‘Head In The Game’ Thinks The Key To Being A Clutch Athlete Might Be All In Your Mind

Head In The Game Book

You’ve heard it a billion times — “practice makes perfect.” If a person wants to excel at anything, especially sports, hours and hours of practice is necessary. But what if the key to athletic success wasn’t just practicing on the field but also on a couch or in a lab?

Common wisdom has held that athletic performance is rooted in genetics and peak physical enhancement of the body but journalist Brandon Sneed has another idea. Mental engineering — training the cognitive process of the brain — presents yet a new level of sports performance, and that athletes, despite already being at the top of the genetic pool, can actually become better.

Head in the Game: The Mental Engineering of the World’s Greatest Athletes

In Head in the Game, Sneed takes on a mesmerizing tour of what seems to be a new frontier in performance enhancement, from neuroscience labs at Duke, to the Super Bowl, to the mountains of Patagonia, to the Taj Mahal of virtual reality, to the jungles of Peru, and beyond. Anchoring all of this is a dynamic cast of characters, from the director of human performance at Red Bull, to the former Nike higher-up who left to start his own cognitive engineering company, to the drug addict who built sensory deprivation chambers in a fit of near-madness only to find them in high demand by the world’s best athletes, to paradigm-shattering neuroscientists who have created technology that allows athletes to look at their brains using a headset and a smartphone, and many more.

Head in the Game brings a new level of understanding to what is possible for our world’s elite athletes — and what is possible for all of us.

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