Inside the brains of Neymar and other sporting athletes
A study has been conducted in Brazil analysing the brains of top sporting athletes, including Barça's Neymar.
These athletes already possess a characteristic in the brain that allows them to use only a small part when they're in action, but with a higher than average efficiency according to the study.
The Folha de Sao Paulo published the papers and claimed that the constant training regimes that each undertake drives the cortex in the outermost layer of the brain, thus enhancing the only necessary parts to perform a specific movement in certain situations.
"Star athletes activate a smaller area of the brain, but with a lot of quality," said Paula Fernandes, an expert psychologist at the Universidad de deporte de Campinas.
It's as though Neymar already has records of how to play football in his brain, and this was shown in the "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience" study published in 2014. Japanese scientists compared the findings of Neymar's brain characteristics from this study with three Spanish Segunda Divsion players, two swimmers and an amateur athlete.
The results showed that Neymar's cortex was used at a much lower rate than the other professional athletes. Neymar's active area was also just 10 per cent of that used by the amateur.
