Neuroplasticity in F16 fighter jet pilots

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9974643/

by bookofjoe • 2 years ago

122 46 2 years ago

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

warner256• 2 years ago

This seems to be specifically about the effects of high g-force, but I'll say that learning to fly a military helicopter (in which coping with high g-force isn't a factor) felt like it probably demanded more neuroplasticity than anything else I've ever done.

A typical test was being on the aircraft controls while navigating at 100+ knots and 50 feet above the trees, looking out for a nondescript clearing or dirt road on the map while wearing night vision goggles[1], ensuring that you hit checkpoints and land +/- 60 seconds from the designated times, listening to (and responding as necessary) to multiple external radios plus the internal intercom system, and being asked to also recite from memory (or suddenly execute) the procedures for some contingency (e.g aircraft emergency, change to the tactical situation). Everyone struggles through the training, because no prior experience or schooling really prepares you for all that[2], and I suspect that coming out the other end entails a massive reorganization of the brain.

[1] Or substitute that with wearing a hood so you can only see the instruments and translating a 2D instrument procedure on paper into a 3D (4D?) reality.

[2] Of course selection is based on school and athletic performance, which seems to help, but I don't know how much evidence supports that.

ohazi• 2 years ago

There also seem to be a lot of anecdotal suggestions that learning how to use that AR/HUD single-eyepiece thing when flying the Apache helicopter similarly requires some brain-reorganizing shenanigans to fully master.

warner256• 2 years ago

True. I flew Black Hawks instead of Apaches, but we also had a HUD monocle that we could attach to our NVGs (so it was only for aided night flight in our case). It prevented us from having to shift our eyes from the NVG image down to the actual cockpit instruments. For me, adapting to the HUD was much easier than adapting to the NVGs themselves; I remember drifting backwards at 15 knots and 30 feet over a runway when I thought I was at a stable 10-foot hover a few weeks into NVG training[1]. The Apache monocle is probably more difficult to use because it overlays the instrumentation on the real-world instead of another synthetic image.

[1] Somewhat amused, the instructor pilot let it happen for a few seconds before asking me if I was OK and could see what was happening. It was a formative learning experience.

psunavy034• 2 years ago

As someone who was a past military jet pilot and navigator, the one thing I still notice I have is an uncanny unconscious/subconscious sense of time. It's not perfect, but I rarely sleep through alarms and if I intend to wake up at a certain time, I have about an 85 percent chance of waking up, looking over at my phone, and seeing 1-2 minutes prior. If I'm going something like cooking in the kitchen, I still set timers, but often get an uncomfortable feeling of "you should go check that" that's within a minute or two.

I always figured it went back to what you mentioned, being able to be on timelines down to the second while doing all the other ancillary tasks like listening to three radios, monitoring sensors, etc.

gmays• 2 years ago

I guess it's individual. My wife flew F-18's for the Marine Corps and is chronically late for everything! So much for on time, on target.

mschnell• 2 years ago

I have that too -- not a jet pilot, but a hobby musician.

dttze• 2 years ago

I got that ability from playing a lot of Quake 3 deathmatch.

dietr1ch• 2 years ago

As a kid I trained myself to keep track of time through using the 15m beep on my Casio watch.

Eventually I was quite accurate on the current time, rarely missing by more than a minute, but at some point it felt like it wasn't really helping me since I had the watch anyway. It also was too weird for becoming a party trick (first time I admit to learning this), and didn't help with the idea that I had just wasted X minutes of my life between any 2 moments I thought about time or checked it without having done something useful, so I ended up disabling that.

boogieknite• 2 years ago

Me and my old school friends always attributed this to playing sports with timers.

washadjeffmad2• 2 years ago

I should look more into my cat's past.

johnchristopher2• 2 years ago

As someone who was a past military jet pilot and navigator, the one thing I still notice I have is an uncanny unconscious/subconscious sense of time. It's not perfect, but I rarely sleep through alarms and if I intend to wake up at a certain time, I have about an 85 percent chance of waking up, looking over at my phone, and seeing 1-2 minutes prior. If I'm going something like cooking in the kitchen, I still set timers, but often get an uncomfortable feeling of "you should go check that" that's within a minute or two.

