The next time you play in a multiplayer match, cursing to the heavens as to why you are constantly destroyed by players who seem to lock on to you in an instant, you will have the ultimate excuse.

Published in the journal Plos One (via The Guardian) under the title "The speed of sight: Individual variation in critical flicker fusion thresholds The study, titled "The speed of sight: Individual variation in critical flicker fusion thresholds," details an experiment in which participants were asked to view a rapidly flashing light source and to identify when it appeared to be constant. Some were able to identify light sources that blinked more than 60 times per second.

The study was repeated many times with the same subjects, and the researchers found that while there were large individual differences, subjects who could perceive the light flicker at a faster rate could do so repeatedly.

Professor Kevin Mitchell, a neurobiologist at Trinity College Dublin, says: "We think that individual differences in perceived speed may be evident in high-speed situations, such as ball sports, where fast-moving objects must be located and tracked, or in competitive games, where the visual scene changes rapidly. We believe that this may be evident in high-speed situations where you need to locate and track fast-moving objects, such as in competitive games where the visual scene changes rapidly.

"You may have an advantage over others even before you grab a racket and hit a tennis ball or grab a controller and dive into an online fantasy world."

While this study is interesting and certainly makes me feel a little better after endlessly playing Counter-Strike as a teenager and losing miserably many times, the preceding research offers some hope for all of us.

Perception of light flicker is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to seeing motion. Moving images have been shown to evoke a different visual system than the one that processes only light, and more than that, can be trained to improve visual perception.

In fact, games have even been used in visual therapy to treat certain symptoms and improve contrast sensitivity, attention span, object tracking, etc.

In other words, it turns out that my lack of ability may be due to lack of practice rather than my poor old eyes not being well equipped in the first place. Still, it doesn't hurt to at least have a head start in some areas, so I will gladly lean on the idea that some of us are simply more superhuman than others.

A comfortable frame rate can often be attributed to being in the eye of the beholder, but also to the fact that 60fps is more than fine for me and I don't have to spend time chasing a frame count limit to see my games in smooth video, I feel a small comfort. It's a small thing.