Hi,

The baseball pitch thing is interesting and seems to show that the human mind has a small ability to actually see into the future. Since the time frame is very small, this parallels to another study i saw some years back where people were shown still clips of scenes one after the other and were told to push a button that corresponded to that scene so each scene had one button. As the scenes popped up on screen, the people would push the button for that scene as fast as they could. After a while, the people developed the ability to push the right button BEFORE the corresponding scene came up on the screen. It's only a tiny faction of a second though and if they changed the rate of popups they could no longer predict the right scene so the conclusion was that the brain has the ability to predict the future but only a tiny fraction of s second into the future with an above average success rate.
Someone may be able to find this on the web i didnt look yet.
BTW the random generator used for the choice of popup was a hardware based RNG. There's no way the humans could have 'learned' the patterns of that kind of process. Even with an ordinary software based modern 32 bit RNG it would be impossible really.

 

That brings me to realize there is a difference in the speed of light vs the speed of seeing. That difference is the time it takes to see something once photons have struck the retina. Depending upon the level of "seeing" this could be microseconds for the photochemical reaction and initiation of nerve signals to perhaps 50 to 100 ms for the arriving light to come to the obsberver's attention.

 

Depending upon the level of "seeing" this could be microseconds for the photochemical reaction and initiation of nerve signals to perhaps 50 to 100 ms for the arriving light to come to the obsberver's attention.

And then one must react to it.

 

That brings me to realize there is a difference in the speed of light vs the speed of seeing. That difference is the time it takes to see something once photons have struck the retina. Depending upon the level of "seeing" this could be microseconds for the photochemical reaction and initiation of nerve signals to perhaps 50 to 100 ms for the arriving light to come to the obsberver's attention.

There is so much in your short message. Visual processing is just so complicated.

How long it takes to see something? Generally speaking, we mean how long for the retinal information to be passed down through a number of structures, not the least of which is the occipital cortex and then made available to other parts of the brain so that you can react or do something in the way of a response (I am, of course, being incredibly simplistic).

A few years ago, I remember a new "record" being set and I was actually able to find the report. She demonstrated 13 ms recognition time and previously it was thought to be much longer.

Then consider reports from people who have been blind for most of their lives and then gain sight. It can be incredibly difficult to adjust and I remember reading a description where the now sighted person would prefer to sit in nearly total darkness. It was, reportedly, a difficult chore to interpret what he saw. It is as though that what we take for granted (recognizing things), he had to expend a lot of time and effort to accomplish - to make sense of the perception. [I think that this was "Virgil" but I can't be sure - you can search for the general issue like here].

Then there is the story I remember about Susan Polgar the chess player. As I recall, she is sitting on a park bench and a truck drives by. On the side of the truck is a billboard with a chessboard containing some number of chess pieces. The truck drives by, so she has only a short time to view the billboard. In one case the pieces (can't remember how many) are positioned randomly among the 64 board squares. She can't remember squat about what she saw. In the other case, the same number of pieces are positioned in a "chess-correct" pattern. Yep, she can reconstruct the billboard with no difficulty. [This is told in a video, "My Brilliant Brain", forgive me if I botched some details as I watched it quite a while ago]

Cool stuff, sensation and perception and cognition.