Kicking a ball for many years can make you a great scorer or it can lead to fully fit legs. But the consequences of this habit, practiced regularly and with dedication, go much further.
We now know that playing soccer also shapes the brain and changes the way it works . Eiichi Naito and Satoshi Hirose, two Japanese researchers, have managed to demonstrate this in a study involving none other than the popular Brazilian soccer player Neymar da Silva Santos Junior.
The result of this research was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2014), and it goes on to say that so many years of training have made Neymar’s brain very efficient at controlling the movements of his foot.
Three other professional players from Second Division teams of the Spanish Soccer League, two professional competition swimmers and one amateur soccer player participated in the experiment. All of them underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were asked to move their right foot at certain times, alternating the rotational movement of the ankle to the right and left. All foot movements of the participants were videotaped.
The results showed that in all of them the motor areas of the foot were activated in the medial wall of the left cerebral hemisphere, which is responsible for this function. Compared with the swimmers or the amateur soccer player, the professional soccer players had less activity and in a smaller area of that left medial wall.
What is significant is that in the case of Neymar this was much more marked , showing an activation of these areas even less than that of the rest of the players. The authors suggest that Neymar might be able to control the ball better due to the fact that he has more neural resources that would not be used in the execution of the motor act itself.
These changes could be, according to the researchers, a reflection at the brain level of prolonged training in a skill such as ball handling, based on practice-dependent brain plasticity capacity. And we know that with proper training anyone can achieve a more efficient brain both in sport and in other skills.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
