And the extra 5-6ft pitchers box gives a pitcher 10% more reaction time. Yes, you can still move back off the pitching plate, but it's still making you start to back up from 5-6ft closer than if you pitch from the back of the box (which I do most of the time).
The pitching box and a 12ft arc are safety factors that are under utilized - both by association proscriptions and by pitchers who don't use those factors when they pitch (where they are available).
When a hit is directly at your face (I know first hand), it takes 1/2 the distance before your brain realizes that the ball is getting bigger (visually) because it is headed straight for your eyes. That only leaves 1/2 the distance/time to react with your glove. It's only a little better (to see the angled hit) if the ball is headed for some other part of your body.
I love pitching - Look forward to it every week we have games. But I never look forward to the intentional or uncontrolled hits that threaten me.
%%%
======================================
Added: Data from JBO's links. For future reference.
======================================
How Can Anyone Hit a 90 mph Fastball? Science Explains!
Lauren Sommer - May 8, 2013
Ever wonder how a major league baseball player hits a 90-mph fastball? Ask some researchers at UC Berkeley, who have identified an area of the brain that makes it possible. Look at the numbers alone and hitting a home run seems next to impossible. A fastball takes .4 seconds to reach home plate...
www.kqed.org
Ever wonder how a major league baseball player hits a 90-mph fastball? Ask some researchers at UC Berkeley, who have identified an area of the brain that makes it possible.
Look at the numbers alone and hitting a home run seems next to impossible. A fastball takes .4 seconds to reach home plate after it leaves a pitcher's hand, but a hitter needs a full .25 seconds to see the ball and react.
"Light hits our eye and the information needs to get to our brain," said researcher Gerrit Maus of UC Berkeley. "That takes a tenth of a second. After that we make a decision to move, and that signal needs to get to our muscles."
Maus said it's an example of a fundamental problem: "Everything our brain receives is actually already out of date by the time the information gets to the brain."
Luckily, the brain compensates for that lag time. Based on the movement of the object and the background behind it, the brain makes a projection of where the object will be. In a scientific paper released today, Maus and colleagues identified an area of visual cortex where that happens.
"If we didn't have the prediction mechanism going on, then you would see the ball possibly 3 or 4 yards behind where it actually is," Maus said.
"It's not only important for baseball or tennis, but also in everyday life. For example, when we're driving, we would always think we're not as far down the road as we actually are."
While we might think we're seeing the world as it really is, Maus said what we're actually seeing is just a calculation.
"It's really the fundamental question of what we perceive," he said. "We don't see what's coming in through the eye, but we see a story that the brain makes up for us to be able to interact with the world. It's a very sophisticated system, but it doesn't always show us everything as it is."
The ultimate goal of the work is to broaden our understanding of how the visual system functions.
"For one thing, we're trying to build artificial systems that see like a human does," Maus said. "Ever since engineers have tried this, they've understood it's a really hard problem. The other application would be basic medicine – we need to know how something works before we fix it."
======================================
Hit a 95 mph baseball? Scientists pinpoint how we see it coming
By Yasmin Anwar - May 8, 2013
How does San Francisco Giants slugger Pablo Sandoval swat a 95 mph fastball, or tennis icon Venus Williams see the oncoming ball, let alone return her sister Serena’s 120 mph serves? For the first time, vision scientists at the University of ...
news.berkeley.edu
How does San Francisco Giants slugger Pablo Sandoval swat a 95 mph fastball, or tennis icon Venus Williams see the oncoming ball, let alone return her sister Serena's 120 mph serves? For the first time, vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have pinpointed how the brain tracks fast-moving objects.
The discovery advances our understanding of how humans predict the trajectory of moving objects when it can take one-tenth of a second for the brain to process what the eye sees.
That 100-millisecond holdup means that in real time, a tennis ball moving at 120 mph would have already advanced 15 feet before the brain registers the ball's location. If our brains couldn't make up for this visual processing delay, we'd be constantly hit by balls, cars and more.
Thankfully, the brain "pushes" forward moving objects so we perceive them as further along in their trajectory than the eye can see, researchers said.
"For the first time, we can see this sophisticated prediction mechanism at work in the human brain," said Gerrit Maus, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published today (May 8) in the journal, Neuron.
A clearer understanding of how the brain processes visual input – in this case life in motion – can eventually help in diagnosing and treating myriad disorders, including those that impair motion perception. People who cannot perceive motion cannot predict locations of objects and therefore cannot perform tasks as simple as pouring a cup of coffee or crossing a road, researchers said.
This study is also likely to have a major impact on other studies of the brain. Its findings come just as the Obama Administration initiates its push to create a Brain Activity Map Initiative, which will further pave the way for scientists to create a roadmap of human brain circuits, as was done for the Human Genome Project.
Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Gerrit and fellow UC Berkeley researchers Jason Fischer and David Whitney located the part of the visual cortex that makes calculations to compensate for our sluggish visual processing abilities. They saw this prediction mechanism in action, and their findings suggest that the middle temporal region of the visual cortex known as V5 is computing where moving objects are most likely to end up.
For the experiment, six volunteers had their brains scanned, via fMRI, as they viewed the "flash-drag effect," a visual illusion in which we see brief flashes shifting in the direction of the motion, as can be seen in the videos above.
"The brain interprets the flashes as part of the moving background, and therefore engages its prediction mechanism to compensate for processing delays," Maus said.
If the brain didn't compensate for our visual processing delay, we would get hit by balls and other moving objects.
The researchers found that the illusion – flashes perceived in their predicted locations against a moving background and flashes actually shown in their predicted location against a still background – created the same neural activity patterns in the V5 region of the brain. This established that V5 is where this prediction mechanism takes place, they said.
In a study published earlier this year, Maus and his fellow researchers pinpointed the V5 region of the brain as the most likely location of this motion prediction process by successfully using transcranial magnetic stimulation, a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, to interfere with neural activity in the V5 region of the brain, and disrupt this visual position-shifting mechanism.
"Now not only can we see the outcome of prediction in area V5," Maus said. "But we can also show that it is causally involved in enabling us to see objects accurately in predicted positions."
On a more evolutionary level, the latest findings reinforce that it is actually advantageous not to see everything exactly as it is. In fact, it's necessary to our survival:
"The image that hits the eye and then is processed by the brain is not in sync with the real world, but the brain is clever enough to compensate for that," Maus said. "What we perceive doesn't necessarily have that much to do with the real world, but it is what we need to know to interact with the real world."
======================================
%%%