Racing Simulators Make You Faster, They Can Repair Brain Injury To
Bonus Neuroscience: The Myth of Multi-Tasking
Anyone who has experienced driving games knows that they can require a ton of multi tasking attention. You’ve probably heard people talk about “multitasking” as if they really are doing more than one thing at a time, but that’s actually impossible due to limitations of how our brain functions. What we actually do is switch our attention from task to task among the multitude we have set up for ourselves and this gives the appearance that we’re juggling them simultaneously. We’ll get more into myth busting attention in a moment and what it has to do with simulator racing, but let me first introduce some helpful technology and examples of brain behavior under damage or injury to mechanisms we often take for granted. Imagine living without it…. But actually that’s what life is like for millions of people, perhaps even one you know.
(Click above for the video version of this blog if you prefer!)
Today we are going to dive into the science looking into simulators effects on the brain, especially in recovery from damage or injury, while I introduce a couple of popular simulator game titles on PC. Assetto Corsa and it’s successor as well as Project Cars 2. All titles we used in armature race training. First up is first on the list, Assetto Corsa which is an extremely versatile simulator title widely used and available on Steam. The software has an ecosystem supporting mods that expand on the base in astronomical ways, so many car models and liveries along with tracks or road routes. It seems to be the sim of choice for drifters, but really it’s great for anyone getting started including karters.
While there is plenty of anecdotal evidence appearing, it still needs more in depth study into the specifics of how simulators are capable of regenerating skills needed to operate a motor vehicle. A big big one being multi tasking. These early studies still provide indicators into how time spent honing skills on a screen translates to real world skills. We’re gonna go through a few cool experiments and treatments involving racing and driving simulators already being utilized, while also looking at some challenges in the science of looking at simulators. It’s a strong case for why these video games may also be a very effective medical device. I’ll volunteer to test them! Sign me up!
Let’s check out this case study real quick, (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21355675/ )
“Abstract
Aim: This study reports the case of a 23-year-old woman (MC) who sustained a severe traumatic brain injury in 2004. After her accident, her driving license was revoked. Despite recovering normal neuropsychological functions in the following years, MC was unable to renew her license, failing four on-road evaluations assessing her fitness to drive.
Method: In hope of an eventual license renewal, MC went through an in-simulator training program in the laboratory in 2009. The training program aimed at improving features of MC’s driving behaviour that were identified as being problematic in prior on-road evaluations. To do so, proper driving behaviour was reinforced via driving-specific feedback provided during the training sessions.
Results: After 25 sessions in the simulator (over a period of 4 months), MC significantly improved various components of her driving. Notably, compared to early sessions, later ones were associated with a reduced cognitive load, less jerky speed profiles when stopping at intersections and better vehicle control and positioning. A 1-year retention test showed most of these improvements were consistent.
Conclusions: The learning principles underlying well conducted simulator-based education programmes have a strong scientific basis. A simulator training program represents a promising avenue for driving rehabilitation. It allows individuals without a driving license to practice and improve their skills in a safe and realistic environment.”
This is just one of the many case studies that researchers are looking at right now when attempting to calculate just how effective racing simulators can be used as tools, not just to train people to be better drivers but also to promote regeneration of lost brain functions from injury or damage. It’s noted in many case studies how much the patient’s ability to switch tasks and focus their attention was a culprit behind managing all the tasks necessary to drive in addition to issues with aggression under stress. This key point indicates there may be ways to repair that damage over time.
In 2007 I was diagnosed with a brain lesion that appeared to possibly be an astrocytoma by teams of physicians consulting on my case at University of Washington’s neurosurgery department, at the time I was experiencing losses of consciousness and difficulties with speech as a 25 year old with no known medical history of brain issues or injury. There was no way to know when this lesion had appeared or how by this time, it was only apparent that it was impacting my ability to function as a normal adult. Sudden losses of consciousness meant having to willingly retire my driver’s license, which is probably the worst thing you could ask a motorsports enthusiast to do..
Probably one of the worst feelings ever was dropping a few quarters in a California Rush machine wondering if this all life was going to be from now on. It felt worse when I couldn’t even keep the animated car on the road. Something I took for granted before, just wasn’t accessible as a skill anymore. It’s hard to quantify the frustration of grieving such a loss you hadn’t considered could happen to you at 25.
Something about it irritated me. Enough that it would keep me going back to that machine almost weekly because of it’s already convenient location to my normal errands. Even if buying a simulator had occurred to me, my financial situation wouldn’t have supported it and I’m fairly sure my mother wouldn’t either. She didn’t see a value in any of the video games I played, so it might have been beyond her to concede that simulators would be more effective at fixing my speech impairment than her efforts in speech therapy. But video games are proving to have profound impacts on brain structure as we see substantial gray matter can be lost in the hippocampus just from playing 90 hours on a first person shooter but boosted by Mario 3D. It ultimately comes down to what a person is playing and how many hours they’re dedicating to it.
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6826942/)
It is entirely true that whatever we practice, we will become better at it.
