Quote:When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball players, then, could reap huge benefits from being able to probe a baseball farther from their eyes. And that inspired Aaron Seitz, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Riverside, who has created a new, publicly available app that conditions users to see farther on or off the baseball diamond.

Read more: This App Trains You to See Farther - Popular Mechanics
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http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/...r-16506910


The paper and abstract:

Quote:Our visual abilities profoundly impact performance on an enormous range of tasks. Numerous studies examine mechanisms that can improve vision [1]. One limitation of published studies is that learning effects often fail to transfer beyond the trained task or to real world conditions. Here we report the results of a novel integrative perceptual learning program that combines multiple perceptual learning approaches: training with a diverse set of stimuli [2], optimized stimulus presentation [3], multisensory facilitation [4], and consistently reinforcing training stimuli [5], with the goal to generalize benefits to real world tasks. We applied this training program to the University of California Riverside (UCR) Baseball Team and assessed benefits using standard eye-charts and batting statistics. Trained players showed improved vision after training, had decreased strike-outs, and created more runs; and even accounting for maturational gains, these additional runs may have led to an additional four to five team wins. These results demonstrate real world transferable benefits of a vision-training program based on perceptual learning principles.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/full...%2900005-0


Wayne's long talked about how the best hitters are those who see the ball the best, and have the fastest/strongest wrists.

damn - I want one of these. Let's get one for every baseball/basketball/fb player too (well, maybe not the linemen).

Here's something else to experiment with. He's marketing this stuff largely in the medical field right now, but looking at these polarized lenses, there could definitely be some use to the way colors are filtered for sharper recognition.

http://changizi.wordpress.com/2013/03/22...ns-blanks/

NOTE: I've never used any of his stuff, but he is the husband of a good friend of mine from high school, hence my awareness. Not an endorsement in any way.