10,000 hours again

John Fairbairn · #1

We've discussed the 10,000 hours concept many times here. Here's a link to a new angle on it, which coincidentally seems to suggest you can get to a very satisfying level in less than half the time.

It makes reference to the golfer Rory McIlroy. I heard a lovely story about him last week which illustrates once again the brilliant Irish way with words. A friend of my friend was on a course in Ireland with Rory and watched gobsmacked as the master teed off. Then as the ball landed leagues away, he gasped: "Rory hits the ball further than I've ever been on holiday!"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26384712

EdLee · #2

Thanks, John.

SmoothOper · #3

That part about vision and baseball, they say you can't improve vision, but I think that is just a myth perpetuated by eye glass manufacturers, there are eye excercises, that can improve occular coordination and focusing ability, and they resemble focusing on small objects like baseballs at long distances, do that for 10,000 hours, I bet your eye sight will improve.

Bill Spight · #4

SmoothOper wrote:

focusing on small objects like baseballs at long distances, do that for 10,000 hours, I bet your eye sight will improve.

Either that, or you'll go blind!

Mef · #5

SmoothOper wrote:

That part about vision and baseball, they say you can't improve vision, but I think that is just a myth perpetuated by eye glass manufacturers, there are eye excercises, that can improve occular coordination and focusing ability, and they resemble focusing on small objects like baseballs at long distances, do that for 10,000 hours, I bet your eye sight will improve.

Actually when evaluating baseball talent, plate discipline (the ability to discern balls from strikes, and not swing at bad pitches) is known to be one of those things that a prospect must innately have, as you will be unlikely to teach it to them.

alejo · #6

SmoothOper wrote:

That part about vision and baseball, they say you can't improve vision, but I think that is just a myth perpetuated by eye glass manufacturers, there are eye exercises, that can improve ocular coordination and focusing ability, and they resemble focusing on small objects like baseballs at long distances, do that for 10,000 hours, I bet your eye sight will improve.

Though there are exercises for improving eye coordination and focusing... they have their limitations.
First, you should take into account that the eye processes objects 6 meters far away exactly as objects coming from Km of distance. This translates into: trying to switch focus from a baseball 10 meters away to 100m is useless. For this purpose, other sports such as table-tennis are much more recommended.
Focusing ability is severely affected by age, diseases and surgery.
After ruling out diseases, there is no way you can improve your visual acuity beyond your own limits. Visual acuity means the smallest degrees of an angle that your retina is able to differentiate.

SmoothOper · #7

alejo wrote:

SmoothOper wrote:

That part about vision and baseball, they say you can't improve vision, but I think that is just a myth perpetuated by eye glass manufacturers, there are eye exercises, that can improve ocular coordination and focusing ability, and they resemble focusing on small objects like baseballs at long distances, do that for 10,000 hours, I bet your eye sight will improve.

Though there are exercises for improving eye coordination and focusing... they have their limitations.
First, you should take into account that the eye processes objects 6 meters far away exactly as objects coming from Km of distance. This translates into: trying to switch focus from a baseball 10 meters away to 100m is useless. For this purpose, other sports such as table-tennis are much more recommended.
Focusing ability is severely affected by age, diseases and surgery.
After ruling out diseases, there is no way you can improve your visual acuity beyond your own limits. Visual acuity means the smallest degrees of an angle that your retina is able to differentiate.

The article only mentioned IE 20/13 vs 20/20 which is merely coordination and focusing. Most people can see that far, but it takes them a long time and they have to squint, which means they can improve their vision. I'm sure there are limits though. Also, those are only limitations of cell sizes and lens, people can also improve how they process the information by practicing for example resolving edges at a distance, improving spatial tracking, etc which is more about what they do with the information and how they go about focusing.

Mef · #8

SmoothOper wrote:

Most people can see that far, but it takes them a long time and they have to squint...

Most people can run a mile if they practice...but that does not mean that they can all train to be top level competition athletes. When you are talking about being an "Expert" at a physical activity there are always going to be limitations that may be impossible to work around.

