May 30, 2009
Wimps have rapid reaction times
Holly Hight in Cosmos Magazine:
Unfit or weak people react sooner to sounds of approaching danger than strong, healthy people – which may be an evolutionary adaptation to allow them a larger margin of safety, says a new study.
Test subjects listened to a sophisticated sound system that mimicked an approaching object, explained John Neuhoff, an evolutionary psychologist at the College of Wooster in Ohio, U.S., and co-leader of the study.
The 'virtual object' sounded like a motorcycle passing on a highway, approaching the subject at 15 m/s and then whizzing past them. The subjects were asked to hit a key when they thought the sound was right in front of them.
Fitness was measured by two variables: heart rate after a bout of moderate cardiovascular exercise and muscular power, measured by the strength of their hand grips.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 08:50 AM | Permalink
Comments
Cool result. I'm sorta wimpy, never been good at sports, with one exception. I'm pretty twitchy and have fast reflexes, so it's not much surprise that the sport I was good at was fencing, where fast reflexes are a major component of your success.
Posted by: Harlan | May 30, 2009 1:31:24 PM
So wimpy people are jumpier?
Posted by: Sagredo | May 30, 2009 4:53:47 PM
...Making them not so "unfit" after all? What a Spencerian little article.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 30, 2009 7:48:25 PM
...Making them not so "unfit" after all?
Here they're using physical fitness, not evolutionary fitness.
Although I don't know what Spencerian means, so maybe you were making a joke.
Posted by: billy | May 30, 2009 9:13:15 PM
I didn't know evolution dealt out consolation prizes. Maybe the wimps in a given group are jumpier as part of an early warning system enabling the fit to flee. A wimp who knows what's coming, acts really rattled, but can win at neither fight nor flight is throwing the advantage to someone else, not to himself.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 30, 2009 10:15:30 PM
Billy, if physical fitness and evolutionary fitness aren't intended to be linked then this article makes no sense. (Not that it makes all that much sense anyway. Especially the part about how older people, being weaker, should be expected to react more quickly to sound stimuli as a compensation, even though they would have presumably long since passed on their genes. By this logic old homo sapiens never die, they just move more and more quickly until the rest of us can't see them anymore.)
I'd be much more interested in a study investigating the lack of intellectual fitness of this study's authors, or the journalists who purvey this nonsense to the general public.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 30, 2009 11:23:16 PM
I must have misunderstood that sentence. So you meant "unfit" in the evolutionary sense, as compared to the physically "unfit" in the quoted sentence of the article.
I think it's ridiculous anyway, as estimating when a motorcycle was in front of you doesn't seem to me to qualify as a "reaction time". That would instead be something like the time for you to first notice the motorcycle.
And it's strange to link evolution with physical fitness (in humans), as anyone can change it with diet and exercise.
Posted by: billy | May 31, 2009 2:26:22 AM
We are doing a project on the study that playing video games will help your reaction time we just want some information on this and if you can help us will you please just give us an email at jacobywalton@gmail.com
thank you,
Jacoby Walton
Posted by: jacoby walton | May 4, 2010 2:07:00 PM
We are doing a project on the study that playing video games will help your reaction time we just want some information on this and if you can help us will you please just give us an email at jacobywalton@gmail.com
Posted by: TREVOR REIDERMAN | May 4, 2010 2:17:58 PM
It's true. Just look at how fast George Bush ducked that shoe.
Posted by: J.Hawkins | May 4, 2010 2:53:13 PM
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