Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Hitting a Baseball


If this does not open in the blogg. You should get the option to open this video on youtube.


Hitting a Baseball

I want to focus on the eye sight of hitting a baseball. Hitting a baseball is known as the hardest thing to do in sports. As the video stated, a player only has less then a quarter of a second to see the pitch, judge what to do and swing the bat. The first 100 milliseconds are used to see the pitch being thrown and send an image to the brain. The next 75 milliseconds are used by the brain to judge the speed and the location of the pitch, and 50 milliseconds is used to decide where exactly to swing the bat. The last 165 milliseconds is used for the exact timing of the swing of the bat. Even if the timing is a little bit off, the ball could go foul or not of been hit at all. The amazing thing about all of this to me is that timing aspect. The visual pigments react to ball being pitched and trigger electrical signals flow through the neurons that make up the retina.
Those signals then get sent to the back of the eye in the optic nerve. All this happens to tell the brain that the pitch is coming. Then the brain reacts to the pitch selection and the swing. This all happens in less then a quarter of a second.

John Merulla

No comments:

Post a Comment