Neuroscientist Dr Kerry Spackman wants to map your brain for success
Saturday, 13 June 2026
With a background in mathematics and physics, Dr Kerry Spackman’s introduction to neuroscience came when he was measuring the performance of experimental cars. “I rang up the president of Ford Motor Company and I said, ‘I’m Kerry from New Zealand. I’m just looking at your data and I don’t think your test drivers are very good’.” That led to working with Formula One champion Jackie Stewart and investigating the question, ‘What goes on inside his brain that makes him better than everybody else?’
In 2009, Spackman, 69, put his findings into the bestseller The Winner’s Bible, and now he’s back with The Winner’s Formula. He tells Frances Morton about mapping a new model for therapy, AI and why true winning isn’t a race.
Do we want to be winners, and how do we find what we want to win at? A winner isn’t necessarily a person who crosses the finishing line first. For me it’s about being the very best version of yourself. The decisions we take, the skills we acquire, the things we leave behind, all of those things determine whether we are better. And what I’m trying to get across in the idea of The Winner’s Formula is that there is a process to this. It’s not random. The process is different for every single person.
You’ve worked with some big winners in the past. When did you start working with F1? Back in the 1990s. I got involved in that through my work with three-time F1 World Champion, Jackie Stewart and he set up his own F1 team, which has now turned into Red Bull Racing, which is where obviously Max Verstappen is. So Jackie started that team and I was working with him, and that’s how that all got going.
Are you still doing work with them? So I still do work with elite race drivers. I can’t mention who they are, just because that’s the nature of this business. But yes, and it’s been a really enjoyable part of my life. It’s been really interesting because in F1, you have your kind of annual review every fortnight. You put a car on the track, and that is a real measure of people who are themselves all extraordinary individuals.
The Winner’s Bible was published in 2009. What’s changed in neuroscience since then? There’s been a lot of changes. There’s a chapter on cognitive wiring maps [in The Winner’s Formula] that came about by actually working with clients and going, OK, traditional cognitive behaviour therapy isn’t working. It’s not getting across. And why is it not getting across? It’s because sentences are linear. It’s very hard to find the relationship between concepts. Whereas we put it into a map, and if you build the map with the person, they own the map. It’s their map. They can see how their thoughts collide. They can see how their thoughts are connected.
That’s something quite new and I think it’s revolutionary. I’ve even filed a patent on it.
You also write about harnessing AI and using it for work, personal finance and mental health. I’ve been very heavily involved in the human-in-the-AI-loop, which I call HAIL IQ. I think AI is incredibly powerful. It’s really good at what it does, but it’s also very weak and poor at other things. So if I get AI to make an image, it will make the most amazing photorealistic images in the world. It’s just incredible. But if I get it to do complex, multilevel reasoning, it fails miserably. And the problem is it produces beautifully polished answers that everyone can believe. It looks really good, but the actual logic hidden inside is actually not very good.
And so one of the things I’m really focusing on is: how do you improve the human in that loop process? It is a real challenge and a massive opportunity. All these statistics say that a lot of companies invest in AI, but more than 50% of them get no return on their AI – like, zero. And you go, ‘Wow, OK, you’ve got this incredible power, and yet you’re not getting the return’. Now, why is that? And I think it’s because humans don’t know how to work in that loop.
You’re about to turn 70, what does winning or having a successful life look to you now? Being able to create something that nobody else has created. That to me gives me enormous satisfaction, huge value. Being able to do something that helps people.
I got an email from this guy from Australia. It was about seven years after The Winner’s Bible. And he said, ‘Hi Kerry, just want to tell you that I bought a one-way ticket from Australia to New Zealand to commit suicide because I heard that Queenstown was the most beautiful place in the world, so I wanted to end my life in the most beautiful place in the world. And I bought the ticket, flew into Queenstown, and in the airport, there’s a little bookstore, and in the bookstore, it had a book called The Winner’s Bible. And I thought to myself, what’s a winner? I’m the biggest loser in the world. I don’t know what a winner is. So, well, I’m not going to go anywhere, so I’ll get the book’.
And he sat down under a tree and he read the book. He wrote to me many years later and said, ‘I have a business, I have a wife and I’m happy’. And he said somehow that book changed him.
And so I said to myself, well, that’s worth more than anything.
The Winner’s Formula by Dr Kerry Spackman published by Harper Collins, $39.99, out Tuesday.
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