So I’m gonna practice getting better at the successor, Assetto Corsa Competizione. This title is popular evolution for the serious GT racing crowd and you can enjoy how graphically awesome it is by watching competition streams on accounts like OctaneOnlineRacing and VCOeSports on Twitch if you want to check it out more of what it looks like from a spectators view. The channels do a fantastic job of hosting races that can be as entertaining as the real thing. It’s also quite the real feel as modern simulator software uses laser scanned tracks to replicate everything down to the tracks surface so if you have the equipment to replicate it, you get to feel every bump! You can see how that much detail could really end up being beneficial to anyone trying to regain their ability to coordinate physical tasks and processing related to driving.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind when we decide how to spend our time because there’s a consistent regeneration and restructuring happening inside our brains due to a property called: neuroplasticity.
Our brains definitely don’t stay fixed after development even though I’m sure many have told you that people don’t change, actually, fundamentally we are changing every second but it’s just things too small to consciously notice. There’s still much happening at a cellular level.
Racing simulators provide a safe environment for anyone, brain injury or not, to test out how a car will feedback to their physical inputs. This helps the driver adapt information over time until they can train automated responses that keep them from wrecking out at 200 miles per hour. While many of us would be entering a brain state of fight or flight, where our brain is flooding itself with neurochemicals that impair specific kinds of performance while enhancing others, but a racer’s brain is trained not to trip that mechanism. Something so naturally occurring and survival based can still be tampered, many of the same mechanisms that can be affected by brain injuries.
These benefits extend beyond the ability to obtain a driver’s license again. The way the brain works is by networking together billions of neurons. Different regions of the brain are taking on distributed tasks from running your heart and lungs to carefully making decisions for long term goals or translating stimulus, like sounds and sights. All these things must coordinate for you to even do the simplest of activities. There’s a lot happening in our operating system up there at any given time, it’s a myth that we use 10% of our brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v3hKO6Jm2w&t=155s
On this episode of Sway’s Universe, Neil Degrasse Tyson illustrates through this myth the dangers of how science studies can be interpreted and used in ways that don’t actually reflect what was learned from that experiment. You won’t get telepathic powers from using a racing simulator. That’s not going to happen no matter what you use. Learning about the many different neuromyths out there can greatly benefit one’s life just through some basic knowledge about how the human brain works. Myths like multitasking can make people think they should be able to balance many activities, even if there’s reasons why they may be struggling and they’re likely to beat themselves up as being somehow at fault or at a deficit from others.
It can be these myths that stand in the way of understanding the real operations in the brain at a mainstream level and while this initially may not seem like a problem, it actually is the source of many internal personal struggles. This doesn’t apply to all cases, but limitations we’ve created with myths in science have stopped progress on discovering tools that would aid recovery from many neurological related issues. Sometimes even just at a thought level.
For example, stroke victims’ perspective on their ability to recover plays a large role in whether or not they do with the physical injuries sustained. A research study published in the December 2011 issue of the journal Stroke noted that depression and a sense of fatalism were found to be associated with increased stroke severity, more stroke recurrence, and even increased rates of death after a stroke. And many more studies besides reiterate the theme of perspective in recoveries.
(https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.111.625491)
Brain injuries help illustrate better the ways the brain can sustain injury in one area, but still allow people to continue mostly functioning without it being noticed or even gain a new way to do tasks otherwise considered impossible in light of disabilities… racing games have shined here when A PhD candidate in Computer Science at Columbia Engineering, Brian A. Smith, created a new system for blind gamers so that they could enjoy games in a way that sighted people do. Perhaps hard to imagine what that’s like.
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/rad/
Because of the brain’s ability to use multiple stimulus these blind gamers are performing as well as an average sighted player too through use of racing simulator gaming software. Even some permanent conditions can compensate using other mechanisms. These kinds of experiments demonstrate that so many of the neuromyths about brains being fixed are inaccurate. It’s rather fun racing simulators can be used for so many forms of testing. This computer programming is so much more than a game, even if it promotes all the escapism of one through immersive peripheral devices. Many of which are becoming more widely available to the general consumer through gaming and competitors entering the industry.
Give the humble simulator some credit. It’s gone beyond video game, it’s started to prove itself as a viable trainer and now a medical treatment too. It’s made its way onto the national airwaves now since NASCAR’s use of iRacing for the 2020 season surviving Covid. As the industry is progressing into using those super accurate laser scanned tracks, it’s also incorporated a new large leap called “horizon locking”, which more closely mimics what a driver would experience in real life compared to how a typical game camera behaves. And if you really want to step up into a whole new field of depth, VR is available on these software titles. Today much of the realism comes through the tire models being incorporated by engineers, that’s become the refining point for giving more accurate feedback to users. Reading off a section from Paradigm Racing here…
“They will see the track as unmoving because of the vestibulo–ocular reflex. This causes the eyes to rotate and move in response to signals from the inner ear to keep the image stable. In short, your inner ear knows which way is up and this tells the eyes how to move to maintain this orientation. This system works regardless of neck or body movement. Whether a driver’s head and body is strapped into the seat or otherwise makes no difference. If the driver tilts their head, the eyes will rotate to keep the track and horizon level. If the car hits a bump and the driver’s head is tilted to the side with the car, the eyes will rotate to keep the horizon level. If the car enters a banked turn, the same thing happens. The end result is that no matter what the car or driver does, their eyes will maintain the earth as an unmoving reference frame because of the amazing capabilities of the vestibular system.”
