[Applause]
[Music]
just over a week from today the first
pitch of a brand-new major league
baseball season will fly and the batter
will be the first of thousands of
batters to to try the almost impossible
task of hitting a round ball traveling
at speeds up to 100 miles per hour and
darting about as it does so with around
bat what Ted Williams famously called
the most difficult thing to do in sport
and even though we call success in this
area 3 out of 10 hits it’s remarkable
that people can do it at all it’s well
beyond the bounds of human perceptual
cognitive decision-making and even
simple human reaction time so that’s
what we want to look at ah you may not
be interested in baseball it’s hard to
believe but you know may not be however
the thing is that this this makes a very
measurable and kind of extreme but also
extremely measurable sandbox for
studying high speed high risk
decision-making and these lessons
learned can apply in very many other
domains such as a neurologist
neurosurgeon spotting a sudden bleeding
event during an open skull craniotomy or
a security officer spotting a suspicious
pair of loafers and those look ok or an
armored vehicle operator spotting an
improvised explosive device on the side
of the road that looked like a bag of
garbage so these are these are important
lessons to be to be learned and some
important domains of performance that we
all rely on we want to step back and
look at something really important the
shoot don’t shoot decision making
decision that seems to be in the news
far more often than any of us want it to
be a police officer needs to make a
decision in the blink of an eye where if
he’s too late
or she
he’s dead if he’s too early he may shoot
an innocent so how do we find out what
is what’s the way that the people who
who have the expertise in here what is
what’s their secret for how they can
make these kind of decisions under that
kind of time pressure and even more
importantly how can we accelerate the
development of that kind of expertise we
all have a big stake in that so let’s
step back and look at something really
important
guitar hero right got any any gamers any
people recognized Guitar Hero sure
you’ve got the little plastic Gibson C
30 and you score points by coming in
with your power cord right in their
right timing with the with the bass &
Drums the downbeat but now the poll
question can playing guitar hero help
you learn to play guitar so you all got
your your audience response system your
clickers on the way in and we’re using
we’re using the analog response system
so show of hands for anybody who thinks
yes playing guitar hero can help you
learn to play guitar for know keep them
down a couple here couple couple there
looks like maybe about 15 percent yes
and 90% of those are smart students who
recognize a trick question when they see
those because nobody really thinks that
playing this little plastic guitar is
going to help you learn to play guitar
but in fact a recent study shows that
when we compared musicians actual
professional musicians with gamers that
is people who’d been playing a schedule
of Guitar Hero the actual musicians in
blue did score better on tuning
instruments something you do than the
gamers in red but if we look at those
parts of the perception of music score
that actually our perceptions melody
recognizing different kinds of melody
tempo and rhythm the gamers actually
scored higher than the professional
musicians so kind of depending on how we
find that we want to accept and let this
carry forward as as we go to talking
about our true area of pitch recognition
today in the in the area of baseball
keep that in mind so this is a breakdown
it looks complicated it is this is the
sequence that has to happen in less than
half a second 400 milliseconds all the
way through there from the ball out of
the pitchers hand to that that batter
swinging and hopefully making contact
with the ball and of those 400
milliseconds my entire research prod
emphasis on this for 15 years has been
on only the first third of it 175
milliseconds and that folks is literally
the blink of an eye not even if not like
like a slow lingering one I mean boom
fast blink just like that that’s the
decision framework that we’re talking
about now how can people be gaining
anything of use from that type of
framework well one of the things another
recent study found is that is that
hitters experienced ones can actually
make a read from before that ball comes
out it actually picking up the exertion
on the batter’s face that’s more likely
to be a fastball coming out with that
kind of exertion you know we’ve got the
the arm angle you know the arm slot
that’s that’s a fastball look now at
that same pitcher we’re throwing a
curveball we might see a skinny wrist no
you can’t see the fingers on the ball
but you can pick that up even from 60
feet away with this hand coming through
at 90 miles an hour you could pick up
the skinny wrist of a pitcher coming
over the over the breaking ball so you
get little hints and clues as that ball
coming out I like this one where is this
guy looking yeah he’s throwing a ball at
you at 90 miles an hour you’d hope that
he’s at least looking at you or the
catcher he’s looking he’s looking at a
window a one-foot square window in space
10 feet out in front of him that he
wants to throw his fastball through and
then also which is going to come out
about waist high and then throw his
split finger fastball through so that it
comes out looking the same and ends up
down below your knees make you look like
a sucker
that’s it you’re standing in there
waiting ready to hit and you’ve picked
up those cues in that time frame in
order to start your swing and actually
be able to hit a ball in the time frames
that were we’re talking about so how can
you how can you train that up we either
say it’s just talent and that’s what
we’ve said for years but if we don’t if
we don’t completely accept that it’s
just a god-given talent how do we we
train that up well you know it is a it
is a perceptual skill so we can treat it
as a visual skill and you know which way
is the C or the you pointed this is a
classic aerobics type of exercise we can
add eye tracking to the eye exercises
we’ve got little apps now that that you
can get on the computer that show a
spinning ball that’s just a fastball
spin it’ll it’ll show you the famous dot
in the slider it’ll recognize spin and
you can see balls chasing each other
around this would be on the on the Nike
sensory station that they had out a
couple of years ago now it looks like
something that you would hold in your
hand but this is actually life-size you
stand in front of that screen touching
