Neurobehavioural signatures in race car driving

ABSTRACT Recent technological developments in mobile brain and body imaging are enabling new frontiers of real-world neuroscience. Simultaneous recordings of body movement and brain activity from highly skillful individuals as they demonstrate their exceptional skills in real-world settings, can shed new light on neurobehavioural structure of human expertise. Driving is a real-world skill which many of us acquire on different levels of expertise. Here we ran a case-study on a subject with the highest level of driving expertise - a Formula E Champion. We studied the expert driver’s neural and motor patterns while he drove a sports car in the “Top Gear” race track under extreme conditions (high speed, low visibility, low temperature, wet track). His brain activity, eye movements and hand/foot movements were recorded. Brain activity in the delta, alpha, and beta frequency bands showed causal relation to hand movements. We demonstrate, here in summary, that even in extreme situations (race track driving) a method for conducting human ethomic (Ethology + Omics) data that encompasses information on the sensory inputs and motor outputs outputs of the brain as well as brain state to characterise complex human skills.