It was the World Cup goal seen around the world but missed by the eyes that mattered most: England midfielder Frank Lampard's shot that dropped cleanly past the German goal-line but was not counted by the referee.

The avalanche of complaints about that missed call and others during the largest soccer tournament in the world raised the philosophical question of whether instant-replay technology improves games or turns them into soulless events run by a bank of blinking lights.

Scientists who study the human brain say it is surprising that bad calls do not happen more often.

"Despite all of the apparent surprise that the referees would be blowing calls, especially at crucial points, from a psychological standpoint this is what we would expect," said David Meyer, director of the University of Michigan's Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory.

"It's like every once in a while you draw the ace of spades," the psychology professor added. "It's going to happen."

Questions about the capacity of the human brain to judge action on the sports field are not limited to conversations at the local bar, but are examined by neurobiologists and psychologists using such measures as 'relay latency,' 'perceptual fluency' and 'speed-accuracy trade-off curve.'

While it is easy for fans to throw up their hands in disgust at a missed call and curse the referee, they need to realize that officials are weighing up actions which happen in fractions of a second, experts say.

"Human beings are never going to be perfect at making calls," said Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University. "Our memories just aren't cut out to allow us to be perfect referees.

"Our eyes work a lot like cameras but our memories don't work anything like an SD [secure digital] card," Marcus, author of the book Kluge: the Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, said, referring to memory cards used in digital cameras. "We can't literally play back what we just saw."

Making it tougher was the fleeting nature of moves in sport, said Emilio Salinas, an assistant professor of neurobiology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center who helped to write a paper entitled "Perceptual decision making in less than 30 milliseconds."

Salinas and fellow authors found that as little as 30 milliseconds of extra viewing time was the difference between a correct and an incorrect judgment about whether a flashed light had turned red or green.

Then there is the fact referees simply cannot see everything.

University of Michigan's Meyer said the maximum number of players any one person could carefully track was four, meaning something would be missed even with multiple referees watching.

When refs do miss a crucial piece of evidence, their brain fills in the gaps using past experiences to help them make the call.

Scientists and even referees understand that the accuracy of calls increases with experience. However, additional practice does not always make perfect.

"You can train your eyes all day long to see as quick as possible, but we're talking about 300 milliseconds to see a 95-mile-an-hour fastball coming from a professional pitcher's rubber to home plate," said Kevin Gee, director of the Sports Vision Performance Center at the University of Houston College of Optometry.

Given the challenges for the human brain, even some staunch critics of technology to aid referees have changed their minds.

"I don't know if we can get any better at doing what we do," said retired MLB umpire Don Denkinger, who is remembered for an incorrect call in the 1985 World Series. "There's no super umpire sitting out there."

After Lampard's no-goal in June, FIFA president Sepp Blatter apologized for refereeing mistakes at the World Cup and said soccer's governing body would reopen the debate on goal-line technology.

Even the scientists, however, recognize the appeal of the drama offered by human error.

"In real life, most of the time we do not have the possibility of engaging in instant replay in order to correct mistakes," Meyer said. "By keeping the technology out of play, we make the sport more traditionally lifelike and in some ways that can enhance the drama."