^A We are all familiar now with issues of visual resolution thanks to the digital camera industry.

^B We are rarely aware of these saccades, although, like most motor systems, they can be taken under conscious control.

^C It is possible to identify information about the world without looking directly at it. (As you might if you were trying not to let someone know you were looking at them. Because human eyes have white sclera, we can tell where someone else is looking, an important issue for social creatures.) Not looking at something takes more effort because one has to build up the information from the sensors at the periphery with lower resolution, and because one has to inhibit the natural tendency to saccade to it.

^D Alan Turing (1912–1954) could arguably be said to have saved the world. Turing led the code-breaking team in Bletchley Park in England that broke the Nazi codes. The Germans had developed a code that was so complex they thought it was unbreakable. It was based on a machine, called Enigma, which consisted of three dials. The person typed a message into the machine and the machine encoded the message on a character-by-character basis as a function of the dials. The dials were set in a specific way each day and so the code-breaking team had to break each day’s code anew. But a captured machine gave the Allies the set of possible dials. Even if they didn’t know the settings for that day, they knew the parameters and could calculate the likelihood that a given message came from a given dial setting. Because thousands of messages were sent each day, Turing and his team could integrate the information between these messages. They measured the weight of evidence for each setting and stopped when they reached a threshold. Although they didn’t crack the code every day, they cracked it often enough that they could read the German orders and they knew what the Germans were going to do. The Germans thought the Enigma was impenetrable and continued to send messages by it until the end of the war. Both David Kahn’s nonfiction history book The Code-Breakers and Neal Stephenson’s fictional novel Cryptonomicon tell this story in wonderfully exciting and readable detail.

^E Interestingly, the English word “bias” has two related meanings. It can mean the initial expectation, an assumption made before gathering information. Second, it can mean a preference for one thing over another, particularly when one responds without appropriately integrating the information. As pointed out in The Anatomy of Bias by Jan Lauwereyns, these are really the same thing—a stereotype is an initial expectation (often wrong) that is unwilling to change in the face of further information.

^F Most televisions (and all computer monitors that show television signals) are digital now, but older televisions received analog signals. Analog televisions that were not tuned to a signal would show a random mixture of black and white dots that was called “snow.” The visual motion signals being shown in the visual noise paradigm look a lot like this analog television noise.

^G The structure is now known solely by its acronym “MT,” but at one time this acronym stood for medial temporal cortex (meaning “in the middle” [medial] of the temporal cortex). The temporal cortex is located underneath the rest of the brain. In the early literature, MT was also known as V5, since it was the fifth visual cortical area discovered.⁹

^H Again, now known by its acronym (LIP), but referring to lateral intraparietal cortex, because it sits on the internal wall of one of the grooves in the parietal cortex.¹⁰

^I Again, now known entirely by its acronym (MST), but once meaning medial superior temporal cortex, “superior” meaning “above.”

^J Humans have evolved specialized areas of cortex to recognize faces.¹⁷ This is why we see faces everywhere (like in the shades of light and dark on the moon as seen from the Earth). Some people have a particular difficulty with this, which is a disorder called prosopagnosia¹⁸ (from prosopon [πρóσωπον, Greek for face] and agnosia [αγνωσíα; a, α not + gnosis, γνωσις, knowing]). People with prosopagnosia have to rely on identifying features (a distinctive hairstyle or mode of dress) to identify people. Markos Moulitsas described his prosopagnosia on his blogsite “Daily Kos,” and noted his inability to watch war movies (like Saving Private Ryan) or Mafia movies (like The Godfather) because everyone has the same haircut and is dressed the same.¹⁹ Although it is not known what causes prosopagnosia, Doris Tsao recently found that one of the monkeys she was studying had no face-selective activity in its cortex and showed an inability to recognize faces, much like people with prosopagnosia, so we know that this can occur naturally in other primates as well.

^K Ted Williams and Tony Gwynn were two of the greatest hitters of all time, getting on base an average of 48.4% and 38.8% of the time, with lifetime batting averages of 0.344 (34.4%) and 0.338 (33.8%) respectively.²²

^L A 100-mile-per-hour pitch traveling 60 feet 6 inches takes about 400 milliseconds.

^M This of course reminds us of the old joke—our well-dressed protagonist stops a passerby on a New York City street and asks, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The inevitable answer: “Practice, lots of practice!”