There is a difference between using dedicated practice to reach the limits of your own personal abilities and using it to be the 100-10^-Nth percentile of all people of all physical abilities.

ez4u · #9

There are decades of research on vision and performance that are just a click or two away, and of course are ignored in the article. For example, try
"A study of static, kinetic, and dynamic visual acuity in 102 Japanese professional baseball players."
Abstract

SmoothOper · **#10**

Mef wrote:

SmoothOper wrote:

Most people can see that far, but it takes them a long time and they have to squint...

Most people can run a mile if they practice...but that does not mean that they can all train to be top level competition athletes. When you are talking about being an "Expert" at a physical activity there are always going to be limitations that may be impossible to work around.

There is a difference between using dedicated practice to reach the limits of your own personal abilities and using it to be the 100-10^-Nth percentile of all people of all physical abilities.

I agree, but in the example given, I am just pointing out that the fact that the difference in mean vision doesn't imply that the ball players naturally had better vision and were therefore more talented, because the better vision could have been acquired, via the process of training to perform in that role.

ez4u · **#11**

The article below has interesting implications for our repeated discussions on playing by intuition versus thinking/reading things through...

J Sport Exerc Psychol. 2007 Feb;29(1):60-77.
Effects of focus of attention on baseball batting performance in players of differing skill levels.
Castaneda B1, Gray R.
Author information

Abstract
This study addressed the question, what should baseball players focus their attention on while batting? Less-skilled and highly skilled (college) baseball players participated in four dual-task conditions in a baseball batting simulation: two that directed attention to skill execution (skill/internal [movement of the hands] and skill/external [movement of the bat]) and two that directed attention to the environment (environmental/irrelevant [auditory tones] and environmental/external [the ball leaving the bat]). Batting performance for highly skilled players was best in the environmental/external condition and worst in the skill/internal condition. Performance of less-skilled batters was significantly better in the two skill conditions than in either of the two environmental conditions. We conclude that the optimal focus of attention for highly skilled batters is one that does not disrupt proceduralized knowledge and permits attention to the perceptual effect of the action, whereas the optimal focus of attention for less-skilled batters is one that allows attention to the step-by-step execution of the swing[emphasis added].

alejo · **#12**

SmoothOper wrote:

The article only mentioned IE 20/13 vs 20/20 which is merely coordination and focusing. Most people can see that far, but it takes them a long time and they have to squint, which means they can improve their vision. I'm sure there are limits though. Also, those are only limitations of cell sizes and lens, people can also improve how they process the information by practising for example resolving edges at a distance, improving spatial tracking, etc which is more about what they do with the information and how they go about focusing.

Visual acuity of 20/20 refers to traditional visual acuity (VA from now on). It refers to the minimum difference between two spots that your eye is able to process as being separate. Nothing to do with coordination and focusing. Average person should be able to see 20/20, most people don't (20/20 was actually settled with a Gauss distribution). Squinting makes up for certain diseases. In theory, in a perfect eye, squint vision should not be different than normal vision. Otherwise, there is a disease. Call it myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, 3rd grade cornea alteration, 4rd grade... whatever, something is not perfect and it's most probably going to be a cornea issue.
I've seen people with 20/13 and I'm around 20/16, it's all a matter of eye lenses.

As far as it comes to dynamic VA, I can't really contribute much to the topic since I lack experience on this field.

SmoothOper · **#13**

alejo wrote:

SmoothOper wrote:

The article only mentioned IE 20/13 vs 20/20 which is merely coordination and focusing. Most people can see that far, but it takes them a long time and they have to squint, which means they can improve their vision. I'm sure there are limits though. Also, those are only limitations of cell sizes and lens, people can also improve how they process the information by practising for example resolving edges at a distance, improving spatial tracking, etc which is more about what they do with the information and how they go about focusing.

Visual acuity of 20/20 refers to traditional visual acuity (VA from now on). It refers to the minimum difference between two spots that your eye is able to process as being separate. Nothing to do with coordination and focusing. Average person should be able to see 20/20, most people don't (20/20 was actually settled with a Gauss distribution). Squinting makes up for certain diseases. In theory, in a perfect eye, squint vision should not be different than normal vision. Otherwise, there is a disease. Call it myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, 3rd grade cornea alteration, 4rd grade... whatever, something is not perfect and it's most probably going to be a cornea issue.
I've seen people with 20/13 and I'm around 20/16, it's all a matter of eye lenses.

