The success of Chiara Mazzel, the blind skier who follows the music at 100 km/h: "It is neural plasticity, our brain adapts"

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Chiara Mazzel

does not ski, she does not compete, she does not descend: Chiara dances.

Last Sunday, at the Espot station in Lleida, she was proclaimed super-giant champion of the FIS Paraski World Cup, but she only danced.

A dance to the rhythm of the music, a dance following the trail of the music.

What an invention, yours, what an innovation.

Chiara Mazzel is blind.

Due to childhood glaucoma diagnosed too late, since she was a child she was losing her sight until at the age of 18 she could hardly see objects that were very, very close, less than 20 centimeters away.

From Trento, at the foot of the Dolomites, in northern Italy, she then had to give up her hobby, skiing, until five years later she discovered paraskiing.

"And I took the step.

It seems easy, but it is very difficult, the most difficult of my career.

Discovering that you can do sports even if you are blind, that this possibility exists, costs a lot », Mazzel acknowledges that at the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games she obtained a diploma - she finished seventh - and now she dominates the world.

How has she improved herself so much?

"The tube", announces her guide,

and yes, indeed, "the tube" has triggered her results.

Last year, already accustomed to the competition, to go down the snow at 100 kilometers / hour, Mazzel detected something.

All the blind skiers follow the instructions that their guides throw at them through a microphone connected to a speaker, but what they say is not so important, what is important is that they say it, that they speak, that they make a sound.

Mazzel discovered that, beyond the directions, she was skiing in the direction of the voice.

If Casal indicated "right", she would turn to the right, but she did so following the noise, not so much her own guideline.

And that led him to think of another method.

In "the tube".

The origin of the invention

Last year Mazzel and Casal began to work on a system thanks to which the skier knew at all times where her guide was, if she had turned or not, where she had turned and in what degrees.

The idea was that the sound, instead of being intermittent - "right", "left" or "bump", the typical instructions - was continuous and the solution was clear: music.

If the guide, Casal, emitted music from his speaker, the skier, Mazzel, could follow him, but in the first tests the notes were dispersed by the mountain, they were buried by the noise of the skis and the effect was not the desired one. .

They decided to call a friend.

«We went to see an audio engineer,

, who had already helped us with my microphone, to see if he could help us with this new idea.

We needed a device that would emit a very powerful sound, very directional, a sound that would reach Chiara in a very direct way”, recalls Casal about how “the tube” was born.

What an invention, yours, what an innovation.

With an industrial name, MAG.00, "the tube" is a 300-watt speaker with a cylindrical sound outlet that the guide wears strapped to his hip at all times and allows the skier to follow him to the millimetre.

LYMBUS

Casal also gives some instructions -"li, li, li" is to the left or "re, re, re" is to the right-, but now the main work is done by the music.

«Thanks to the tube I have improved a lot both technically and in speed.

It is as if he sees through the ears, "proclaims Mazzel, who is now leading the competitions and who has already made his rivals interested in his machine.

For how it works and also why it works.

What is behind the ingenuity?

neural plasticity

"It is an evident sample of the neuronal plasticity of the human being, of the learning that we are capable of doing in certain situations," explains the neurologist

vice president of the Spanish Society of Neurology and head of the San Carlos Clinical Hospital in Madrid.

«A third of our brain is dedicated to seeing, sight is a fundamental part of brain development, but without it the brain adapts, the cognitive power of neurons develops in a different way.

That is why blind children adapt much better to sound stimuli.

For this reason, in an MRI of a congenitally blind person, there are parts of the occipital cortex that function, although this is essentially dedicated to vision.

For this reason, in this case, the skier orients herself through sound.

Some people think that hearing and balance are acquired at a very young age, but we don't fully develop them until we are 14 years old.

In her case, a vision problem as a child has led her to adapt », analyzes Porta about the success of Chiara Mazzel.

Despite losing sight

the Paralympic skier flies down the slopes because she has applied neuroscience.

She doesn't ski, she doesn't race, she doesn't descend: she just dances.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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• Articles Javier Sanchez