Cognition Test Puts Brock Purdy on Par With Star NFL QBs

According to Mike Ally, director of football testing at S2, San Francisco quarterback Brock Purdy has the mental aptitude of an NFL star despite lacking physical tools. That assessment comes after testing more than 40,000 athletes with S2.

Contrary to aptitude tests, which focus on specific skills, cognitive tests assess general intelligence. They typically cover a range of abilities such as spatial awareness and mechanical reasoning in order to measure an applicant's overall mental capacity.

Spatial Awareness

Spatial awareness, or the capacity to perceive and comprehend objects in space, is an essential cognitive ability. It's necessary for success in many STEM (sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields as well as essential for general learning.

Sports necessitate the ability to read and react to their environment in order to make informed plays and decisions on the field. It also serves as a necessary skill for success in many daily tasks like reading, writing, and math.

Spatial awareness is also crucial in social situations, such as maintaining personal space or understanding a person's emotions. Thus, developing spatial awareness should be encouraged from an early age.

Learning spatial awareness may not always be straightforward, but it can be a life-enhancing skill that will enable you to reach your full potential in all aspects of life. A person with good spatial awareness has the capacity to visualize and mentally perceive shapes within their head - an invaluable ability for deciphering complex information with multiple dimensions.

As a baby, you develop spatial awareness by learning how to hold a toy correctly. This requires stretching muscles in the arm in order to reach across space and touch it. With each repetition of this process, your brain learns information about how far you need to stretch in order to successfully grab onto the toy.

Your spatial awareness skills are essential for many reasons, such as navigation, understanding and fixing equipment, calculating distance and measurement accurately, and performing on the job. It also plays a role in other tasks and hobbies like music composition or playing an instrument.

Fortunately, this skill can be developed and refined at a young age by encouraging children to play in tight quarters. Many of the world's greatest basketball players have excelled due to growing up playing Futsal or similar types of sports that involve maneuvering around obstacles.

This skill can be an enormous advantage in sports, but it's essential for other everyday tasks and for achieving success in STEM-related professions. Parents and coaches should not neglect this valuable cognitive ability.

Distraction Control

One of the biggest mishaps for the San Francisco 49ers this season was an agonizing shoulder injury to veteran quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo. That forced them to turn to their 2022 last-pick Brock Purdy, who quickly made a name for himself as a reliable starter.

Though many scouting reports questioned his athleticism and arm strength, Purdy has proven to be impressive when it comes to taking on first-down blitzes and processing information behind center. That is especially true in Kyle Shanahan's offense that relies heavily on play-action passes.

Good news, though: According to Matt Barrows at The Athletic, Purdy's brain has allowed him to quickly grasp the Niners offense and make plays when his team needed them most. A brain-testing company called S2 Cognition recently revealed that Purdy scored among the top 3 percent of NFL quarterbacks when taking their cognition test.

Matt Barrows believes he's an ideal candidate to become an NFL star due to his exceptional cognitive ability, which should allow him to manage emotions and remain focused on the task at hand.

That means the 49ers can safely trust Purdy for the long run -- perhaps even into his later years as an NFL starter. That's certainly something to be thankful for considering his draft position was labeled 'irrelevant' by some.

If he were healthy, Purdy would have been the undisputed front-runner to take over for Jimmy Garoppolo as starting quarterback. Unfortunately, at 29-years old he is recovering from a torn ligament in his elbow that will necessitate surgery next month.

At present, the best way to prevent being distracted is recognizing any source of discomfort or emotion that causes your mind to wander away from the task at hand. This could include fear, anger, frustration, boredom or any other strong feeling that can be challenging to manage.

Depth Perception Speed

In addition to spatial awareness, distraction control and decision making, depth perception speed should also be a focus for quarterbacks. When passing the ball or changing lanes on the road, it's essential to know what you're looking at and how far away it is.

In order to effectively process visual cues, your eyes need to work together as one cohesive unit. That is why getting a comprehensive eye examination is so important; this could include testing for strabismus - an eye muscle issue where the eyes don't align correctly with each other - as well as other potential eye muscle problems.

A cover test is an efficient way to check for strabismus and determine whether your vision is clear or not. If your eyes are misaligned, you could experience difficulties with depth perception and double vision - both of which can be highly frustrating when trying to complete daily tasks.

Depth perception is a complex system composed of various cues that enable your brain to interpret what you're seeing in three dimensions. These cues include convergence and accommodation, which refer to how your eye muscles angle inward and outward when looking at different objects.

Finally, your eye muscles alter how the lens of the eye shifts its focus to enable you to perceive objects at various distances. If depth perception is impaired, learning new skills may prove challenging.

One of the best tests to assess depth perception is a motion parallax test. In this exercise, you must judge which of four circles appears forward relative to its neighbors. A variety of factors can influence your judgment of this, such as viewing distance and differences in color between circles.

Testing your depth perception can be tricky, but if you notice any distortions in your vision it could be indicative of an issue with eye coordination. Blurred vision could arise due to trauma, glaucoma or other eye conditions as well.

Brock Purdy was fortunate that an S2 Cognition test put him on par with star NFL QBs when it comes to depth perception speed. While not an intelligence exam like the Wonderlic, this assessment measures how quickly and accurately athletes process information. According to founder Brandon Ally, Purdy scored in the "mid 90s" on this exam - placing him alongside Drew Brees and Patrick Mahomes.

Decision Making

When the San Francisco 49ers selected Brock Purdy in 2016, many experts doubted he could make an impact in the NFL. That is until his outstanding rookie season and help propelted them to the NFC Championship Game.

Making decisions requires thinking critically. This involves recognizing and assessing all available information to make an informed choice without succumbing to personal prejudices or blind spots.

It can be a challenging task, and it requires an open mind that accepts that the information you have gathered may not be completely accurate. Nonetheless, accepting this fact is an essential step towards becoming an effective decision-maker.

According to Matt Barrows of The Athletic, neuroscientist Brandon Ally of Nashville-based S2 Cognition recently tested Brock Purdy for decision-making skillset, and his score was comparable to current top quarterbacks like Drew Brees and Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs.

The S2 test measures a player's capacity for rapid information processing. This differs from the 50-question Wonderlic test, which assesses cognitive ability through multiple questions.

On the test, Purdy performed exceptionally well in three areas: spatial awareness, distraction control and depth perception speed. Ally reported to Barrows that Purdy achieved each of these feats with an impressive 94% accuracy rate - outperforming other players such as Joe Burrow from Cincinnati Bengals, Josh Allen from Buffalo Bills and Mahomes of Chiefs.

Ally believes the results of the S2 test demonstrate Purdy's potential as an NFL quarterback. He projects that the quarterback will have a career passer rating around 90, close to or above the league average.

This score indicates the quarterback will be an elite football player. This indicates he can read defenses well, make wise decisions, and lead his team to victory in the NFL.