Isao Machii is a Japanese man with superhuman reflexes, which he stereotypically uses to do all sorts of amazing tricks with a katana, including peeling an apple and cutting an Airsoft pellet in half in midair. The video bellow is from a show that is very, very Japanese, but it showcases many of Machii’s abilities quite well. Airsoft pellets travel at roughly 160 feet per second. That’s too fast for the human eye to even register, let alone pinpoint in order to bisect with a goddamn sword. Machii isn’t seeing the pellet with his eyes: He’s sensing it in some other way. Here’s what clinical psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula has to say about him: “This is about processing at an entirely different sensory level, because he’s not visually processing this.
This is a different level of anticipatory processing …” We can all sort of do this, obviously – catching a ball when somebody throws it to you requires you to anticipate where it’s going. A baseball player, with practice, gets so good at it that he can hit a fastball coming in at 90 mph. But he’s still doing it by sight — years of practice have taught him that the trajectory of the ball can be predicted by how it looks leaving the pitcher’s hand. The difference is that Machii’s brain is wired so that he can hit things that are moving too fast to see. According to the expert up there, Machii isn’t even sensing the pellet at all. He’s anticipating where it will be and when it will be there. That basically makes him a Jedi.