Will Brain Enhancement Replace Steroids as a Sports Scandal?

Steroids were the sports scandal of the last decade (and if football comes clean the topic could dominate this decade too).  For the athlete, steroids and hormone therapies provided growth, healing and stamina in the muscles.

Will policing sophistication and fan acceptance ever reach the point where a science degree is not needed to understand the latest sports headlines?  Probably not.

Athletes often talk about building muscle memory.  The term muscle memory brings visions a tiny cortexes embedded into massive biceps.  While optimizing the structure of a muscle to execute specific skills is often referred to as developing muscle memory, the real action is in the brain. 

And a brain scandal is sure to come.

It’s not like the pharmaceutically-minded in sports have been ignoring the brain.  Greenies (amphetamines) to promote focus have been almost as easy to find as sunflower seeds in the dugout.  And the products of big pharma have long replaced the Rorschach tests for “helping” troubled players.  But these are largely outside the black box approaches to brain manipulation.  It's like using a large woolly blanket to warm one cold toe.

So what happens when we find ways to enter the brain and mess around with its individual connections?  Snipping off the irksome connections and building ones we prefer.  Or maybe we alter the connections that regulate the connections.  What happens when we can design a brain that is optimized for mood, focus, consistency and, most importantly, skillset activation?  Imagine if you could construct the mental mechanics for the perfect curveball in every situation. Or imagine being able to efficiently rewire the brain to shorten the time that it takes for a batter to recognize a pitch.

This is still sci-fi.  The complexity of making these type brain alterations is unimaginable.  And even if we had the tools we wouldn’t know where to use them.  But neuroscience is the science of now.  And discoveries that can make incrementally more precise adjustments to the brain are happening every day.

So don’t be surprised if the newest assistant coach has a degree in neuroscience.

NOTE:  I love reading books about neuroscience.   There are a growing number of excellent books in the fields that study the brain in an increasingly large number of specialized areas.  A great place to start are with books that take a broader view on neuroscience (How we Decide by Jonah Lehrer and Your Brain is (Almost) Perfect by Read Montague), genetics (The Agile Gene by Matt Ridley) and brain evolution (Big Brain by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger).