Six Million Dollar Sight?
Or, superior vision and the promise of better baseball
Humanity has always looked to get smarter, faster, stronger. The method of loci memory enhancement technique dates back at least to Cicero, Steve Austin was rebuilt in 1973 (inflation-adjusted cost: $31.6 million), brain training games are making millions, and soon, OmniCorp’s Google Glass app will threat-assess and eliminate everyone ahead of us in line at Whole Foods while simultaneously finding the perfect French toast recipe.
Historically, though, even “successful” interventions tend more towards sizzle than steak: training regimens can be burdensome, improvements only fleeting, or the benefits isolated and specific. The method of loci, for example, isn’t a one-stop memory improver: only a minute to learn, but a lifetime to master (approximately). A rapidly acquired, long-lasting, and generalizable improvement in abilities is almost a modern day philosopher’s stone. And while a recent vision-training paradigm isn’t quite the brain equivalent of turning lead into gold, it does show potential for lasting improvements in vision and…baseball?
About 350 years ago, alchemists first isolated elemental phosphorus, finding trace amounts in large vats of rotting urine. Lucky for us, this vision training game, called UltimEyes (buy it here—leave a note if it works), doesn’t involve urine or mystic alchemical wisdom. It’s based on the striped and blurred stimuli (called Gabor patches or sine-wave gratings) common in vision research. In general, the game requires the players to identify the orientation of the stripes. The size of the stripes and their contrast changes over time, adapting to the players’ performance, ensuring that the game remains a challenge as the players get better.
The game uses Gabor patches because they seem to be fundamental to vision. At the earliest stages of processing in the brain, visual information is filtered and broken down into fundamental units not unlike those patches. Different neurons, then, respond to particular colors, orientations, motion speed/direction, or spatial frequencies (fine vs. gross detail). That’s an important distinction: the game is not aimed at improving the abilities or resolution of your eyes, but instead aims to improve the efficiency with which the visual system processes that filtered information.
The training regimen was tested on a group of college baseball players, who did 30 training sessions (twelve total hours) over two months. The primary finding was their visual acuity—what’s measured when you read off a wall chart at the DMV—increased by nearly 20% from before training (control groups that didn’t train at all, in contrast, showed no improvement). Several players improved from 20/20 vision to 20/7.5 vision, which is literally—bad pun incoming—off the charts. Any further improvement and they might have been able to see into the future; in any case I think they now qualify as X-men.
The more intriguing part of the study is that the improvements weren’t limited to reading letters off a chart. A full two months after their training ended, the baseball season started…and the training made for better hitters. Strikeout rates declined and their batting performance improved, presumably because the greater visual clarity allowed them to see the ball better. The authors even estimate the batting improvement of visual training might have produced as many as four additional wins for the team over the course of a full season.
These findings are impressive: it’s a relatively brief training that lasts for months and transfers from an iPad game to high-level baseball performance. But the history of this type of vision training might be reason to dampen our enthusiasm for a future of super-vision and record-breaking baseball. The idea of using gratings and Gabor patches for vision-training goes back nearly 40 years (or more; see Campbell et al., 1978). And like this one, that 1978 study showed huge benefits from only little training…except that follow-ups failed to replicate the finding. More recent studies continue to show mixed results—suggesting that while it certainly seems possible to train our vision, we haven’t yet isolated the critical factors.
Two relevant aspects of this study set it apart from past work. First, the training regimen incorporates motivation and game-like qualities: feedback, goals, adaptive performance, high scores. More and more, researchers are discovering that video games and motivation can enhance learning (they also change behavior; many standard beliefs about decision-making turn out to change when those decisions are presented in a game-like context). But this isn’t the first training to use the game approach, so it’s not clear what particular features make this unique. Secondly, they trained people with normal vision, whereas past studies have focused on treating individuals with low vision or other visual deficits. Perhaps this training only benefits people who have good vision to begin with.
But even if training can improve our visual acuity, often we are so concerned with whether training regimens work that we forget to ask a different question: what’s the cost? Our abilities (cognitive and physical) often don’t reflect an absolute peak of performance, but rather a balance between costs and benefits. In baseball, batters might sacrifice power for making contact (or baseball fans might remember Rob Deer and Dave Kingman, who took the opposite approach to dizzying heights). We type slower to reduce errors, or read slower to improve comprehension .
That kind of tradeoff can occur unconsciously, too. The idea that our brain slows down as we age is dogmatic, but a recent paper suggests that slowing may reflect the brain simply having more accumulated knowledge to sift through. And one of the authors of this study has previously reported that when participants are trained to find a visual target in a random display, they get better at detecting the target…but also start to “see” targets that aren’t there—thus finding more targets at the cost of more errors.
Our everyday visual acuity may not be a physical limit of our eyes, but a tradeoff in how the brain processes visual information. The training here may well work (though I’m going to wait for a replication)—but it may also have a cost we haven’t yet recognized. Getting all the way down to 20/7.5 probably has some consequences, so I’m guessing that vision training isn’t going to be baseball’s next big performance enhancing drug—but I’d sure like to see some team try it.
