That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuoroscience Behind the Nike Mind Shoes

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss Nike's new shoes designed by neuroscientists. 

Hi, I'm Olaf Kirk Olson, a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So here is your homework, or I guess a preview. I would pause the episode right now, and I would go on YouTube, and I would type in Nike, as in the shoe company, and mind. All right, M-I-N-D. The reason you're going to do this is I'm going to talk.

about the neuroscience behind the shoe because I was a part of it. So a while back when this project started, I sort of dropped an episode hinting at what's behind the Nike mine shoe. And the reason I want to focus on this is if you look at the ad that Nike's put out, it basically says this is the first shoe designed by neuroscience, and that's a true statement. And I'm not trying to sell Nike shoes. I am actually a visiting professor at the Nike Sports Research Lab this year, but I am not a Nike employee. I get no money off of the shoe sales.

I really want to focus on the neuroscience behind it because it's really cool and it's an amazing idea. Now, this is going to sort of parallel that episode I mentioned, but now I can actually talk about the shoe. So I can be a lot more specific. and tell you how neuroscience can inform shoe design. Okay, so here's the idea, the basic concept, which I have talked about before. You have almost as many sensory receptors

on the bottom of your feet as you do on your hands. All right, so your hands are incredibly innervated with sensory receptors, and that's why you have an amazing sense of touch and you can feel the world and all of the textures and all of the different things out there. Now, the same is true of your feet. You know, a lot of us, we put socks on right away,

then we put on shoes. Try walking around barefoot. So there's another piece of homework. Watch the YouTube video, Nike Mind, see what it's all about. Your next piece of homework is just try walking around on different textures barefoot and really feel them. All right? like really feel them.

And you realize quickly that you can actually pick up a lot of sensation from your feet. All right, your feet are incredibly good at detecting textures. Now, the other trick you can try has more to do with balance, but it's the same concept. Get a really, get a pillow, like a pillow that's, and you can try different, you know, different weights, I guess, of pillows is the phrase. and try to balance on one leg standing on a pillow. All right. And try to do it again wearing shoes, especially shoes that are like a nice thick soul.

You'll probably find that you have a lot more trouble balancing on a pillow standing in a pair of thick shoes than you do barefoot. And the reason's the same. In both of these instances when you're feeling texture and when you're trying to balance, your foot is receiving an incredible amount of sensory information from those receptors on the bottom of your feet. That sensory information is translated up the spinal cord

through the midbrain to the primary sensory cortex, and that allows the motor system to detect texture, and it allows the sensory system to detect texture, and it also allows the sensory system to inform the motor system to respond to changes. This is crucial for balance. Now, of course, with balance, you rely on some other systems as well,

but this bottom of your feet stuff plays a massive role. Now, think about what we've done with humans as shoes. We've put a thick layer of something on the bottom of our feet, and this negates or blocks the sensory input.

Now, why do we do this? Well, it's to protect. the bottom of our feet. You know, if you walked around barefoot in a modern city, there's glass, there's metal, there's all sorts of things. If you did it in the brush, there's all sorts of sharp, prickly things and rocks. So we've put souls on the bottom of our feet, or artificial souls, I guess, more correctly, to protect our feet from damage. It makes perfect sense, and we should do that. You know, we've got to protect our feet. But we're missing sensation. We've also, at the same time, while we protect ourselves, we've taken something away.

Now, while you're pondering this, I'll give you another homework activity. Dr. Kay's dish in the homework tonight. Sorry about that. Imagine, well, don't even imagine, try this. Go put on a pair of kitchen gloves and just try to feel different textures. Like try your couch versus a wood floor versus a marble countertop versus, you know, what a carpet. try all these things. And what you'll realize quickly is you don't have a lot of sensation. You get a bit of pressure. You can tell if something's hard or not. But in terms of actual texture, you get almost nothing.

Well, it's the exact same logic. All of those sensory receptors in your hands are covered up by the oven mitts. So you can't feel anything. All right. Back to feet because Nike didn't release the mind oven mitt. It released the mind shoe. So we're at this point where we want to protect our feet, but we do realize that having sensation is good for us. Well, that's where minimalist shoes come in. I actually own a pair of vibrant five fingers. I love them.

