That yellow ball isn’t just bigger — it fundamentally rewires the task your brain is solving. In baseball vs. softball, the physics look similar, but the perceptual–motor demands are not interchangeable. A softball travels slower, yes—but its larger diameter changes visual angle, time-to-contact (τ), and the way the brain predicts motion. Elite athletes don’t react faster in general. They get faster within the exact statistics of their domain. Neuroscience and sports science show that expert performance relies on: • Highly tuned internal forward models (the brain’s prediction engine) • Domain-specific calibration of optic flow and angular velocity • Learned mappings between visual cues → motor output When you train for years on one object size, speed distribution, and spin profile, your nervous system optimizes for that distribution. Change the context—even slightly—and those optimizations can become liabilities. That’s why: • Baseball hitters can look lost in softball cages • Eli...