Football on the Brain pullout

An eight-page detachable pullout, the magazine’s first collaboration with Football on the Brain, a four-year public engagement project involving researchers and football communities. Its argument is that playing football is a feat of neuroscience: you have to know where everyone is, predict where the ball and the players will be, decide quickly, make the pass and learn from the outcome. Illustrated throughout with a cartoon brain in spectacles, it walks through the areas responsible for vision, movement, speech, learning, emotion and prediction, explains how the prefrontal cortex does the maths behind a perfect pass and how the amygdala regulates the emotional rollercoaster, and sets brain teasers – a Spot The Ball, a word search – alongside a keepy-up planner covering every day of the tournament.