hugely important. Yeah, it's hugely important.

• 41:32Chuck Nice?

  That is awesome, man. You say it's a couple of years away. That's that's a blink of an eye when it comes to, you know, how fast technology moves. That's very cool.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  So the technology to create the sensor environment, you know, you experience that same sensor input is definitely there. I think the trick is going to be how do you then make sure you customize it for each of the individual applications? So do you do you need to get hit a certain way when you're a quarterback or is it enough to kind of feel it? But I think those are the open questions that we still need to answer.

• 41:59Gary O'Reilly?

  That will depend on the athlete because sometimes the coach will tell you the athlete needs to get hit that little bit harder before the athlete realizes that you need to do this thing quicker.

• 42:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that coach is a dick.

• 42:11Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no. Some each athlete, Chuck, we've mentioned this. Each athlete learns in a different way and each athlete has to get the best brought out them in a slightly different way. Sometimes it's enough. Sometimes you've got to hit harder.

• 42:25Chuck Nice?

  I learned through coddling.

• 42:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. That's because you're a prima donna.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  I've experienced that, but maybe that's where we should go next.

• 42:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, dear. So have you guys ever thought about taking this technology? And I don't mean now because I know that right now you're, like I said, you're being widely adopted across so many platforms. But from a consumer recreational standpoint, do you guys ever think about if this gets small enough that you could actually take somebody into the game itself? So you're watching a live game and you're able to jack into the game from home and in an instant replay, instead of seeing like the Fox instant replay, it's the Striver instant replay where you put on your headset and you actually get to be

• 43:16Chuck Nice?

  on the field and see exactly what just happened on the field. Why am I getting so excited about this? It doesn't even exist, but it's so cool.

• 43:25Gary O'Reilly?

  It will do. And secondly, you'll be Tom Brady.

• 43:29Gary O'Reilly?

  I'd rather be Mick Foles.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  That's a really interesting question. We've obviously thought about that. Other organizations are trying to do that right now. And so I think it would be interesting for like the average consumer to be able to see what it's like to see what Tom Brady sees. Although I would question whether or not that's a good way to watch a game. But but but that might be that might be some insight that people can get about. Well, what is it like to kind of be blindsided, right? Because everybody always sits in their, you know, chair watching the game thinking that like, okay, I could have easily made that pass. He had a ton of time back there. But if you actually look at what he's looking at when, you know, that might be a kind of a cool insight for for the average, you know.

• 44:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you do you?

• 44:09Chuck Nice?

  Just wait a minute, just to answer a question for the fan who wants to see what Tom Brady sees. As an Eagles fan, let me just say that what what he would see is defeat.

• 44:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 44:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Sometimes, Michael, you just got to let Chuck get things off his chest.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Move on.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  It's been a long time for Eagles fans.

• 44:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's been a no time. And let me tell you something, and to all the Patriots fans, so we haven't been on the air for a while and talking about this. We all know now that the Eagles won the Super Bowl. I'm not a person who likes to gloat, okay? And I'm not going to gloat, but I will say this. As a Patriots fan, the one thing that you did not need was another ring. You I'm sure you wanted another ring, but you didn't need one. Eagles fans needed a ring. We needed it. Okay? So that's all I'm saying. All right.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Fair enough.

• 45:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Michael, you're an incredibly patient man, and we appreciate that. I think it's been brilliant. Thank you. Michael Casali from Striva. She's science officer.

• 45:18Chuck Nice?

  Dude, such a pleasure.

• 45:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, and we've got to come up with a salute for you. That's that's much certainly.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  Ready for you guys.

• 45:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, brilliant. Very best of luck, sir, with everything. And thank you for what you've given us already. And on behalf of every athlete so far. Brilliant. Thank you so much indeed.

• 45:33Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely guys, thanks a lot.

• 45:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, that's our show Chuck.

• 45:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, it's so fascinating, I gotta tell you.

• 45:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Now!

• 45:38Chuck Nice?

  I feel smarter for some reason and more athletic and I've done nothing.

• 45:42Gary O'Reilly?

  But that's the whole idea. Being able to use the power of the brain to achieve so much more. And we've got Brett at Halo, we've got Michael at Striver.

• 45:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Gary O'Reilly?

  And they are at the forefront, they are pushing the boundaries, they are giving athletes that extra percentage they didn't know that they could access.

• 46:03Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, I can't wait for these guys to come up with a technology that actually turns you into an athlete while you eat sandwiches and sleep. That would be, that's like, when that happens, oh my god, am I gonna be a Viking?

• 46:18Gary O'Reilly?

  That's just abuse of technology.

• 46:22Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a great abuse of technology, but it's still abuse.

• 46:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 46:25Gary O'Reilly?

  And while Chuck and I go off to snack, I hope you've enjoyed this. Playing with science has been an absolute blast and we have been in the front row of class once again for technology and the use in the brain. Um, yeah, playing with science, hope you enjoyed it, we see you all soon, I'm sure.