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.