It's interesting, I have the same ability: waking up 2-5 minutes before the alarm clock, feeling the washing machine or the oven alarm will ring in 20 seconds~2 minutes. I am rarely off and when I am it's by a huge margin. But I have no background or job or hobby history that would have helped fine tuned that. I also don't rely on it, I often set timers.

chiph• 2 years ago

Prior Air Force, but not a pilot. 40 years later my internal clock is still usually accurate to 10-15 minutes. Not good enough to replace a kitchen timer, sadly.

The saying when I was in was "If you're not five minutes early, you're late." Which I understand they have optimized to everyone showing up fifteen minutes early now. Such a time-waste.

jhayward• 2 years ago

I was like that for several decades but after I retired I got better.

I'm fairly certain that, at least in my case, it was a form of hypervigilance and based in anxiety. I'm less anxious these days and hope to live longer as a result.

Although I do still have a better-than-average ability to know when to check what's in the oven for doneness. This "feels" much different, though - I'm completely unaware of the passage of time until something just says to me "that stuff should be about done now."

zihotki• 2 years ago

I have no military training like that but I'm also often wake up a few mins before alarms and also have a good sense of time. It seems to me that it's more rather a personal trait. And it's possible it's a skill one can learn.

tra3• 2 years ago

I have relatively poor hand eye coordination/balance and I've been trying to learn how to pilot a drone (without stabilization). Anecdotally, kids can pick it up within hours of flying a sim, and adults take in general 20-30 hours to get proficient. I'm double that and I'm still terrible.. flying a helictopter in the conditions you describe must be orders of magnitude more difficult.

Out of curiosity what do you do now?

warner256• 2 years ago

With the old mechanical linkage controls (not the newer fly-by-wire controls with a bunch of automatic stabilization) it was typical to have 20 hours before one (i.e. 20-25 year-old flight school student) could safely pick the helicopter up off the ground, hover, and set it back down. There are no younger nor much older military flight school students, so I don't know how age would affect the learning curve. The old simulators were no help with learning to hover because it was all about "feel" and the simulators could never get the feel quite right. I've never tried to pilot a drone so I can't compare with that.

I'm still in the military but transitioned to studying, doing, and teaching IT and CS stuff in my late 20s (which is how I ended up here at HN).

mmooss4• 2 years ago

athletic performance

Interesting - what do they measure? I could see hand-eye coordination and a sense of body position relative to the ground (the perception that Simone Biles lost temporarily). But most athletic performance would have seemed irrelevant to me. It seems mostly a mental task, as you describe.

Someone I know in special forces said they don't look for 'jocks', but people with emotional and cognitive performance under stress, though a certain level of physical ability is necessary of course.

warner256• 2 years ago

It's not as direct as measuring wannabe aviators for athleticism. You have to see it as the multi-year pipeline going from high school / college / enlisted ranks to the selection for officer training to the selection for aviation. All three steps are competitive, and athletic participation and achievement and physical fitness scores are major inputs. So a flight school class ends up having a disproportionate number of former varsity and intercollegiate athletes, and the intramural sports played among aviators tend to be quite serious.

If it helps, it's probably for the reasons you said - generally being able to quickly process and accurately react to visual / audio / proprioceptive / vestibular stimuli - plus being used to working through physical discomfort.

I agree that that's true of all SOF selection, and probably Army SF in particular.

JohnBooty• 2 years ago

Neither pilot nor military but:

Specifically to fly fighters you need strong cardio, strong core muscles, strong head/neck muscles. During high G maneuvers all the blood in your body wants to flow down to the lower parts of your body. You have to clench your lower body to mitigate that to an extent (the legs of the flight suit inflate too, to help) and do rapid deep breathing exercises to keep enough blood and oxygen flowing to your brain.

