It's Monday, July 16th, 2018, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indrae Viscontas.

And I'm Kishar Hari. Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space for science, politics, and society collide. We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at Enquiring. Show, on Twitter, at Inquiring

show, and on Facebook. And you can also get an ad-free version of the show by supporting us at

patreon.com slash inquiring minds. And of course, you can subscribe to the show on iTunes or

wherever else you get your podcasts. So, Kishore, we're just exiting the World Cup. So some people are thinking about

how athletes are performing at such high levels. We're also in the midst of baseball season,

about to enter the All-Star break.

And so I've been thinking about what it takes to be such a great athlete. And so we usually think

about athletes such as baseball players or soccer players as having really good coordination

between their senses and their muscles, right?

Yeah, you have to have hand-eye coordination to hit a ball and you have to be super strong to

hit it far and you have to be fast to, you know, to run the bases, all of those things.

So you think if you have poor eyesight, you would by definition never be a great baseball player.

Yeah, I would think so.

Okay, apparently not true.

That's something I learned by reading the performance cortex, which is Zach Sean Brown's book.

It's how neuroscience is redefining athletic genius.

And in one of the studies that he describes, which we'll talk about in the interview,

is essentially where they took a bunch of baseball

players impoverished their vision and their batting averages did not change.

What?

...