Several early races in the AC75s were completed in less than 15 minutes, barely enough time to warm up the first racing computer to appear on an America’s Cup yacht. This (right) is the very early-generation computer designed and built by Dick McMurdy (seated left) for the 12 Metre Clipper – a defence candidate for the 1980 Cup in Newport, RI. It may look agricultural but with the help of team partners Data General what McMurdy had achieved was remarkable. Data could be ‘telemetered’ 15 miles from the course to shore where it was then analysed using what was very likely the first working sailing analysis system – appropriately named Starship Nova


often look for shortcuts but all the answers come from asking hard, honest questions and implementing things in a hard, honest way at the fundamental level. SH: VR can be used to motivate the motor cortex which is the region of the cerebral cortex involved in the planning, control and execution of voluntary movements… VW: Again I would steer away from the concept of brain training. By activating the motor cortex or any other region of the brain, it doesn’t mean that you’re activat- ing it in exactly the same way and that you’re learning in exactly the same way. I’ll give you an example I used with


some athletes. In this sport their events typically took 90 seconds. So I would ask them to visualise those 90 seconds and the movements and actions they would go through. They would then do this and they would all come in breaking the world record by about 30 seconds, meaning that their minds had clearly cut corners. Now put people in a brain scanner and


we might say, ‘imagining doing this sport activates exactly the same areas as actually doing this sport’. This is highly likely to be true but you’ve no guarantees it’s being done in the same way. You shouldn’t be aiming to isolate and develop brain sectors. The brain is not the key here. The behav- iour is, and if you understand everything about the behaviour you understand every- thing about learning. If you implement the learning properly and people are honest in their assessments, then you will learn. And you have to train at the specific


things you want to learn. There’s no such thing as brain training, you can’t strengthen a particular area, so all these brain-training programs are actually nonsense. If you’re looking at coloured dots


moving around a screen and you get better at that, all you’re getting better at is coloured dots moving around a screen. Conceptually, it’s called file transfer, that you train on something that is very unlike


58 SEAHORSE


something and it transfers to something else. But I think a good memory for things like sailing doesn’t mean that you’ll have a good memory for lots of other things. You need to focus on the sailing specificity rather than the brain generality. SH: Transitioning from one sailing mode to another, to change gears, is critical. Could mental training help here? VW: The simple answer is ‘no!’ What’s important here is practise, practise, prac- tise. So if you want to get people to work well on pumping or changing gears then train that specific skill and train it under different conditions. Do it when people are tired; when people don’t want to do it; when they are being yelled at; while they’re wearing a cold, sodden set of gear; in the middle of the night. But do not imagine that there is any kind of magic: that by training the brain in this it will transfer because it won’t. If there is an element of brain training here, yes, you can get people to practise it mentally but I would suggest that you time them so that what you’re getting is real mental practice, not fantasis- ing. So you can imagine running 100m, but we would all imagine ourselves run- ning it too quickly. It’s amazing how many people come in under 11 seconds when you ask them to imagine running 100m. SH: It has been said that the brain requires 20 per cent of the body’s total energy resources. With the physical demands on the grinders being so high, could increas- ing brain efficiency release energy resources to better meet the physical requirements? VW: I would still label all of this ‘physical pressure’. The brain is going to require the same amount of energy no matter what you do, but putting the body under physical pressure makes it much harder. Rather than pretending we can train the brain it might be better to get the sailors to realise it by giving them the same mental tasks on a treadmill at different levels of fatigue. SH: Iain Percy from Artemis recently said


that ‘any of us who were sailing in the last Cup were aware that the boundaries of science and sport are being pushed to really new levels – it was scary, in fact, it blows your mind’. Vendée Globe skippers are already delegating the steering of their flying craft to 3D autopilots because they simply cannot keep up by hand… How could this all pan out in the future? SH: There’s got to be interaction between any hardware and software and I’m guess- ing that there’s got to be human back-up. So we still have to ask the same questions, what we want this autopilot to do. It depends where you want sailing to go, whether you want it to become more like Formula 1, or whether you want to main- tain as much of the human element as possible. But the warning I would give to anybody who is delegating to autopilots is to ask what are the limits of the autopilots, when do I delegate, what do I delegate, and in the interests of human sport it’s to be hoped that these kinds of decisions are never taken away from the athletes. SH: After your coaching work with the England Rugby team under Eddie Jones you said to the press that ‘It is our ability to express information and making it meaningful to the players that counts. We are not teaching them how to play rugby. We are trying to change behaviour, so it is learning about how humans operate.’ But it did appear that your input had a distinct effect, turning round a string of four or five England losses in a row… VW: I really wouldn’t claim any credit here. I did talk to the England coaches about the importance of deep learning. We discussed how to implement that spaced, interleaved learning in the rugby environ- ment and how to deal with it in the parts of the game that were controllable and then the parts that were uncontrollable. But it’s important to say that I do not


lay great claim to any big impact on any- thing the England rugby side did next! q


PAUL J MELLO/OUTSIDE IMAGES


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