Our brain is so much slower than the speed of a baseball pitch and a tennis serve but it has its own way of getting around.
A new study by the scientists of the University of California, Berkeley reveals how athletes are able to counter incoming balls with speed that goes beyond 90 mph.
According to Gerrit W. Maus, from UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and lead author of the study, the brain can recognize speeding objects as far as their trajectory and faster than the eyes which gives a person time to react. This is a complicated prediction technique of the body which is relevant not just for sports but in our everyday lives such as when crossing a street where we can avoid speeding cars.
"As soon as the brain knows something is moving, it pushes the position of the object moving forward, so there's a more accurate measure of where this object actually is," said Maus.
Yoggi Berra, a former American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager, once said "How can you think and hit at the same time? You can't, because there's no time for both”.
Maus said that no one has to think about it because it is an automatic brain response.
A baseball pitch travels around 56 feet in only 0.4 seconds with a speed of 90 mph while tennis serve is even faster at 163 mph.
With less than a second, the body undergoes several reactions. The eyes look for the ball, transmits the image swiftly to the brain, then sends messages to the spinal cord that makes the arms and legs act in response. Area V5, a region in the rear of the brain, is responsible for calculating the movement and position of the ball.
In an experiment, six participants had undergone functional MRI to see how the brain reacts with brief flashes of movement. This is called the "flash-drag effect".
A better understanding of how the brain reacts to moving objects may help in detecting and treating myriad disorders including those that have problem perceiving motion.
This research was posted in an academic journal Neuron last Wednesday.
