In a study published this week in the journal Current Biology, [neuroscientist Aaron] Seitz worked with 19 [baseball] players on the University of California, Riverside, baseball team, and showed that his app UltimEyes lengthened the distance at which the players could see clearly by an average of 31 percent.

After using the app for 30 25-minute intervals, players saw an improvement that pushed many of them beyond normal 20/20 vision, including seven who attained freakishly good 20/7.5 vision—meaning that at a distance of 20 feet, they were clearly seeing what someone with normal vision could see at no farther than 7.5 feet away.

Despite its name, UltimEyes has little to do with improving the physical eye or eye muscles. Rather, the app works by exploiting recent insights into when and how the adult brain can be fundamentally rewired—a concept known as neuroplasticity.

“Within the last decade or so we’ve started to learn that brain fitness is a bit akin to physical fitness,” Seitz says. “If we exercise our brain in the proper ways, pretty much everything that the brain does should be able to be improved.”

Top image via ThinkStock.
Bottom image via UltimEyes.
Via Popular Mechanics.