#96 - 23 Out of 24: What My Own Eyes Actually Look Like on the Data

This week Dr. Laby hands listeners his own scorecard. Sitting at his desk with nothing but a laptop camera and a piece of software he has been building and rebuilding for weeks, he runs himself through two tasks on his own eyetracker_v7 tool: a saccade test and an antisaccade test. No patient chart, no clinic lighting, just his own eyes and the real numbers.

He walks through why the terms matter (saccade, smooth pursuit, and the far less familiar antisaccadic inhibitory control), why he could not find a single consumer or professional vision-training platform that actually measures a true antisaccade response rather than substituting a button click for an eye movement, and why he ended up building that missing piece himself. He is candid about the debugging mess behind the clean numbers, a stale data buffer, a velocity calculation that diluted fast eye movements, a display bug that let him see his own gaze and defeat the blind nature of the test, and frames that transparency itself as part of why the dataset can be trusted.

The episode closes on two real same-day runs (Saccade 20/20 both times, Antisaccade 23 of 24 both times) as an early reproducibility signal, explicitly flagged as a starting point rather than a finished validation, and connects the whole exercise back to the Athletic Vision Pyramid from Eye of the Champion: saccades and pursuit gather the visual information, antisaccadic inhibitory control decides whether that information gets acted on correctly under real time pressure.

Episode Timestamps

• [00:00] Heads Up, This One’s Different — Handing Over My Own Scorecard
• [00:45] Defining the Terms — What a Saccade Actually Is
• [01:35] Smooth Pursuit, the Other Half of How Eyes Gather Information
• [02:05] The Third Piece Almost Nobody Has Heard Of — Antisaccadic Inhibitory Control
• [02:55] The Vision-to-Action Chain, and Why Inhibitory Control Is the Gatekeeper
• [03:20] The Gap I Found — No Consumer Tool Actually Measures a Real Antisaccade
• [04:00] Building the Third Mode Into eyetracker_v7
• [04:45] The Debugging Mess Behind the Clean Numbers
• [05:35] Today’s Run — Saccade 20/20, Antisaccade 23 of 24
• [06:15] Why the Error-Corrected Trials Are the Interesting Number, Not the Bad One
• [06:50] Two Runs, Same Day — An Early Reproducibility Signal, Not a Finished Validation
• [07:20] Why This Is Not Abstract for an Athlete
• [07:55] What Comes Next — Testing the System Until It Fails

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• What a saccade is, what smooth pursuit is, and why they’re only two of the three ways your eyes gather information that matters in sport
• What antisaccadic inhibitory control actually measures, and why it is a direct, real-time readout of your brain’s ability to override a reflex with a decision
• Why Dr. Laby could not find a single consumer or professional vision-training platform that measures a genuine, gaze-verified antisaccade response, and why a click or key press is a fundamentally different task
• How eyetracker_v7 works: a five-point calibration step, and three modes (Pursuit, Saccade, and the new Antisaccade mode)
• The real debugging history behind the tool, including a stale gaze buffer, a velocity calculation that diluted fast eye movements, and a display bug that broke the blind nature of the test, and why showing that mess matters for trusting the final numbers
• Today’s actual results: Saccade mode 20 of 20 completions with zero timeouts; Antisaccade mode 23 of 24 real completions, 19 correct and 4 error-corrected, with only one timeout
• Why an error-corrected trial (a reflexive glance caught and self-corrected) is evidence the inhibitory system is working, not evidence it is failing
• Why same-day reproducibility across two runs is an encouraging early signal, not a substitute for the formal test-retest validation, larger samples, and standardized comparison against a validated tracker that real proof still requires
• Why suppressing a reflexive glance under time pressure shows up constantly in sport, from a hitter not chasing a pitch to a goalkeeper not committing early to a fake

Helpful Resources

• Sports Vision NYC
• Connect with Dr. Laby on Instagram
• Pick Up a Copy of Eye of the Champion
• Download The Ultimate Sports Vision Guide for Athletes [FREE]

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