Neuroplasticity in F16 fighter jet pilots | Hacker News Reader

Neuroplasticity in F16 fighter jet pilots

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

122 pointsbookofjoe46 comments

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.

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.

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.

Strangely that's how I was before I went to flight school.

> 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.

Apparently the ability to wake up at a certain time is "trainable". Does this imply an innate "clock" that is being tapped here?

https://youtu.be/P-a5sW7W36E?si=aGbuu3N3Km2d8NKT

ADHD?

Yup, my ADHD also grants me this ability. I use my alarm maybe 4 times a year, and even then it's usually not needed.

Not that I am aware of. But I am trying to adopt some ADHD strategies to better handle some anxiety related problems.

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.

I should look more into my cat's past.

Does your cat jump on your bed right before the alarm rings as well?

Almost to the minute.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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).

It’s insane how hard hovering is. I had about 35 hours of fixed wing time, and treated myself to a helicopter lesson for my birthday.

Hovering was so humbling! You’d be stable for a few seconds and then oops now we’re suddenly crabbing backwards whilst rolling laterally whilst exacerbating everything with pilot-induced oscillations in every conceivable axis of movement.

Having to constantly enter three inputs whenever the external environment changes (ie wind, gust), or any time any one of the three inputs change… it absolutely requires some new neural pathways to be forged!

I flew with Patty Wagstaff many years later and even she admitted hovering was so hard, to the point it looked like she wasn’t going to be able proceed with her rotor license (before it all clicked).

> so hard, to the point it looked like she wasn’t going to be able proceed with her rotor license (before it all clicked)

Yeah, I think we were all convinced that we were going to wash out of flight school in the first few weeks. Hovering was not something that you could see yourself gradually getting better at, so it felt impossible right up until it wasn't. It really did just "click" one day. Almost two decades later, I still have a vivid memory of the very moment that I realized I had full control of the aircraft when picking it up from the ground.

When my buddy and I were telling an instructor pilot one day how we felt (like we'd never be able to hover), he wisely pointed out that the flight school syllabus had a certain number of hours for a reason. It had been refined over the past 50 years, so they knew exactly how many hours were needed, and if things "clicked" for us ahead of that schedule it would mean that time and money were being wasted.

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.

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.

> 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.

I think the formative learning experience is why the instructor let you drift for a while. Of course, plus 20 feet has a different impact on safety than minus 20 feet :P

> 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.

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.

> All three steps are competitive, and athletic participation and achievement and physical fitness scores are major inputs.

Are they? Why? I don't want an athlete next to me in a foxhole, but someone who can stay calm, think clearly, and make good decisions under extreme stress.

Edit: Sports are the opposite of warfare: Games, where the only consequence is 'points', where the losing team at worst buys the beer, and where participants follow rules and require fairness.

Warfare is the opposite in every respect. You die, your country is overrun and your family dies and home is destroyed. Generations pass before you recover, if ever. There are no rules or fairness; quite the opposite - the participants look for every advantage they can.

> agree that that's true of all SOF selection

I said/meant that SOF does not select for athletes.

For better or worse, I think athletic participation and achievement is used[1] as a proxy for what you want. The idea is that one can prove himself through sport as a good teammate with grit, determination, toughness etc. in adversarial situations. It might be debatable, but I think that's the logic used by the institution.

And I was trying to say that what's true is the SOF community's desire for "emotional and cognitive performance under stress" above most other qualities. Like you said, one won't even get looked at without a baseline level of fitness or athleticism, but after that selection appears to be based on the outcomes of mind games and the assessment of personality traits.

[1] Officers coming out of Army ROTC, for example, get literal points for playing intercollegiate or intramural sports, and having more points gives them a better chance at getting their choice of career field. Getting an Army ROTC scholarship in the first place probably works the same way.

As a former military jet aviator, you don't seem to a) know what you're talking about on a fundamental sense and b) be comprehending what you're being told.

The point is the empirical evidence that those who succeed in the pipeline tend to disproportionately have athletic backgrounds, often competitive ones. Not all, but many. This is precisely because competing in elite sports is a way (not the only way, but a way) to develop everything you say you'd want next to you in a foxhole, yet which you somehow scoff at athletes being able to acquire.

You frankly come off as someone with no experience in the military OR in athletics, and I say that as a former aviator who was not an elite athlete but knew some.

And I've worked with SOF personnel. They may select against stereotypical "jock" behavior (though that's sometimes debatable looking at Naval Special Warfare). But they sure as hell select for very high athletic talent . . . among other things.

Why attack people you are talking to - unless you have little else to make your case? The value of selecting for athleticism has nothing to do with me; that topic is irrelevant. If you really can keep your head in a jet, maybe you can keep your head here. Regarding knowing what you're talking about - you have no idea about me at all. People might differ from you for other reasons than being fundementally flawed - the first is not at all a signal of the second; you are not the standard of reason.

> the empirical evidence that those who succeed in the pipeline tend to disproportionately have athletic backgrounds, often competitive ones.

Where could we find this evidence? That would be very interesting. I don't doubt they do select for athetic backgrounds but that's not empirical evidence that it's wise.

My individual experience in playing competitive sports (pretty well, very competitive, not professionally), gambling, and also frequent experience in very high stress (professionally and otherwise) and sometimes dangerous situations:

The first is no help with the latter other than blowing off steam. I wouldn't use the same word for real-life stress and the 'stress' in games, but for comparison sake: I'd say the 'stress' in sports is for children - highly simplistic situations of no consequence; like a movie; just enough 'stress' to supercharge engagement and make it interesting. The value, the conceit or trick of sports (or a good movie or song) is that you get to experience those exciting feelings without actually facing real life, you don't have to accomplish anything real but you get the endorphins and other drugs pumping. That's great, until you start believing it's real; it's a drug trip.

Real-life stress is entirely different. Sports 'stress' is not nearly enough to psychologically threaten or damage or traumatize you; not enough for real fear and injury; there are no life-changing consequences for you and others based on your decision and action - do all your employees lose their livelihoods because you make the wrong decision, or because you don't thread the needle, on your feet, on 10,000 political and business and social factors and communicate effectively to the big client? College admissions tests (i.e., something with real-life consequence) are a better measure IMHO, as an example off the top of my head.

I think that "supercharged engagement", those emotions, gets the better of people's judgement. Add to that the macho bias; the social trend of embracing physical violence and action, the big trend of favoring sports, and dismissing judgement, knowledge, and intellect (because the latter result in things that undermine powerful people); some groupthink ... that's where I suspect the bias (IMHO) to sports comes from.

I'm not attacking you. I'm observing that when you say something "seems to be" the case, and then people with actual experience in the field speak up, perhaps it's your time to sit back and listen versus argue about how things "seem to be" to you.

Your GP comment did attack me and mostly focus on me - look at the very first words - not the issue, and so did the parent comment. You still aren't providing the actual contribution you promise, the evidence, nor addressing the issues on their merits. All you have is insults and criticisms of the other participants.

Nobody is interested in that stuff (and it's against the guidelines). Just contribute intelligently to the issue at hand.

> people with actual experience in the field

Perhaps this is all about your claimed expertise - you've repeated it many times and you make a point of emphasizing it and putting down the ideas of others, as if to boost yourself higher by comparison. People here, at least, aren't going to genuflect to self-importance and aggression.

If your expertise is real then you don't need to do those things. Just contribute to the discussion - of the actual issue - with dignity. Plenty of people here have expertise in the topics being discussed; they don't feel the need to bring down others.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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?

>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

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.

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.

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

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

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