A new study at the University of
California, Berkeley, has shown how humans can predict the path of a 100 mph
fastball. Vision scientists studied how the brain processed visual movements,
and they figured out which part of the brain was in control of this. When our
eyes see an object, it takes one-tenth of a second for us to even register the
information in our brain. Gerrit Maus, psychologist at UC Berkeley, said,
"the brain does not think the object is in the position where the eye
tells us it (that it) is. The object is shifted forward in the direction that
it's moving, so we're actually predicting where things are going to be. The brain sees things as they are ahead in the trajectory than what the eye
sees at that at that time. One of the problems we have is that your brains work
relatively slow compared to electronics or computers. The information that we
see is already old by the time it reaches our brain. The scientist conducted an
experiment on 6 different people’s brain and found a commonalty that the
activity occurred in the V5 region of the brain (located at the back of the
head and to the side). Therefore, the V5 tracks moving objects, advancing them
in their trajectories so that a baseball player hoping to hit a fastball is not
processing old information in their brain.
NOS Themes
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Science is collaborative
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Role of skepticism
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Importance of repeatability
- Science is based on evidence
http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/08/18129836-how-our-brains-can-track-a-100-mph-fastball?lite
As Maus from UC Berkeley says "The background is moving at the same time, so we perceive the flash being dragged along by the motion. The brain interprets the flash as part of the moving background, and therefore engages the prediction mechanism to shift the position of the flash." it's amazing how much our brain does in such a short amount of time. We rely on it so much without realizing it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.livescience.com/29417-how-brain-tracks-moving-objects.html
It's amazing how our brain can trick our eye and our eye can trick our brain. For example, when you are riding in the car and it looks like a big puddle up ahead but you get closer and it is gone. This is caused by the heat and reflections. I never really thought about how once you see something, the information that gets to your brain is old, and that a computer could process the information much faster than a human brain can.
ReplyDeleteCool to read about. very interesting that our brain predicts all motion we see subconsciously in the effort to compensate for the time lost when delivering the visual to our brain to process.
ReplyDeletewow. it is crazy that your brain predicts the flight path.
ReplyDeletei found another article about the brain predicting the future:http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/offbeat/human-brain-predicts-the-future-29252477.html