SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - When you watch a baseball game and pay attention to every pitch, you are actually watching neuroscience in action. The brain cannot process pitches as fast as they come, as it takes only about four-tenths of a second for a baseball to travel from the mound to the plate.
ABC 10News Anchor Jared Aarons spoke with researchers at the Salk Institute about how batters react within milliseconds, and what that information teaches us about real life.
"Hitting a fastball is less about reacting to the present and more about betting on a possible future," Dr. John Reynolds, a professor at the Salk Institute, said.
"There's a saying in baseball that you can't swing and think at the same time. Well, that has reality in neuroscience. Because the parts of the brain you use to think, the frontal cortex, are too slow to react in this time frame," Reynolds said.
Reynolds mentioned that great hitters can analyze all kinds of information from a pitch to make better predictions to get a hit.
"They've seen thousands of pitches, and they know how to read the body of a pitcher," he says. "They're looking at the wind up, the step into the pitch, the way the shoulder is moving, the elbow is moving, and where the hand is at the moment the ball is released. That builds a predictive model of what's happening and where the ball is likely to go."
It's not just baseball. Dr. Reynolds says the same thing happens in everyday life, thousand of times a day.
"As you're moving through the world or things are moving around you, you're actually living a little bit in the past. You're living with the information that came in through your eyes a tenth of a second ago, two-tenths of a second ago. And to know where things are right now, your brain is constantly projecting into the future a couple of tenths of a millisecond," Reynolds said.
"It's predicting where things probably are now based on what you know. That process of prediction is part of our normal perceptual experience of the world. And in baseball, it's just really compressed into those 400 milliseconds. (Baseball) really is for me, a distillation of the normal experience of the brain. And it's really exciting because it taps into that thing we do all the time."
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