- Book information
- A Tenth of a Second by Jimena Canales
- Published by: University of Chicago Press
- Price: $35
"WE LIVE in a tenth-of-a-second world," Thomas Edison's electrical engineer Arthur Kennelly mused. That unit is roughly human reaction time and, as measurement technologies improved, this bodily lag from stimulus to response became a vexing matter of observational interference. Jimena Canales ably shows it was brought to a head by astronomers recording the transit of Venus in 1874: precisely timing anything through an eyepiece was bedevilled by human error.
Yet while this history of the unit thoroughly covers scholarly dialectic in science journals, the underlying experiments receive little attention. We learn that gunner reaction times were studied by time-motion acolytes in the trenches of the first world war, but only get hints of results. The unit's cultural role in sports measurement flickers by in a mention. Still, it is a thoughtful look at the all-too-human perceptual complications facing objective observation.
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Have your say
From what I know, the average is 215 ms for the simplest test.
http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/index.php
After a bit of training I average 150 ms. With a cup of coffee, it gets better, occasionally even below 100 ms.
More Like A Fifth
Sun Oct 25 14:42:02 GMT 2009 by Dennis
http://freetubetv.net
How do you even gauge that? I mean an interesting concept would be if everyone lives in varying reaction time zone - so that you may react to things that occur every 5 nanoseconds, while the next person may react every 1 nanosecond and another every 30 nanoseconds. The difference between each is how "live" reality is to you - those who have a smaller reaction time may experience or witness more.
From the perception of things?
Maybe perception rates of 7 Hz, and 13 Hz, are also related through 1-2 reaction rates on an 11 Hz signal, to give approx 1 Hz rates, such as similar to heart rate?
Or just another of the range of unfortunate coincidences confusing the issue?
what are we measuring the rates of, anyhow? The entire process has to depend on the varying recovery rates of neurotransmitters which depend on the availability of the chemicals they require, no? and they can vary by a long list of factors, to mention af few.. age, health, diet, and stimulants, so the real mystery must be which way to ensure that all the components are on hand to speed up the process.
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