For the last three decades sports psychologists have been assembling a picture of how elite athletes hit 95-mph fastballs or return 150-mph tennis serves. The intuitive explanation is that the Ryan Howards and Rafael Nadals of the world simply have faster nervous systems—quicker reflexes, which give them more time to react to the ball. But it turns out that when elite hitters, from baseball and tennis to badminton to cricket, are hauled into the lab, their reaction speeds are no better than those of people chosen off the street.

In tests involving pressing a button in response to a flashing light, most subjects—athletes and nonathletes alike—take about 200 milliseconds, or a fifth of a second. (You can test yourself online at humanbenchmark.com) So, researchers conclude, a fifth of a second is about the bare minimum needed for the eye to take in information and convey it by electrical impulse to the brain, and for the brain to relay a message to the hands. "Once that pitch reaches the last 200 milliseconds," Thomas says, "you can't change your decision anymore. You're already swinging where you're swinging—and a lot can happen in the last 200 milliseconds of a pitch."

Two hundred milliseconds is almost half the entire flight time of a big league heater; the batter must start his swing before the ball is halfway to home plate. And given that the window for actually making solid contact with a fastball is about five milliseconds, or 1/200th of a second, it's a wonder that anyone ever hits it. In fact, the only way to accomplish it—the technique that separates the expert from the amateur—is to see the future.

I know this from table tennis -- the pros aren't faster, they just know where to be and they get there earlier. It's interesting to see the number of places this applies, from sports to, well, *many* things.

Michael Galpert rolls over in bed in his New York apartment, the alarm clock still chiming. The 28-year-old internet entrepreneur slips off the headband that’s been recording his brainwaves all night and studies the bar graph of his deep sleep, light sleep and REM. He strides to the bathroom and steps on his digital scale, the one that shoots his weight and body mass to an online data file. Before he eats his scrambled egg whites with spinach, he takes a picture of his plate with his mobile phone, which then logs the calories. He sets his mileage tracker before he hops on his bike and rides to the office, where a different set of data spreadsheets awaits.

“Running a start-up, I’m always looking at numbers, always tracking how business is going,” he says. Page views, clicks and downloads, he tallies it all. “That’s under-the-hood information that you can only garner from analysing different data points. So I started doing that with myself.”

This stuff fires me up. Combined with cooking, cooking equipment, cleaning things up, buying furniture, reading, writing, etc.--it's all about engineering the life you want.

Highly enthused I am.