The first post in this series dealt with mental capabilities required to be included in the small fraction of future workers who live a comfortable life with plenty of disposable income. Mental capacities also underlie our kinesthetic (athletic movement) abilities. Amateur and professional sports (not to mention musical and other artistic kinds of performance) appear now to be undergoing a fundamental transformation that is moving beyond traditional instruction, practice, and repetition to include training the brain to more effective perform the mental computations required to be at the right place at the right time. I recently received an email pointing me to a brain training regime - of the sort I've described for general cognitive enhancement used to counter aging - that specifically addresses the sports of hockey and basketball (the technology was originally developed to teach Israeli Air Force pilots about aerial combat.) The demonstration video pasted in below shows the integration of a variety of cognitive enhancement techniques (spatial awareness, anticipation of movements) into an ensemble appropriate for those sports.
Is it going to be the case that my grandsons can not hope to compete in their brave new world unless they have explicitly performed cognitive enhancement training on themselves? I certainly hope not!
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