As far as it comes to dynamic VA, I can't really contribute much to the topic since I lack experience on this field.

I don't understand how you can see anything without coordination or focusing. I've always been able to read the bottom line, but one time I had some dry eyes, so I went to the eye doctor, I was not overwhelmed by his knowledge. He spent like thirty minutes trying to figure out if he could prescribe glasses, then gave me some sample eye drops, and didn't discuss anything that could naturally help my dry eyes, from vitamins to warm heat packs(both of which helped, but the eye drops did nothing), the only other thing he could think of was plastic surgery. Lame. Look it up, there are all kinds of exercises for improving eye sight, if you don't get a thorough eye workout in your day to day activities, you might need to practice.

alejo · **#14**

SmoothOper wrote:

I don't understand how you can see anything without coordination or focusing.

Patients with a single eye lack eye coordination.
Healthy people start losing their focus ability when they are around 40-45 years old. This is the reason why almost everyone in their sixties needs reading glasses. There is a lens inside the eye called crystalline. Part of its job is to focus the image into the retina (posterior part of the eye). Young people have the ability to modify its thickness in order to focus to closer objects. This ability decreases with ageing till focusing ability is close to none. This situation is called presbyopia (wikipedia).
After a while, older people suffer from cataracts (opacification of the crystalline) and this lens is removed. When removed and replaced by an artificial lens, focusing ability is null. Therefore, patients are always focusing on objects in the infinite (over 6 meters). They do all need reading glasses after surgery. Some of them reach 20/20 visual acuity after surgery.

SmoothOper wrote:

I've always been able to read the bottom line, but one time I had some dry eyes, so I went to the eye doctor, I was not overwhelmed by his knowledge. He spent like thirty minutes trying to figure out if he could prescribe glasses, then gave me some sample eye drops, and didn't discuss anything that could naturally help my dry eyes, from vitamins to warm heat packs(both of which helped, but the eye drops did nothing), the only other thing he could think of was plastic surgery. Lame. Look it up, there are all kinds of exercises for improving eye sight, if you don't get a thorough eye workout in your day to day activities, you might need to practice.

Unfortunately, dry eye is one of the pathologies we lack a cure for. It's one of this common diseases (like a cold or flu) where we can't treat its aetiology. We know factors that cause some dry eye worsening or symptomatic improvement. Vitamins are very controversial. Heat packs do help. Eye drops help a whole lot and there are many different prescriptions... I don't know how to say it in English... not all eye drops have the same ingredients (you'd better try some drops with hyaluronic acid).
As for plastic surgery, it's a possible solution depending on your situation/disease. Tear plugs are another temporary solution...

However, I think we're getting a little bit too far from the topic of a Go forum :lol:

Specially in the "General Go Chat"...

SmoothOper · **#15**

alejo wrote:

SmoothOper wrote:

I don't understand how you can see anything without coordination or focusing.

Patients with a single eye lack eye coordination.
Healthy people start losing their focus ability when they are around 40-45 years old. This is the reason why almost everyone in their sixties needs reading glasses. There is a lens inside the eye called crystalline. Part of its job is to focus the image into the retina (posterior part of the eye). Young people have the ability to modify its thickness in order to focus to closer objects. This ability decreases with ageing till focusing ability is close to none. This situation is called presbyopia (wikipedia).
After a while, older people suffer from cataracts (opacification of the crystalline) and this lens is removed. When removed and replaced by an artificial lens, focusing ability is null. Therefore, patients are always focusing on objects in the infinite (over 6 meters). They do all need reading glasses after surgery. Some of them reach 20/20 visual acuity after surgery.

SmoothOper wrote:

I've always been able to read the bottom line, but one time I had some dry eyes, so I went to the eye doctor, I was not overwhelmed by his knowledge. He spent like thirty minutes trying to figure out if he could prescribe glasses, then gave me some sample eye drops, and didn't discuss anything that could naturally help my dry eyes, from vitamins to warm heat packs(both of which helped, but the eye drops did nothing), the only other thing he could think of was plastic surgery. Lame. Look it up, there are all kinds of exercises for improving eye sight, if you don't get a thorough eye workout in your day to day activities, you might need to practice.

