In this activity, you can measure just how long it takes for you to react, and compare reaction times with your friends and family. Background You may not realize it, but when your senses pick up clues from the outside world—the smell of baking cookies, the color of a stoplight, the rrrring!
During that time your brain receives information from your senses, identifies a possible source, and allows you to take action. The jam-packed fraction of a second is called your reaction time. This activity teaches you about your brain's reaction time, but it also relies on the laws of physics. Specifically, you can calculate your reaction time using our handy chart, which is based on how quickly a ruler falls.
How do we know how quickly your ruler will fall? Gravity pulls all objects toward Earth's center at the same speed. If you want to try this out at home, try dropping a tennis ball and a basketball from the same height: They should both hit the ground at the same time!
To make things easier, we've provided a chart, above, that you can print or copy out on a piece of paper. The basic rule: milliseconds translates into about two inches or five centimeters. You only need two people for this activity, but it's also great for a group. Leave five spaces below each name. A nerve signal travels from your eye to your brain then to your finger muscles.
Your finger muscles move to catch the timer. The whole process takes between and milliseconds. The neural pathway involved in a reaction time experiment involves a series of neural processes. This experiment does not test a simple reflex. Rather, this activity is designed to measure the response time to something that you see. Catching a dropped ruler begins with the eye watching the ruler in anticipation of it falling. After the ruler is dropped, the eye sends a message to the visual cortex, which perceives that the ruler has fallen.
The visual cortex sends a message to the motor cortex to initiate catching the ruler. The final process is the contraction of the muscles as the hand grasps the ruler. All of these processes involve individual neurons that transmit electrochemical messages to other neurons. You can take the time it takes to decide things out of the equation.
Much of the time it takes you to react to the ruler dropping is the time it takes electrical signals to travel along your nerves. Moving at about metres per second, a signal telling a finger to move has to travel from your brain down your spinal cord and into your arm. Signals for muscle control generally move faster than other ones. Pain signals for example, move very slowly, often less than one metre per second.
Describe how the nervous system responds to a stimulus. The speed of your reactions play a large part in your everyday life. Fast reaction times can produce big rewards, for example, like saving a blistering soccer ball from entering the goal. Slow reaction times may come with consequences. Reaction time is a measure of the quickness an organism responds to some sort of stimulus. You also have "reflexes" too. Reflexes and reactions, while seeming similar, are quite different.
Reflexes are involuntary, used to protect the body, and are faster than a reaction. Reflexes are usually a negative feedback loop and act to help return the body to its normal functioning stability, or homeostasis. The classic example of a reflex is one you have seen at your doctor's office: the patellar reflex. This reflex is called a stretch reflex and is initiated by tapping the tendon below the patella, or kneecap.
In their original papers Erb referred to the reflex as the "Patellarsehnenreflex" while Westphal denoted it as the "Unterschenkelphanomen". Thankfully, we now refer to it as the patellar reflex.
This reflex is also known as a "reflex arc". It is a negative feedback circuit that is comprised of three main components:. The knee reflex arc is a spinal reflex, and the circuit is drawn above. This picture shows how the sensory afferent neuron sends information through the dorsal root ganglion into the spinal cord; where the signal splits into two different paths.
The first is the motor neuron efferent leading back to the quadriceps. When your quad muscle's motor neuron receives the information it fires and causes your lower leg to spring forward up in the air. The second signal from the sensory neuron travels to an interneuron which sends a signal to the motor neuron efferent leading to the hamstring. This makes playing on flat, even terrain a walk in the park — quite literally! Try new or difficult techniques slowly at first, then gradually increase your speed as you get better at them or feel more comfortable performing them.
This helps your body get used to the feeling of that move or technique so it becomes more natural to perform, even at higher speeds. Find a place where you can practice how quickly you respond to a signal, such as a gunshot or whip crack. This can help you better train your brain to process auditory stimuli and turn them into increasingly automatic physical reactions. You can use numerous online tools to test reaction time, like this one.
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