Wire Yourself Up for Racing, Science Style
Racing driver lab part 4.
The point of having your own racing driver’s science lab is to experiment on yourself, discover something, then make yourself faster.
Now, if I asked you to picture that in action, you would probably imagine a driver on a simulator, with wires all over them and brain sensors producing charts on an array of monitors - all being observed by a boffin.
And that’s what I reckon you can actually have a crack at - you are the driver AND the boffin, discovering some golden nuggets about yourself that actually can help you get faster.
You can get wired up, have extra screens on the go, and absolutely produce some numbers that are genuinely going to help.
Some more than others. Here’s my experience!
Of course it could have been a blip. So I ran again with practice laps - crap.
Qualifying sessions, full Miyamoto Musashi zen master brain waves.
Brain wave measuring device
I think we agree that once you tick the fitness boxes for karting, which is bloody hard but straightforward, all the gains to be made are in your head. Your body has to be strong and incredibly resilient to horrific punishment, but once it is fit all it does is deliver what your brain tells it.
And one super important factor of what your brain does is focus. The ultimate focus is the mysterious ‘flow’ state. To me that just means super-focussed, so focussed it feels a bit weird.
Personally, I think the ‘flow-state’ has to be left alone, to happen when it happens. If you try to force it, it will resist - that’s my theory, but there are always sports scientists trying to crack the code to make the flow state something you can switch on at will.
BUT, certainly you want to put everything you can in place to get as focussed as you can.
So, can you measure focus with a device?
Apparently so, so I laid out the 300 quid or so on a device that claims to be able to tell what your brain state is up to.
After all, if I could measure my focus, then I can find the patterns that got me there. If I can figure that out then I can train myself to increase focus, and repeat it far more often. Then the sky is the limit on how fast and consistent my driving will be!
So I strapped that thing to my head, and used the Mindlyft app to see if I can control my focus….
I can’t.
I couldn’t get any correlation between what was going on in my head and what appeared on the app. The app gives you tasks - the more you can get to a kind of zen meditative and focussed state, the higher the score you get.
It gives you instructions, a calming voice and stuff.
Nothing happened, so I was ready to bin the stupid bloody thing.
But…