Unfortunately, dry eye is one of the pathologies we lack a cure for. It's one of this common diseases (like a cold or flu) where we can't treat its aetiology. We know factors that cause some dry eye worsening or symptomatic improvement. Vitamins are very controversial. Heat packs do help. Eye drops help a whole lot and there are many different prescriptions... I don't know how to say it in English... not all eye drops have the same ingredients (you'd better try some drops with hyaluronic acid).
As for plastic surgery, it's a possible solution depending on your situation/disease. Tear plugs are another temporary solution...

However, I think we're getting a little bit too far from the topic of a Go forum :lol:

Specially in the "General Go Chat"...

Baseball players aren't fifty years old. There are plenty of scientific studies related to vitamins and eyes, the fact that eye doctors(all doctors for that matter) continue to perpetuate the myths about vitamins is what you would expect from a two bit drug pusher.

There are ways to help dry eye, and you would think an eye doctor would know about them.

alejo · **#16**

I'm an eye doctor. I've been training with specialists on dry eye who visit over 15 patients with dry eye daily... there are ways to help symptoms derived from dry eye but we lack a method to increase the quality and amount of tears. Period.

Vitamins for retina pathology are controversial. First valuable studies on this topic appeared 4 years ago and included vitamin A. Two years ago patients who had enrolled these studies and were smokers developed lung cancer more often than regular smokers. Vitamin A, traditionally said to be "good for the eye" was removed from these vitamins. Latest valuable studies only find them useful in certain advanced dry age-related macular disease. Retina specialists don't agree when it comes to prescribing vitamins.

Vitamins for tear improvement are controvesial. Studies such as this one have been published: only 24 patients and sponsored by the vitamins seller. Here you have a suspicious thesis on the topic, with 8 patients leaving the study out of 38. I could go on like this. We lack a serious study on this field. Dry eye specialists tend to not prescribe vitamins.

SmoothOper · **#17**

alejo wrote:

and sponsored by the vitamins seller.

I wonder how many prescription glass studies are sponsored by the seller? I just really feel eye doctors ignorance shows when they say things like there is no known way to increase tears, therefore they can't help dry eye, when a deficiency in tear production is rarely a cause in dry eye, the more common problem being the oils that spread the tears across the eye secreted by glands under the eyelids , which need omega-3 and possibly other vitamins furthermore warm heat packs can help these oils spread.

RBerenguel · **#18**

SmoothOper wrote:

alejo wrote:

and sponsored by the vitamins seller.

[...]I just really feel eye doctors ignorance shows when they say things like there is no known way to increase tears, therefore they can't help dry eye, when a deficiency in tear production is rarely a cause in dry eye, the more common problem being the oils that spread the tears across the eye secreted by glands under the eyelids , which need omega-3 and possibly other vitamins furthermore warm heat packs can help these oils spread.

Alejo is an eye doctor. He quite likely knows something about te subject

SmoothOper · **#19**

RBerenguel wrote:

SmoothOper wrote:

alejo wrote:

and sponsored by the vitamins seller.

[...]I just really feel eye doctors ignorance shows when they say things like there is no known way to increase tears, therefore they can't help dry eye, when a deficiency in tear production is rarely a cause in dry eye, the more common problem being the oils that spread the tears across the eye secreted by glands under the eyelids , which need omega-3 and possibly other vitamins furthermore warm heat packs can help these oils spread.

Alejo is an eye doctor. He quite likely knows something about te subject

The question remains why he would choose to say something, like vitamins don't help dry eye, when that is an especially narrow interpretation of what dry eye is and the relevant scientific material. Maybe they haven't done a large cohort study, but when they can isolate the components of the oils and tears in lab and it has omega-3 it's not a huge jump to say your eyes need omega-3. It reminds me of the Age Related Eye Disease Study(AREDS) where the two cohorts compared were doctors, in one cohort they prescribed vitamins, the other they gave placebo. Theoretically doctors should be well informed enough and care enough to get sufficient nutrients to prevent eye disease, but as it turns out the cohort which had the vitamins also had significantly less eye disease, go figure.

RBerenguel · **#20**

The human body is more complex than "Y needs X, if Y doesn't work add X until it does."

10,000 hours again

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