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Over the past three months, I have been stuck in a cycle of procrastination to finish my entry for the prestigious Breakthrough Junior Challenge. The cycle was so vicious that I found myself awake at 3am two days before deadline day to complete the finishing touches and edit the final version. But we got there! I have submitted my video and am eagerly waiting for the results! For my entry, I chose the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory as the concept to be explained. Why? Well,

Steven Gerrard is Liverpool through and through. He was born in Whiston Hospital just six miles east of Melwood training ground and nine miles away from Anfield. Growing up on the Bluebell council estate in Huyton, about five miles east of the city centre, Gerrard spent most of his time kicking a football around with his older brother on a small patch of grass and a concrete cul-de-sac right outside his front door. He later credited these games with building his trademark tou

Welcome to OpenBrain, a cutting-edge biotech startup headquartered right in the heart of Silicon Valley. To fully understand the growing success of this company, let us take a tour into its state-of-the-art office building, starting from the physical infrastructure in the basement all the way to the executive suites at the higher levels. Now what’s a building without the dirty work? At the very bottom of the basement lies the medulla oblongata, or the utility room. This room

Ever wondered how an action potential in your brain actually works? Well, considering that it is the FIFA World Cup right now, I’ll explain it in football terms. For our analogy, we assume the neuron itself to be the Metlife stadium (or as FIFA like to call it, the New York New Jersey Stadium), where the 2026 World Cup Final will take place. Fans, in this depiction, are individual ions that create electrical signals in our stadium (or neuron). It is currently 10:00 on matchda

Three weeks ago my mother and I went to watch Brian Cox’s new global tour, Emergence, in Singapore. We only knew of it a day before the actual event. But quite conveniently, it was right downstairs from our apartment, so we decided to go anyway. I have been watching his talks online for a while now, so I wasn’t going to miss the chance to see him live. It’s safe to say that it did not disappoint. And like any other Brian Cox performance, I was completely astounded by everyt

The war for your future is fought in a few cubic centimeters of gray matter. It is a constant negotiation between two versions of yourself that I like to call the Architect and the Animal. To understand why we stay the course or why we stumble we have to look at the neural bridge that connects them. On one side perched right behind your forehead is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is your Architect. It is the part of you that dreams in decades and understands the quie

A. Turn Motivation into Concrete, Step-by-Step Action Plans It isn’t enough to just feel motivated; you need to bridge the gap between "wanting" and "doing." Using "if-then" planning (or implementation intentions) helps transform abstract goals into reliable routines by setting clear cues and timeframes. This approach taps into both your brain's goal-oriented and habit-based systems, creating the kind of feedback loops necessary for lasting change (Doll et al., 2012; Arias-Ca

A teen goes out on a Friday night. He gets caught in an alleyway with three strangers. They are smoking crack cocaine. One of them insists that he tries; another forces it into his hands. He tries. The ventral tegmentum prints out a surge of dopamine. Every Friday night, the teen goes back to this alleyway and smokes crack with his new friends. Soon, the brain begins to register the action of going out and the environment of the alleyway as a cue to the reward. So the new pro

There I was, just 8 years old, pressed against two of my best mates, watching the Champions League finals, 2018, Real Madrid against Liverpool. It was three in the morning. It felt like the world had gone elsewhere, leaving only the game and us to bear witness. We wanted to be pundits and critique their play, but we were awestruck and kept silent, the way children do when they sense something sacred. It was only when Madrid lifted La Decimotercera that I let my whisper slip o

As an athlete myself, this is probably what hurt me the most. Ever since I was a kid, my dream has always been to play football professionally in Europe. A few years ago that dream became only to play NCAA Division 1. ‘Only’ is a really cocky way to describe my change in ambitions, but it is a good reflection of my real thinking going into that decision. However, as ‘cocky’ as I have been since that shift, my body and my mind, as a result of consequent decisions, have made

We are constantly told by our coaches, our parents, our teachers, our teammates, sideliners watching on, and even the great stars and athletes we see on TV to “STAY HUMBLE”. To humble ourselves. To humble our character. To humble our magnitude as an athlete who's given their life to a sport that they love, sacrificing who knows what in their lives, closing off who knows how many doors to take this one path and bet on it, shutting away how many voices, turning down how many p

My generation of rising athletes is the most competitive, polished and professional batch of athletes that the sporting world has seen. I say that with a certain pride, knowing that I am apart of the group. We give ourselves the label of ‘athletes’. We spend an unimaginable amount of time editing our highlights and branding ourselves as a commodity. We track our performance, our recovery, our sleep. We are becoming, by each day, more and more professional. Athletes who know h

Flow Balancing the Pendulum (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Much like each of the other factors, the key to maximising your chances of uncovering your flow state is to find that particular sweet spot. In this case, the level of challenge and skill that brings out a flow state comes at a specialised Goldilocks zone. This refers to the task being hard enough to keep you fully engaged yet not so hard that you’ll choke. Here we are introduced to two psychological laws, the first bein

Athletes are like performers. They are the actors in the production process. They are the spotlight, the protagonists, the stars. They are who we see on screens. They are the ones that earn the big bucks, the faces that you have posters on in your bedroom. They are the ones with the most followers on social media, the ones that fans will travel a sea-length to see. But who are actors without their fans, their agent, their backstage staff, their director, their marketing crew

Congratulations. You made it here. Congratulations, because you survived the pedastal, and that’s something not many can afford, and not many has afforded. It’s a true achievement. An achievement for the few, by the few. You’ve let the pedestal get the best of you, you’ve let the pedestal hand you its inherent rewards, yet you haven’t fallen off. By doing so, you’ve given yourself the rare gift of a slower, more deliberate descent. You chose to step down, rather than lettin

The Objectification of Athletes They say sports are the purest form of human expression. But somewhere along the way, the purity got packaged. Sold. Broadcast. Clipped and captioned. Athletes became products. Highlights became currency. Pain became content. We stopped watching people. We started consuming them. The world doesn’t always see the human behind the jersey. They see stats. A contract. A body moving at inhuman speeds, and they expect performance on demand — like a m

Loris Karius started his career playing for local team SG Mettenberg and SSV Ulm 1846 before joining VfB Stuttgart. Talented in his reflexes and shot-stopping abilities, he rapidly rose through the youth ranks and appeared for the German under-16 national team against FYROM in September 2008. Manchester City invited Karius and his family to England after watching him in Germany's under-16 game against Azerbaijan, and completed his signing on 1 July 2009. Karius played for the

For many youth athletes, their identity becomes intertwined with their sport. This phenomenon can lead to an "identity foreclosure," where young athletes define themselves solely by their athletic achievements. While this can be propelling for an athlete’s drive, it also concurrently sets them in vulnerability. A setback or impediment that ever so slightly goes over a personal tolerance mark can induce compounded detriments over oneself. When you define yourself in attachment

The sport for me is football. I don’t really know how it came to me. I used to go to the park with my parents every weekend when I was five or so, and my parents recalled that I would stick my face up to the green-painted, rust-stained steel fences that enclosed a five-a-side football field every day, eagerly peeking into a group of boys, a year or so older than me, kicking a rubber ball around frantically. I remember seeing a coach clad in a white compression shirt with blac

So, how does this apply to us athletes? Well, 21.5 million young footballers, again, is a huge number, and that is an understatement. And yet what makes us so minuscule sparks that flame that lasts all the while until it blows out. Why? Why do we put free time that could be spent elsewhere to attempt to attain a ratio that increasingly stacks against our will? Why is every Saturday morning spent on the training ground? Why is every Sunday night spent pondering over a bad game