- Seeing the future is not limited to clairvoyants
and fortune-tellers - we can all do it, according to scientists at Harvard
University.
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- Researchers have been looking at the
human ability to respond to an object that is travelling literally too
fast for the eye to have time to transmit its image to the brain.
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- Tennis players and cricketers, for example,
routinely react to balls travelling at up to 100mph, when technically their
brains should not be able to register them before they are gone.
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- Now, Professor Markus Meister and his
colleagues at the Harvard University Department of Molecular and Cellular
Biology have discovered that our eyes contain cells called ganglions that
can calculate the future position of a moving object.
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- In-built advantage
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- The ganglions then fire off an alert
message to the brain thousandths of a second before the object actually
arrives in that place.
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- The finding revolutionises many previous
models of the eye, which assumed that it acted simply as a camera - capturing
the image presented directly in front of it.
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- It also suggests that top athletes may
have the ability to see fractionally further into the future than the average
individual, giving them an in-built advantage.
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- The discovery was made using an instrument
developed by the Meister Lab that uses microelectrodes to record the action
of about 100 ganglion cells in the retina of the human eye.
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- The project aims to decipher the entire
"neuronal circuit" of the retina and the optic nerve, which contains
about one million fibres.
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