In the lead-up to Friday's semi-final against Fiji in Brisbane, elite performance manager Troy Thomson told Fairfax Media the Kangaroos' meticulous preparation had extended to maximising sleeping efficiency as part of a longer-term strategy to further enhance mental capacity.

Each player was fitted with a pillow before the tournament began. Hotel rooms have also been decked out with humidifiers while special blankets are aimed at providing an optimum temperature for sleeping.

"Sleep's super important for us, especially with us changing hotels over the six weeks," Thomson said.

"All the players were fitted out individually with a pillow depending on their sleep position and body size.

"The boys have been carrying those around Australia during the World Cup tournament and some performance blankets as well, which are made of a special material and have breathing pockets.

"They're a little bit more comfortable than the big heavy doonas that you have in a hotel room. Little things like that that we can probably control a lot more in a camp situation than what we can at club level."

Thomson believes harnessing players' mental potential is the next direction in the ever-evolving world of sports science.

The Kangaroos have long strived to be at the forefront in technological developments, and this year's World Cup has given Thomson and his team the chance to try out some new innovations to improve player performance.

One of those was neurocognitive testing through the Platypus Institute which Australian players underwent before the World Cup, and from which Thomson expects to receive individual results in about a week.

Players can then take those confidential results back to club land, and choose whether to share them with coaching staff.

"Hopefully off the back of that, players will be able to start doing some training for their brain where they can find improvements whether it's attention span, spatial awareness, increasing memory," Thomson said.

"Those sort of things can all be enhanced. It makes sense to do that as a footy player, these guys are the best of the best so to try and get better at that is another training tool to take back to the clubs and hopefully improve them.

"For me in the next five to 10 years it's going to be the next big space. The training methods that we have from a strength and conditioning point of view have improved out of sight over the last 15 years, it's probably close to reaching its potential but we just haven't touched the brain and the cognitive side of things.

"Teams are starting to look into it in terms of meditation and visualisation and trying to help those sides of things. If we continue to try and improve it from a performance perspective then I think that's going to be where we see some really good performance gains for these guys over the next couple of years.

"With the technology revolution that we're in at the moment, it becomes pretty easy for the boys to sit down and do some training through their iPads or their tablets or their phones."

Measuring brain activity while players are active is another strategy Thomson hopes to one day pursue.

GPS data monitoring players' activity levels and heart rates have been a staple of high-performance rugby league programs for many years, and clubs use the information to tailor training programs and assess individual performance.

But measuring brain activity is a bold new frontier creating previously untapped potential for enhanced performance, which Thomson said would deliver benefits on and off the field.

"The next step then would be 'What's going through a Johnathan Thurston's brain when he's about to kick a goal to win a grand final, what's his brain doing?'," Thomson said.

"We've got heart-rate monitors, down the track we might have brain monitors so we can tell what's going on and work on improving that space as well.

"It's probably more individualised than the physical side of things. We'll see improvements, not only from a performance perspective but from a mental health point of view.

"The stresses that these guys now face as well outside the footy field, I think these coping mechanisms will really help them from that point of view.

"Definitely from a performance perspective I think it can help. How big and what's the gain of that, I don't know at this stage."