Everybody wishes they had super powers. The big problem with that shared ambition, however, is that super powers do not exist. Not unless you count super human vision. That does exist, and a new app promises to help you attain it.
The app is called UltimEyes, and it was designed by neuroscientists who were thinking of ways to help baseball players see better. So they recruited 19 players from a university baseball team as test subjects and had everyone use the app for 30 25-minute intervals. The app basically asks the subjects to identify various blurry grey blobs.
Amazingly, the players were indeed able to see farther by an average of 31 per cent. Nine of them even improved their vision to the unheard of level of 20/7.5. That means they can see clearly at 20 feet (6m) what normal people would see clearly at 7.5 feet (2.3m).
As amazing as they are, the improvements don’t exactly amount to super powers, because the app really just takes advantage of the brain’s extraordinary abilities. Like a muscle, you see, the brain can be trained to work better. This quality is known as neuroplasticity, and it’s the reason the baseball players improved their vision; their brains simply got better at processing visual information.
And you can too! The app is available for download. It costs $US6, but that’s a paltry price to pay for a superpower. Or, at least, it’s cheap for a better brain. [Cell via Popular Mechanics]