Imagine two athletes: a soccer player and a Formula 1 driver. While the soccer player may be blisteringly fast on the field, she still moves at a humanlike speed. She may be quicker than anyone and be able to pivot with incredible dexterity, but it’s always at a pace that the human brain can follow.
Now think of the racecar driver, going about 220 miles per hour on the straights and 180 on the corners. No land animal, living or dead, has ever run even half that quickly. It’s simply too fast for any mortal’s brain to keep up with.
So, how do they do it? How does a human mind navigate a sport that’s faster than it can follow?
“There is a limit, like a physiological limit,” said Otto Lappi, a senior university lecturer at the University of Helsinki in Finland. “But there is less limit to how much cleverness your brain can build in — to know the environment and figure out right now what I need to do not to kill myself.”
Scientists have long studied elite athletes as a way to understand the inner workings of the human brain. But Formula 1 drivers offer them a unique window: how the brain adapts to impossible speeds.
The first thing to know is that while reflexes are important, they are not what distinguishes a truly elite driver.
“This is something that people don’t realize when they think of racing drivers living off their reflexes,” said Dr. Lappi, who studies eye movements of various types of athletes. “Most of their skill is anticipation. The anticipation is how the brain buys itself time.”
In other words, a great driver doesn’t react to the road, he predicts it. In many ways, this isn’t surprising because the entire brain is often said to be an elaborate prediction machine. But in Formula 1 drivers, this looks a little different.
There have been many studies of how regular people’s brains adapt to driving, but only a few have actually used elite drivers, because it is hard getting international celebrities to visit a neuroscience lab.
In two small, yet remarkable studies from 2014 and 2013, an Italian team compared 11 professional (including Formula 1) drivers with 11 normal ones. As one might expect, they found that elite drivers had good reaction and visuospatial skills. But the most interesting difference was in an area buried deep in the back of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex, which acts as a hub connecting spatial reasoning and — crucially — memory.
Whereas other parts of the brain might allow you to navigate unfamiliar places, this is the part of the brain that connects where you are now to where you have been before (and was heavily used by London taxi drivers in a 2006 study). A person with a damaged retrosplenial cortex, say, from Alzheimer’s disease, might recognize their home, the corner store and a nearby school, but would have no idea how to use one to find another.
The Italian team found that elite racecar drivers had more densely packed cells in this region and more connectivity to other parts of the brain. In other words, they can make highly detailed spatial maps of places they have been and pull them up quickly. What’s more, among the 11 professional drivers, more density in that region meant more racing victories.
But it’s not just about how many brain cells you have, it’s also about how well you use them. The studies also suggested that elite drivers use far less of their brains while racing than regular drivers
“This what we call neural efficiency,” said Pietro Pietrini, an author on the paper and a professor of neuroscience at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy. “So if you are very skilled, you rely on less brain.”
Dr. Lappi added that drivers in his studies will often look ahead around corners, even when they are completely hidden from view. The point is not to see the turn, but to see it in their mind’s eye.
On any given stretch of road, the average driver may be checking the road signs, scenery, dashboard and hundreds of other unconscious things. Elite racecar drivers are far more efficient, looking at only what is necessary and not even blinking unless they have to, usually on the straights, Dr. Lappi said. What’s more, the head movements on one turn will be the same every time.
All of this efficiency allows the Formula 1 driver to focus during the race without exhausting their brains.
“Neural efficiency and brain fatigue are two faces of the same medal,” Dr. Pietrini said.
But how a brain functions is about more than talent and training. It’s also the product of the stress and struggle that have shaped it. And here again, the experience of Formula 1 drivers might be unique, said Jill Colangelo, an expert in overtraining and mental health at the University of Berne, Switzerland.
Like many athletes, top drivers endure unrelenting physical and mental training — honing their reaction time and learning everything they can about their vehicles. And like many modern athletes, they endure the constant microscope of public opinion. They also deal with grueling dieting regimens to keep their weight down and the loss of sleep from all the global travel — both of which take a toll on mental health.
But unlike in other sports, Formula 1 drivers regularly experience forces up to six Gs, which is more than many astronauts train for. Even with their specialized neck supports and training, drivers are still regularly pressing their brains against their skulls, either from G-forces or the constantly shaking car, which may create a sort of brain fog and fatigue. In fact, some studies suggest that the number of concussions the drivers experience are on par with or higher than N.F.L. players.
What’s more, there’s the constant heat on the body — drivers can lose up to eight pounds of fluid in a race. And unlike many other athletes, they live with the constant knowledge that their car could spin out, flip and kill them.
Test pilots experience G-forces, professional rock climbers grapple with a fear of death and N.B.A. stars deal with celebrity, but almost no other athlete has to deal with all of them at once, Dr. Colangelo said. She worries that the pressure to be perfect for the sponsors and fans, especially on social media, is causing long-term harm.
“After a certain point, your body just can’t cash those checks anymore,” she said. Then she added, “they can do super things, but that does not make them Superman.”
At the end of the day, is a Formula 1 driver born with a special brain or is it built through years of relentless training? We’ll probably never know, Dr. Lappi said. It’s not like a swimmer, who may have an optimal body shape or unusually large lungs. It’s plausible that someone could be born with the perfect driving brain, but it’s equally possible that someone could be born with a genetic makeup that drives them to train their brain.
But in the end, Formula 1 drivers don’t necessarily interest Dr. Lappi as much as how the brain adapts to speed.
“This,” he said, “is very, very old, fundamental, ancient machinery.”
