All Episodes
Episodes
#95 - You Can’t Test a Batter’s Eyes Without a Bat
A new 2026 study in the journal Vision (Clutter & Fogt) put 15 baseball and softball batters through the same pitch, tracked two different ways: once with a real partial swing, once with no swing at all, just...
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#94 - The Gap No One Is Talking About: Coaches Are Training Vision - But Don’t Know Why
Seventy-three percent of coaches are now incorporating visual training into their programs — a number that should feel like a victory after thirty years of Dr. Laby making the case that vision is trainable and perform...
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#93 - The Referee's Pupil, the Game's Truth
The cleaner a sports vision experiment gets, the less it looks like the sport — a tension Dr. Laby has wrestled with for thirty years.
A lab can control lighting down to the lux and measure fixations to the millisecon...
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#92 - One Fixation Count, Two Opposite Answers
Two meta analyses asked the same question about visual search behavior and got opposite results...
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#91 - You Turn Before You See
An athlete on defense, no one in front of them, and then, without hearing or consciously seeing anything, they turn.
Coaches call it sports sense.
Teammates say eyes in the back of the head.
What's actually happening ...
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#90 - Messi Didn't "See the Future." Here's What Actually Happened.
The World Cup coverage couldn't stop talking about Almada and Messi "seeing the game before it happens."
Broadcasters reached for neuroscience and a fair amount of magic to explain it.
What they were actually describi...
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#89 - The Quiet Eye Wins World Cups
The United States faces Belgium in the Round of 16 of the 2026 FIFA World Cup — a rematch twelve years in the making.
Dr. Laby uses the match as a lens to explore the single visual behavior that most consistently sepa...
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#88 - The Hidden Edge the Eye Chart Never Found
Walk into any Major League spring training facility and you'll find a technician holding up a Snellen eye chart — the same one from 1862 — and clearing players for the season based on static acuity.
The problem: that ...
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#87 - Why Messi Sees the Goal Before Everyone Else
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is just days old and it has already delivered more visual drama than most tournaments produce in their entirety.
Messi broke the all-time World Cup scoring record.
Harry Kane converted a retake...
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#86 - A Faster Eye Is Not a Smarter One
A new systematic review and metaanalysis in Frontiers of Psychology pooled nine randomized controlled trials and 323 athletes to answer a deceptively simple question: what does stroboscopic visual training actually tr...
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#85 - The Eyes That Saved the Play
Three extraordinary defensive plays in the first two days of June 2026 — Julio Rodríguez's backspin-defying contested catch, AJ Ewing's full-layout diving snag, and Jorge Barrosa's committed dive on a sharply angled b...
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#84 - Stop Polishing The Base
Which visual skills actually predict athletic performance? It's the question I've spent my career chasing, and Frontiers in Physiology just published the most comprehensive answer yet.
Yang and colleagues pooled twent...
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