How well you see is a function not only of your eyes, but the quickness of your brain in recognizing any image. In theory, training the brain to “see” better should lead to the same sort of improvement as, say, a new pair of glasses.

That’s the thinking behind a new video-game that trains the brain to be more responsive, and it appears to be paying dividends for a college baseball team in California.

“Baseball is a highly visual sport. Professional players on average have much better vision than the normal population,” explains Aaron Seitz, a professor of psychology at U.C. Riverside.

By exercising with difficult tasks, you train your visual system to perform better.

“Hitting a ball at 100 miles per hour means you have to make visual decisions based on very little information in a very small amount time. So, there’s good reason to believe that even a small improvement in vision could lead to a measurable improvement in performance.”

The game is called Ultimeyes and is based on Seitz’s research into the brain’s visual processing center. Like an old Atari game, players need to zap blobs as they move across a screen, and the task becomes more difficult as time goes on. The blobs grow smaller and dimmer making them harder to see, and “distractor” shapes appear alongside, testing your ability to distinguish between targets.

“By exercising with difficult tasks, you train your visual system to perform better,” Seitz says.

U.C. Riverside’s baseball team tested Ultimeyes before the 2012/3 season. Each player sat five feet from a screen for 25 minutes at a time, completing 30 sessions each. The extra training seemed to pay off. By season’s end, the team had more runs and fewer strikeouts than any other outfit in its league.