Dec 12, 2021 7:00 AM

This Tent Hacks Athletes’ Brains to Slow Down Time

From baseball to soccer, playing with light can unleash peak performance by rewiring athletes’ brains to improve rapid response times.

In his first few months at Salford City FC, goalkeeper Václav Hladký conceded an average of 1.29 goals per game. Then the League Two team asked the Czech shot-stopper to try out some new technology from OKKULO, a Newcastle-based sports science startup it had just started working with.

The faster a ball travels, the harder it is for a keeper to react. If a shot is coming towards them at 145mph, for instance, it’s impossible to react to any movements of the ball that happen in the final eight metres of flight, because of the amount of time it takes the brain’s visual system to interpret what’s happening and send signals to the muscles. “What the visual system and the brain has to do is predict where the ball is going,” says University College London academic Andrew Stockman, OKKULO’s scientific advisor.

OKKULO works by rewiring the response system to make decisions earlier—and to feel more confident doing so. Counterintuitively, it does that – at first – by forcing subjects to make decisions later than they normally would.

Players stand inside a giant tent, and footballs are fired at them under different light conditions and at different speeds to help sharpen their response times. The changing light levels manipulate how fast the ball appears to be moving, making it more difficult for the visual system and brain to process a ball’s movement, pushing the delay in processing from 200 milliseconds to 250. That adds a further two metres of “blindness” to any decision an athlete makes.

Initially, that means a lot of getting hit in the head and body by wayward balls you’re unable to react to. Hladký, in his first trials with OKKULO, ended up catching some shots from OKKULO’s ball cannon with his neck. But the body adapts and recognizes it needs to take decisive action earlier. “You're constantly recalibrating your brain to interact with your environment,” says Stockman. The process becomes rewired to the low light levels—which means when you’re back in normal light, time seems to slow down and your brain makes more measured decisions about where a ball’s likely to go. “We make them see six feet better off,” says Mel O’Connor, founder of OKKULO.

Before starting the company in 2019, O’Connor spent 20 years of evenings after work in the TV industry poring over scientific literature and developing prototypes that would prove a hunch he first found while reading Nature. O’Connor was in the middle of directing a film, and wanted to understand how light moves through a lens when he came across a study by Newcastle-based academic Lindsay Sharpe that showed the visual system’s response could be delayed in different light levels.

“I thought, if it’s delayed, how does that work? Would it mean a ball moves slower or faster?” recalls O’Connor. He found Sharpe’s phone number and asked Sharpe that same question: what would happen to a ball in different light conditions? Sharpe didn’t have the answer, but suggested O’Connor work with a colleague at nearby Durham University who had connections with the local cricketing team.

A rudimentary system—blacking out the windows of a training facility, testing players at night and seeing what happened if they played in different combinations of colored light—saw early successes. The eight country cricketers became more comfortable hitting 99mph fast balls (as fast as the ball machine could go) after four-and-a-half hours in OKKULO, where before they kept missing 160kph deliveries. Durham cricket’s coach, Graeme Fowler, approached O’Connor. “I don’t know what’s happening,” the founder recalls him saying, “but keep doing what you’re doing.”

In 2019, O’Connor officially launched the company with an investor. It’s since gained £650,000 of funding. Alongside Salford City, OKKULO is also being tested by Manchester United’s research and development arm, and a number of Premier League teams are interested. But it’s not just football where OKKULO can make a difference. Mixed martial arts fighters, baseball prospects and skiers have tried the system and seen increased perceptive power.

In autumn 2021, O’Connor took the system to Major League Baseball and NFL trials in the United States to tout for business. As for Salford City’s Hladký, by May 2021, after six months inside the OKKULO tent, his average concession rate had fallen to 0.71 goals per game, despite strikers peppering his goal with twice as many shots “He won all the awards,” says O’Connor. “We basically slowed down time. He said: ‘I don’t fear the ball anymore’.”

Correction: 9.38GMT 14/12/21 This article was updated to remove a comparison of the technology to a strobe light at a nightclub