By Daniel Terdiman 03.29.17 | 9:00 am

The next time a San Francisco Giant hits a game-winning home run or turns a great double play to end a rivals rally, you may be able to thank neuroscience.

Today, Halo Neuroscience, a San Francisco startup thats developed a device aimed at boosting the performance of athletes, announced it has officially been helping the Giants get the most out of its players.

[Photos: courtesy of Halo Neuroscience]

The device, the Halo Sport, stimulates the brains motor cortex, energizing motor neurons, which then send athletes muscles stronger signals, allowing them to get more powerful and efficient with every training rep.

The Halo Sport, which looks almost exactly like a pair of headphones, isnt new. But Halo hasnt previously revealed much about its partnerships with any professional sports franchises, especially not ones that have progressed beyond the experimental stage.

The Giants, with their proximity to Silicon Valley, are exposed to lots of intriguing technology that could be used to improve athletic performance, says Geoff Head, the teams sports scientist. But before jumping at any of that tech, the three-time World Series champions like to do our homework.

Austin Slater warming up.

Last season, Head says, the Giants conducted a two-week trial involving 18 top minor league prospects at the teams off-season conditioning camp. The idea, he explains, was to give nine of the players Halo Sports and compare the results of their training and workouts with nine players who didnt get the devices but went through the exact same conditioning.

Afterwards, he says, the team found there to be significant-enough improvement results in the Halo group compared to the control group to where it opened up our eyes to the devices value.

To be sure, the improvements were smallon the order of 1% to 2%. But with these athletes at the major league level, Head says, thats sometimes enough to be the difference between winning and losing.

Based on those trials, the Giants signed a formal partnership with Halo Neuroscience and have been utilizing the startups devices during the current spring training at both the major league level and for players at four different levels of the minor leagues.

According to Head, Halo cofounder Daniel Chao had explained that the peak benefit of the companys device comes in the 60-to-90-minute window after wearing it, a data point that matched what the team had learned from its in-house study.

The greatest improvements we found in the players in the [test] group, he says, were the skills work we were doing when they were wearing the Halo headset. As soon as they players took off the headsets . . . we would get into some advanced mobility worktrying to learn new postures, speed drills, and so on.

Asked why players didnt just wear their Halo headsets all day, Head says its simply a matter of diminishing returns. When wearing the Halo Sport, the areas you work on receive a higher level of stimulation. If you constantly stimulate over the course of a day, he explains, youre definitely not going to get as much bang for your buck. Its like working out all day. You would get the best results in the first part of the day.

The key for the Giants, as the team seeks to get the most from its use of the Halo Sport, is to figure out which skill set each individual player needs the most work on and have them wear the headset immediately prior to doing that work.

So, for example, if a pitcher is trying to work on changing the arm angle at which he throws, he would want to wear the Halo Sport in the morning in the 20 minutes or so before beginning his 10 a.m. workout. Even after stretching, the pitchers throwing session would still be within the devices 60-to-90-minute effectiveness window.

San Francisco Giants pitcher Tyler Beede

And the benefit may not be limited solely to what a player can do on his own, Head says. In fact, the Halo Sport improves learning as well. So players will be more likely to internalize training feedback from coaches if it happens during that time frame.

The benefit even extends to getting stronger, Head says. So if a players biggest weakness is, excuse the pun, his strength, he will do well to wear the Halo Sport prior to doing his weight liftingand may even want to wear it for the first 20 minutes of those sessions, Head says.

Given that baseballs regular season hasnt yet started, its too early to tell if Halos technology will help the Giants actually get more wins. And even after the games begin, theres of course no way to know if there was actually a true benefit.

But the results of the Giants experiment last season suggest theres reason to believe that Halo can help the team do better. A baseball season is 162 games. It generally takes around 90 wins to guarantee a playoff spot. Over the course of that span, a 1% to 2% improvement works out to between 1.62 and 3.24 additional wins.

So, Giants fans, if your team makes the playoffs by three wins or less, therell be a reasonable argument to be made that its due to neuroscience.

Daniel Terdiman is a San Francisco-based technology journalist with nearly 20 years of experience. A veteran of CNET and VentureBeat, Daniel has also written for Wired, The New York Times, Time, and many other publications.

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