the screen while you follow those balls
around like that
Nike also had strobe goggles that they
came out with and you know they go back
and forth like that if you do that in
front of your eyes while you’re trying
to do anything while you’re trying to
drive you know when you stop doing that
you all of a sudden like see like it’s
easier to see easier to drive it makes
some sense the scientists use these
occlusion goggles in which case you’re
standing up there ready to hit a ninety
mile per hour fastball and right if the
ball comes out of the hand boom they
just shut your eyes off completely now
that that’s got to be a comfortable
space there was a fellow researcher back
in 1984 who actually patented a system
for triggering off of the pitcher as a
helmet visor that would BAM shut off
that space and all of that seems kind of
exotic and it even gets more exotic now
now we’ve got researchers who are
measuring putting an EEG cap on
ballplayers showing them a simulation
there you see it of a ball and being
able to measure
exact point in time that exact point in
time which you can see in the in the
colors there of when they recognize a
pitch the top one is a decision to go to
swing the bottom one is a decision to no
not swing understanding that not
swinging is not a decision not to mean
if the decision not to to swing now we
can imagine something like that being
available to managers in the dugout and
in fact last year for the first time
they allowed iPad pros before that was
no computers no electronics iPad pros in
the dugouts and it kind of looks like
this guy is looking at EEG maps but he’s
not those are heat maps of batter’s hot
zones you know don’t pitch this guy high
in a way pitch this guy low and in that
that sort of thing but they kind of look
the same of course we’ve got video games
that are getting so much realism that
they become like simulations really
military level type simulations can’t we
just train people give them the whole
experience of hitting within that and of
course we’ve got the sky high
expectations of virtual reality so in
the area of pitch recognition Jason
Giambi a player who was known to have
this skills has has put out there as a
product and you just slide it this is
one of the cellphone into the front VR
if we’ve got people who are following VR
and it can it can give you a little
train up on that and then we also have
the VR cave approach now some folks
we’ve got the the the center over here
between the Union and this building it
used to be the poolroom but you’d have
to be a real Purdue old-timer to
remember that at the room full of pool
tables before they put the envision
Center down there and and they build
within their a VR cave 3d big immersive
thing expensive and this actually is
being brought into the realm now at
least professional baseball here’s what
it looks like okay it’s simulating
giving you that experience of that pitch
that 90 mile an hour pitch coming right
into you and you try and swing a bat and
this however is the approach that I use
this was developed in the early 80s in
primarily in Australia studying return
of serve another ballistic skill in
tennis and we’re cutting off video
showing video listen now see he just got
but good all right so you actually see
the moment of recognition there I saw a
kind of described earlier the
split-finger fastball little bit right
down first time he saw it he was fooled
and then he adjusted and he started
seeing it right away I can’t see it what
he is seeing I as the researcher sitting
there you can see my hand on the right I
couldn’t see what he was seeing he’s
seeing this these videos are being cut
off right as it’s coming out of there
and he can tell you 90% of the time with
that pitches I don’t exactly know how he
does it and you know what if you ask him
he doesn’t either so what you know some
in this way the the approach that I
would take care is still much more
behavioral there’s a black bloc
something magic happens in the black box
I don’t need to know what it is what I
need to know is what are the conditions
of learning that make it happen so we
see a pitch you guess the type of pitch
in this case the guest fastball strike
well it was wrong it was a changeup ball
okay let’s get a let’s get a replay so
we put that in mind okay you see that
whoop that’s a nice little change at
ball so repetition feedback and
progressive difficulty which you might
recognize as drill and practice
methodology the the bottom feeder of
instructional technologies this is how
your kid learns math facts how you learn
vocabulary but this is stimulus-response
training and we don’t want people
thinking in the batter’s box we don’t
want paralysis by analysis we want
stimulus response we want to take the
conscious part of your brain out of that
so that you’ve got a situation where you
can practice that either in a larger
scale this is a college player here
practicing with with a big screen or
some younger players they’re actually
pre high school working working just on
a computer so we’ll watching video
pitches help you learn to hit a baseball
well it helped you learn how to play
guitar didn’t it so you know there are
some important implications for this if
you can accept the premise of separating
perception and action in these highly
integrated perception action skills
separating those so that you can train
them up individually it really opens up
the the possibilities for training in
areas
again even more important than baseball
if there’s such a thing so think about
that
put this one premise in mind this is one
takeaway that I want you to leave with
more realistic does not necessarily
equal more learning we’re entering into
a realm now with virtual reality where
we can put those experiences in but what
this is about when we look at the
expertise in these performance domains
that we’ve described it comes down to
one thing as herb Simon’s that expertise
is nothing more and nothing less than
pattern recognition pattern recognition
that’s what we’re building up towards so
that’s my that’s my pitch for the day
I’ll leave tomorrow for my spring
training research trip that’s what I
call it for my with my wife you know so
I research okay we tough duty but
somebody’s got to do it and I hope that
you somewhere between now and late
November when they get to the World
Series somewhere even if you’re not even
the remotest of a baseball fan you sit
down and take a few moments on
television or maybe if you see a ball
game being played at a park to to
appreciate this and the many types of
superhuman perceptual cognitive
performances that that we do routinely
thank you very much
[Applause]
you [Music]