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Brain Training Improves Police Officers Performance



It’s no secret that police officers take on extremely stressful and mentally taxing situations every day. They stand on the front lines of public safety, and the nature of their work translates into some very specific demands on their brains. Spotting little details can mean the difference between keeping everyone safe and out of harm’s way, or misreading a situation and endangering both the officer and citizens. Keen powers of observation and remembering minute details make up a required tool-set for officers who want to continue being safe and successful, much like safe driving, quick reflexes and good peripheral vision.

Recent news stories show us how misreading a situation can lead to embarrassing or even fatal outcomes. With stories like these gaining a stronger hold on the public’s perception of police forces, the service is under much more public scrutiny. Working to help improve officers’ ability to think faster, and, react quicker and more appropriately to situations has become a goal of many departments. Having the right arsenal of tools at hand is critical, whether that’s hardware or a brain that’s properly trained to make quick decisions and remember more accurately.

Police officers are often required to drive at extremely high speeds when responding to urgent calls or, for instance, to pull over a recklessly speeding driver. Statistics from the US between 2000 to 2009 show that over 700 officers died in automobile or motorcycle accidents while in the line of duty. When a driver is required to speed up, he or she will need to process information accurately at a much faster rate. Some recent studies have shown that clinically proven cognitive training exercises such as BrainHQ can increase the quality and quantity of information the brain can accurately register, process and react to.

Training our brains to deal with an influx of information isn’t just useful for safer driving. It can also help police officers focus in situations when alertness is critically important and attention to detail needs to be instantaneous, but remembered in the long term—such as entering a crime scene in progress to later writing it up in a report. Having a neuronetwork that is better wired to pick up details and remember them accurately is something that can be trained, much like hitting the gym improves our basic strength and cardiovascular fitness.

The plastic nature of our brains means that with specific and rigorous training a police officer can:

  • increase alertness and improve attention to detail
  • speed up visual processing to see quicker and react faster
  • improve visual memory to recall events clearly and accurately
  • extend peripheral vision to extract more information in a single glance
  • improve reasoning to assess situations properly and respond accurately
  • strengthen brain’s social cognition network to more accurately read facial expressions 
  • increase driving safety

Cognition is so vital to police work that at Golden West College in California, the police officer training school is running a study on recruits to determine whether or not they can improve processing speed, vigilance and attention to detail by giving officers caffeine.

Clearly, nobody wants to rely on a cup of coffee to improve performance. What this reflects however is the critical need for officers training their neuronetworks to perform efficiently at a higher speed. A new study is under way with a police force in the United States using BrainHQ, the only brain training program that is supported by over 100 published studies that show these exercises reinforce and strengthen the brain’s plasticity at its very core. This training allows for measured and proven improvement to how our brains function and perceive the split-second situations that make a difference.

To learn more about how brain training works visit this link.

Try BrainHQ’s Target Tracker exercise to improve divided attention, and, Hawk Eye to increase brain’s speed of processing visual information.

DynamicBrain Inc. is the Canadian Partner of Posit Science Corporation providing brain fitness program, BrainHQ in English and French.