Like I really do. But the problem with the vibrant five fingers is they don't protect you that well. If you've got bad ankles or knees, do not go into minimalist shoes. All right. And if you don't have bad ankles or knees, don't start right. running 10K races or marathons in them. Now, there is a very small group of people that believe you should wear minimalist footwear and you can run in these things and you can, you know, survive in the world.

But these are people that generally are very, of a very specific body build, tend to be very light, all right, and they're usually in good shape to begin with, and they ease into it. All right, so if you were going to run a marathon and a pair of vibrum five fingers, I would strongly recommend you start with walking one kilometer one day a week, and then you work your way up to 42 kilometers running over a long period of time. And even with that, you might damage your ankles and your knees because you don't have that protection. So what's the answer?

You need a shoe that protects your foot. So you need some level of thickness on the sole so that your foot doesn't get destroyed by the world around it. but you also need sensation. And if you look at the bottom of the mind shoe, you'll see that there are these little things that go in and out. Now, I can't tell you about the mechanism behind it because that, well, to be fair, it's a corporate secret. But you get the idea, if you look at the bottom of the mind shoe in the video,

you're going to see a bunch of little spikes almost. They're round and they kind of look like a mint almost, at least half of a mint, and those spikes move in and out as you walk across the ground. And the purpose of that movement is to allow some sensation through. Now, it's not as good as being barefoot. Wouldn't argue that, but it does allow you to sense the world, and it's far better than a soul that doesn't have this technology in it. So that is the neuroscience behind the Nike Mine Shoes.

all right. And again, I'm not going to talk mechanism. I'm talking concept, just in case someone from Adidas is listening. That's a joke. But what I can tell you is that my lab actually helped validate the shoes and they do work. They do what they're supposed to do. So what we did is we had people walk on a treadmill. Well, actually, they stood in the mine shoes or they stood in a control shoe, so a shoe with a thick sole without the mind technology. And we measured their brainwave data.

And then we had them walk on a treadmill for 10 minutes wearing either the mine shoes, the control shoes, and then we had them stand again at the end for a period of time wearing the shoes. And what we found is whether they were standing before

the walk, whether they were walking or after the walk is there was more activity in the sensory motor cortex wearing mind shoes than wearing the control shoes. We did that measuring EEG or brain waves. So simply put, the mind shoes do relay more sensory information to the brain. We were able to detect it with the human EEG signal. Kind of cool. All right, that's a little bit behind the, you know, a little bit behind the scenes on the Nike mind shoes, I would encourage you to, uh, you know, check out the YouTube video. You won't see me because I don't work for Nike, like I said. But it's a good insight to the technology and after hearing this little primer,

you probably can get a little bit of an idea about how the shoes work and what the intent is. Okay. Don't forget the website that neuroscience guy.com. We're going to be updating it soon, but there's links to Patreon. a couple of dollars a week, a month. It really helps. It goes to the graduate students, Jan and Matt, who help with the podcast. They're poor starving graduate students, and this is a way for them to not only do something good, you know, and help translate knowledge to the world about neuroscience, but also to hopefully earn a bit of money to offset their tuition fees. Literally, all of the money goes to them. You're not supporting me. I don't need it. Of course,

there's our social media presence, Instagram, Threads and X at that Neurosai guy. Check out Instagram. We're always posting new material. Okay, Jen's always posting new material that supplements the episodes or previews them. Great stuff up there and lots of it. And of course, Threads and X, we don't post that much there, but it's a great way to reach out to us.

So send us some messages at that Neurosai guy, because we do want to know what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. And we do have an episode coming up on that. We're going to answer four listener questions specifically with a new format, a panel format. So we might be able to answer your questions. So please send them in. There's also Gmail, that neuroscience guy at gmail.com. And of course, the podcast itself.

Thank you so much for listening. And please subscribe if you haven't already. My name is Olive Craig Olson, and I am that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.