Reacting to an opponent drawing their pistol faster than deciding to draw first, scientists say, confirming what often happens during duals in old Western films.
Credit: wikimedia
SYDNEY: Just like in the old Western gunfights, people move faster when reacting to a trigger than if they initiate movement, which shows movement has different brain pathways, scientists said.
Published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study suggests that reactive movements and intentional movements use different brain pathways.
"In our daily lives, we constantly mix intentional movements, for example putting a cup on a table, with reactive movements, for example catching the cup after we knock it off the table by mistake," said lead researcher Andrew Welchman, a psychologist from the University of Birmingham, UK.
Parkinson's points to different brain pathways
"Your movement time - that is, how long it takes to move - is swifter when you react," he added.
Scientists working with Parkinson's disease patients have long thought that different brain pathways must be involved in different movement types.
People with Parkinson's disease often struggle more with intentional movement than reactive movement - while they can't pick a ball up from a table, they may be able to catch it.
Tip-off from Western films
This hints that the brain area damaged by Parkinson's disease controls only specific types of movement.
Nobel laureate Niels Bohr also pondered intentional versus reactive movement. Observing gunfights in wild western movies, he wondered why the cowboy who drew his gun first always got shot.
Bohr tested his theory - that reaction is faster than action - by duelling with colleague George Gamow using toy pistols.
Racing to push buttons
In a more rigourous experiment, Welchman and coworkers pitched 10 volunteers against each other in a series of 'lab-duels'.
Sitting opposite each other, each with their own set of buttons, pairs of volunteers duelled with each other, trying to complete a series of button presses faster than their opponent.
There was no start signal - like in a gunfight, volunteers either chose to start the duel by reaching for the first button, or raced their opponent when they saw them start.
On average, volunteers completed the button-press task 21 milliseconds, or 9% faster when reacting to an opponent than when initiating the duel. This advantage is unlikely to help you win a gunfight, however - although faster, reactive movements were less accurate.
sounds similar to the reflex arc neural pathway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc
Just like Climate Change
Maybe this means that we don't have to worry about acting to prevent climate change, we can just wait until it happens and react quicker then??
Revheads at traffic lights
Does this explain the phenomenon when you sit at a traffic light and there's some idiot in the lane next to you revving their engine and creeping forward in anticipation of the light turning green. Then when it turns green I react to it, so that I often take off quicker than they do (although of course I don't accelerate as hard).
They seem to slow down their reaction to the light turning green by anticipating it.
SO he thought movies were reality?
"Observing gunfights in wild western movies, he wondered why the cowboy who drew his gun first always got shot."
Because the script called for it?