Where would we be these days without our smartphones? There’s an app for virtually anything—games, TV shows, photography, music, shopping, fitness; the list goes on and on. And now, it turns out there are apps that can help you improve your vision, and scientific studies have proven that they work.
Earlier this year, a team of neuroscientists based at the University of California, Riverside, published a study in the journal Current Biology in which they tested out their new app called UltimEyes. Rather than improving the eye itself, the app works by exploiting a fundamental characteristic of the brain—neuroplasticity. Connections between brain cells are malleable and can be strengthened, so by exercising the area of the brain that is responsible for processing visual information (the visual cortex), it is possible to improve visual performance. This plasticity has been demonstrated in various prior studies on adults, which usually involve repetitive practice on visual tasks.
The visual stimuli used by UltimEyes and various other eye-training apps are patterns called Gabor patches, which are blurred lines presented on a grey background. Gabor patches are used because they have features that match and therefore activate the receptive field properties of brain cells located in the visual cortex. By presenting the eyes with these patterns and gradually making them more difficult to identify, your brain gets better at processing them, which leads to an improvement in vision.
As reported in the study, the team tested out their training platform on 19 baseball players and found that it improved the distance at which they could see clearly by an average of 31%. Many of them even achieved greater than 20/20 vision after using the app 30 times. Furthermore, the participants also had decreased strike-outs, suggesting it could actually help in playing baseball.
When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball players, then, could reap huge benefits from being able to probe a baseball farther from their eyes. And that inspired Aaron Seitz, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Riverside, who has created a new, publicly available app that conditions users to see farther on or off the baseball diamond.
In a study published this week in the journal Current Biology, Seitz worked with 19 players on the University of California, Riverside, baseball team, and showed that his app UltimEyes lengthened the distance at which the players could see clearly by an average of 31 percent. After using the app for 30 25-minute intervals, players saw an improvement that pushed many of them beyond normal 20/20 vision, including seven who attained freakishly good 20/7.5 vision—meaning that at a distance of 20 feet, they were clearly seeing what someone with normal vision could see at no farther than 7.5 feet away.
“We were using standard, on-the-wall eye charts,” Seitz says. “Normally, you stand 20 feet away, but our charts only measured down to 20/10 [vision]. So we moved some of these players 40 feet away from the eye chart and they were still reading the low lines. I was shocked.” Seitz has also calculated that, by measuring the improvement in batting of his test subjects against other players, his app made the team score enough extra runs to win at least four additional games throughout the season.
Although Seitz’s app seems quite implausible, its effects are indeed real, says Peggy Series, a neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study or the development of UltimEyes. “These results are, in fact, very similar to what’s already been proven in the lab,” Series says. “It’s very exciting. The fact that the app is improving the players’ visual acuity is not as surprising to me as that the improvement might actually help in playing baseball.”
The Brain—Not the Eyes
Despite its name, UltimEyes has little to do with improving the physical eye or eye muscles. Rather, the app works by exploiting recent insights into when and how the adult brain can be fundamentally rewired—a concept known as neuroplasticity.
“Within the last decade or so we’ve started to learn that brain fitness is a bit akin to physical fitness,” Seitz says. “If we exercise our brain in the proper ways, pretty much everything that the brain does should be able to be improved.”
UltimEyes exercises the visual cortex, the part of our brain that controls vision. Brain researchers have discovered that the visual cortex breaks down the incoming information from our eyes into fuzzy patterns called Gabor stimuli. The theory behind UltimEyes is that by directly confronting the eyes with Gabor stimuli, you can train your brain to process them more efficiently—which, over time, improves your brain’s ability to create clear vision at farther distances.
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