Science for a change

Kumeu neuroscientist and author of The Winner’s Bible Dr Kerry Spackman shares his day, and his work, as part of the Guardian’s Nine to Five series, beginning with a run, which for Spackman is “like pushing the reset  button on the computer.” “What I do isn’t self-help; I take exception to a lot of self-help books that aren’t based on science and can be a bit trite. Telling a highly performing individual to ‘think positive’ isn’t going to make a difference — they know that already — but what I do gets behind the science of why or how performance has changed. When I’m working with athletes, I need to know everything about them so that’s what we concentrate on in the first session — the All Blacks call it the ‘Deep Dive’; they say, ‘We’re going to do the Deep Dive with Kerry.’ Sometimes I’ll have world-famous people come to me, and I think there’s nothing possibly new to uncover about them, but there always is. I’ll find what it is that really has an influence on them.”