You will also be keeping your head on a swivel to an extent while flying in combat, turning your head to see things around you, it's not just a matter of looking at sensor data. Imagine observing things behind you on a roller coaster (2-3g max IIRC) but now scale that up to potentially up to 9g when your body feels like it weighs 1,500lbs/700kg or so. It's a workout!

While not as directly applicable to flying choppers, all military pilots in a given branch come from the same pipeline. You don't know your aircraft assignment (jet, heavy, chopper, whatever) until the end of flight school so everybody has to be pretty fit. Video of selections being announced during graduation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XF_VMwgaEI

strangattractor• 2 years ago

I'm having difficulty in understanding why this is assumed to be related to g's pulled as opposed 100's of other things. Someone spending many hours doing a task that demands a great deal of focus and physical coordination might show changes in neuroplasticity different to someone that sits in front of a computer screen writing code all day.

tlb• 2 years ago

Comparing fighter pilots to helicopter pilots might say something about the effect of G forces, since the cognitive loads are both high.

However, the control group is “10 adults with no experience in flying … matched for age, gender, and educational level”. I feel like fighter pilots are pretty different from other people with the same amount of education.

maartenscholl• 2 years ago

Do fighter pilots accumulate all that much exposure to G-forces in terms of duration? 2000 flight hours sounds like a lot, but aren't they flying steady most of the time?

Wouldn't professional bobsleigh pilots, alpine skiers, formula 1 drivers and downhill mountain bikers accumulate many more hours of high G-force exposure over the period of say a year?

bookofjoe• 2 years ago

Top-Gun Navy Pilots Fly at the Extremes. Their Brains May Suffer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/us/navy-pilot-brain-injur...

https://archive.ph/FQ32k

HPsquared• 2 years ago

The profile is different. Fighter pilots have sustained g-force in a vertical direction, draining blood from the brain. Formula 1 drivers have lateral and forward/backward acceleration, which will have different physiological effects. The other sports are probably different again. Not sure if anything has a similar profile to jets.

alistairSH• 2 years ago

I'm not sure DH mountain bike hits the G-forces that one might encounter in a fighter jet. Maybe some instantaneous instances, but nothing sustained. I'm a mountain biker (nowhere near an elite DHer) and they don't require compression gear to keep from passing out.

Bobsled/luge might be closer, but I have no direct experience.

dailykoder• 2 years ago

I'd second that. I am far far away from being a pro, but my gut feeling and memory tell me that I felt way bigger forces while doing big, steep dirt jumps than any form of downhill. Though, the pros are actually fast around the corners, unlike me. So maybe there might be some g-forces, but I doubt they are anywhere near an F1 car or something else

rjsw• 2 years ago

Alpine skiing doesn't result in particularly high G-forces.

excalibur• 2 years ago

A control group (mean age (SD) = 29 (3.2) years, range 23–32 years) of 10 adults with no experience in flying was included, matched for age, gender, and educational level. Additionally, controls were also matched for handedness (9 right- and 1 left-handed in each group).

Controls should be matched for military service. There is a high probability of this altering the brain in ways unrelated to being a fighter pilot. In fact, military pilots who fly other types of aircraft might be ideal.

PKop2• 2 years ago

Controls should be matched for people that end up being equivalently skilled pilots, unless we are supposed to pretend that those capable of being elite fighter pilots have the same brains as those that aren't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379879

PKop2• 2 years ago

How are they disambiguating between these brain markers being an effect, or a cause, of being an F16 fighter pilot?

Like claiming "Becoming an Olympic swimmer causes long torsos, long arms and short legs"

They should at least have control group be students in flight school, and then throw out control subjects that don't graduate. Of course, better would be before and after flight hours for same people. Seems pretty obviously flawed to just compare to some random other group of non pilots.

Neuroplasticity in F16 fighter jet pilots

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