Baseball will be on the minds of fans this Monday, when major league ballparks across the U.S. open for the start of the 2014 season.
That will be true for Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Professor Timothy Verstynen, but in a more scientific way. He’ll be thinking of all the information a batter must process before swinging for the fences.
That hitter must estimate where the ball will be, decide whether or not to swing, and coordinate a complex sequence of movements to get the bat at the right place at the right time, all within a single fluid movement.
This is just one example of the kind of brain activity being studied by Verstynen.