Researchers have been looking at the human ability to respond to an object that is travelling literally too fast for the eye to have time to transmit its image to the brain.

Tennis players and cricketers, for example, routinely react to balls travelling at up to 100mph, when technically their brains should not be able to register them before they are gone.

Now, Professor Markus Meister and his colleagues at the Harvard University Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology have discovered that our eyes contain cells called ganglions that can calculate the future position of a moving object.

In-built advantage

The ganglions then fire off an alert message to the brain thousandths of a second before the object actually arrives in that place.

The finding revolutionises many previous models of the eye, which assumed that it acted simply as a camera - capturing the image presented directly in front of it.

It also suggests that top athletes may have the ability to see fractionally further into the future than the average individual, giving them an in-built advantage.

The discovery was made using an instrument developed by the Meister Lab that uses microelectrodes to record the action of about 100 ganglion cells in the retina of the human eye.