I’m a musician, but I’ve also dabbled in sports, namely racquetball, where lightning-fast reflexes separate you from the herd – as I’m sure it does in many other endeavours.
Specifically, if you will, listen to the guitar solo by Frank Gambale in the first song of this video.
This to me is not human. Sure, I’ve heard the thrash-metal “shredders,” but to me, this is pure genius poured out in 128th notes. Can you imagine how fast this guy’s neurons must be firing? But then you have a guy like Oscar Peterson, and many, many classical pianists of modern times and of yore.
I know that “playing fast” does not a good musician make, but where does this end?
In the animal kingdom, there are far faster candidates – the mantis shrimp, for example, moves so fast that it heats the surrounding water to instant steam, in a tiny explosion. Apparently they can almost sever digits if not handled with care.
Where does it end, with humans? Top racquetball players are so fast that they defy your own eyes – they’re on the ball before you even have a chance to realize it’s hit the wall. Insane!
Is that just a result of thousands of hours of scut work – practice – or is it something else?
Just curious. Now must get back to my 32nd-note scales.
Because you asked this in IMHO rather than General Questions, I won’t bother to look up cites, however:
Yes, there is a physical limit to reaction time. It has to do with several factors including the extent to which a nerve is insulated, baseline for an action potential in each individual nerve cell along the way, and the distance the nerve impulse has to travel.
Reflex reactions are faster than conscious responses because the signal travels up the nerve to the spinal column and the response is sent back from the spinal column. It isn’t carried up to the brain for processing first.
Martian Bigfoot has the right of it. This isn’t “thinking”; This isn’t even “reactions” like Sattua seems to think. This is what we call “muscle memory” and while there probably is SOME limit on it, it’s EXTREMELY fast.
Also, would it have killed you to timestamp your video?
Last weekend, I watched (and participated from the audience) in some improvisational comedy. Almost everyone involved did some obvious thinking, faked it a bit until an idea gelled, followed a bad path and then discarded it, etc.
One guy was dynamite. He launched in without pause, threw out idea after idea, fast, in poetic meter. And this is on a topic he had no way to prepare for: it was a “hot potato” challenge.
Now, it turns out the guy was a professional rap-master, so he had a lot of practice being creative in a hurry. So it is the sort of prowess one can train up.
Gaw dam it was impressive to watch! The rest of us couldn’t even begin to keep up with him!
Former racquetball player, and would say the reflexes are a combo of flat out training muscle memory and also advanced experience in how the game is played. A good player knows there’s only two or three reasonable shots in any one setup, so they typically cover one or two and prime their reflexes on the third.
I don’t really believe they’re thinking faster. They’ve just trained enough that they don’t have to waste their brain power on court positioning and the basic body mechanics of a shot and can concentrate more on their opponent’s weaknesses and any minor refinements a particular shot might need (slightly different angle, adjusting for the ball’s spin, etc).
Am doing martial arts now and the emphasis on practice and muscle memory to avoid thinking is just as well-ingrained.
Not only is there a limit to how fast humans can react to stimuli (although in many cases, it’s actually prediction), it’s probably the case that most sports evolve to test those limits. The distance to the plate in baseball or the size of a racquetball court likely were chosen to be long enough so that humans could physically react, but short enough so that it’s challenging.
