Lost SA?

What to do when you lose situational awareness. (And we’ve all been there!) Adapted from BAE Systems paper Airmanship Training For Modern Aircrew, presented at the RTO HFM Symposium on ‘Advanced Technologies for Military Training’, held Genoa, Italy 13 – 15 October 2003, and published in RTO-MP-HFM-101.  

Meditating military helicopter pilots

A peer-reviewed scientific study published this year shows the positive impact of meditation on personnel in two Norwegian Air Force helicopter squadrons. This was not new-age wishful thinking, or sloppy science self-reporting that some people felt good. No, this was university and Air Force doctors and scientists taking chemical measurements of salivary cortisol, testing performance on computer-based cognitive tasks, and comparing the results to a control group. The subjects were all high-performance airmen during a prolonged period of high-demand work. This is real-world stuff. The results: From a mixed between–within analysis revealed that the [mindfulness training] participants compared to the control group had … Continue reading Meditating military helicopter pilots

Do ‘brain-training’ games make you a better pilot?

The Association for Psychological Science recently published a massive 200-page research report on brain training programs, seeing if fun cognitive tasks or games can enhance performance on other tasks. Peer-reviewed, respected authors, fully-referenced. It covered all the valid studies that have examined this question, a huge research database. And the results? Based on this examination, we find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance. So no, they don’t! … Continue reading Do ‘brain-training’ games make you a better pilot?