It’s these not often considered advancements that will have greater impact on the simulators ability to replicate real life and train to a more precise degree. To trick the brain into believing it’s in a real life situation where it needs those task switching skills for survival. That its ability to be more effective at helping recovery from injury comes through minor advances like how the vision is translated or feedback is input. Definitely gives engineers who code games a bit to think about though.
That’s why we’re moving into a title that’s more associated with gaming than being a simulator, Project Cars 2. It’s latest release has gone nearly full blown Need For Speed, but the second installment on the series was regarded as being close to simulator worthy. I also agree, the feedback and feel on it is very much closer to the realism and difficulty of Assetto Corsa. There isn’t the flashy optical illusion effects used in a lot of mainstream racing games, none of that motion blur or close up cut out of corners to make it feel like you’re going faster.
It’s not California Rush, that’s for sure. But who knows how much that game and others may have had to do with my recovery. Other than occasional stumbles in pronunciation of words, it might be hard to tell that impairment has ever been a problem. Or that it takes effort to sound the way I did before the loss of consciousness started. While the appearance of the lesion has disappeared, leaving the question of what it ever was or why it showed up, there are still residual effects I experience with cognitive impairment. None which prevent me from being able to drive a car, not only safely but sometimes even pushing some competitive boundaries in racing yet still able to refrain from speeding tickets. The more I play with simulators the easier it gets. Can only confirm the motivation to race may have created a belief system that wouldn’t allow the doubt to creep in that I wouldn’t race again, just wasn’t even going to acknowledge life without it.
Racing is life folks, you know what I’m talking about.
Neuroscientists are definitely coming up with some creative ways to put the technology to use and alter it for the purpose they’re attempting to achieve. I have one last experiment to share about Adam Gazzaley’s work at University of San Francisco with the creation of a particular type of racing game, Nuero Racer and some exciting implications about what it can do beyond entertaining oneself killing time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa-mVD1hRIE
This game could viably be a treatment for cognitive decline and even other neuro phenomenon like Attention Deficit HyperActivity Disorder (ADHD), which is something that’s been a widely debated topic. Especially when it comes to the issues of whether or not pharmaceuticals are appropriate treatment given a child’s age and developing brain. With options like Nuero Racer it would provide other methods to improve focus or could help in addition to other treatment, but that it might not be too difficult to get their youngin to play racing games. It would seem more like a reward than punishment.
NeuroRacer is a great demonstration of exactly why our modern connotation for multi-tasking really isn’t accurate to what’s happening inside our brains. Users have to balance the task of driving while also recognizing the signals and symbols added into the task. That addition of the symbol task is forcing the participants to shift their attention even if it’s only for a split second, but that in doing so increases the brain’s ability to shift quickly and appears, on the outside, like a brilliant juggling act. Let’s hear more about what this looks like from another perspective… a short order cook!
(https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794)
Even for someone without an injury or damage can benefit from training on a simulator especially if their race activities have them multi-tasking. Even games such as Wipeout or the F-Zero series provide much of this attention splitting action flying gravity defying hovercrafts while also trying to take down your opponent with strategic weapons like mines meant to trip up the pack behind you or rocket boosters for a well placed sprint section of the track. Controllers will get the job done, but adding the wheel pedal combination to the equation means coordinating more and more regions of the brain together as part of training. This leads to subsequent benefits related to the connection between what the eye sees and how the hands move to compensate.
My own experience with simulators and recovery from damage seen in my brain via MRI has certainly proven to me their value, even when I was using equipment completely unintended for anything other than sheer entertainment. Not only am I driving today, sometimes I’m even a decent racer. Sometimes… focus can still actually be a huge challenge and perhaps always will be given that I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, but no longer crippled by an inability to control my brain’s transmission, essentially, and getting it’s shifting back to a state where it was functional.
Neuroplasticity is taking place whether we realize it or not. Whatever we choose to do with our time is shaping our brains around those activities. Perhaps it will give many a lot more to consider with how to spend that free time. Hey, games isn’t a bad choice! Better than TV, there was another study released on what tv does to your brain this week and I’ll get to that on the channel at another time… but there’s amazing ways games are changing the way we operate! From racing simulators to exploration games, the digital landscapes are adapting our brains in good ways and in bad. It’s up to us to tune for what benefits us the most.
Whether you’re trying to get better at multitasking or healing from a major brain injury, simulators can be a surprisingly fun way to network the brain to a new level of efficiency capable of incredible task switching, focus and redistributing tasks across the brain regions to help humans adapt. You can imagine the joy of being able to play a racing game when you’ve never been able to see and it’s cool to fathom that one day these translational abilities will change lives in huge ways through gaming technology.
