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Do you play a sport? If you do, you’re in good company. Almost 60% of kids in America play one sport or another. Here’s another question that seems unrelated, but actually kind of is: do you play video games? I bet you do.
Okay, normally, sports and video games are played as opposites: one works your body and keeps you active and healthy, and the other works your butt and makes it really good at sitting. But here’s the thing: a whole lot of sports and a whole lot of video games require you to have excellent reaction time to be good at them. Is a puck coming towards you? Line-drive right to shortstop? Maybe a zombie just jumped right out of that broken window and you need to take it out? Or maybe that’s not the Tetris piece you wanted, but darn it, you gotta find somewhere to put it, and fast. All of these tasks require you to read a situation and react to it very quickly, almost without thinking. Today we’re going to do a very simple test of your reaction time, one that has a built-in measurement system.
Materials
- A ruler
- Another person
- Paper and pencil
Process
- Give your other person the ruler. Have them hold it at the end that reads 30cm. (We’ll be using centimeters for this instead of inches because it’s both more precise and more scientific.)
- Hold your hand out a few inches below the ruler with your thumb on one side and your fingers on the other, ready to catch it with a grasping motion if it drops.
- Instruct your other person to drop it without warning.
- As soon as you realize the ruler has dropped, try to catch it in your hand.
- Did you catch it? Look at your hand and find which centimeter number is closest to being above your fingers. Write that number down on your paper and record it as “Trial 1.” Since we’re dropping the ruler with 30 cm at the top, the slower your reaction is, the higher your number will be.
- Repeat the experiment at least 10 times. Record your results each time.
- Examine your results. How did your performance change, if at all? Did your reaction time get faster or slower as you got more used to the ruler drop?
Summary
Reaction time is incredibly important for just about every competitive sport (and a whole load of video games). A running back in football has to be able to quickly dodge the other team’s defenders, and the defenders have to be able to react to his moves so they don’t get faked out. Goalies in soccer or hockey have to react to balls and pucks moving towards them at often incredible speeds.
There are multiple parts of your body involved in a fast reaction. First of all, there are your eyes (or another sensory organ). Then there’s your brain and your nervous system, and finally your muscles. In our experiment today it went like this:
- Your eyes gathered the light reflected from the ruler as it started to fall.
- That information was sent through your optic nerve to the vision areas of your brain.
- Your brain interpreted the information from the nerve and you consciously realized that the ruler had begun to fall.
- Your brain sent a signal down the nerves in your arm to your muscles to tell them to begin moving.
- The muscles in your arm and hand follow that signal and close your hand on the ruler.
There’s a lot going on there, and even if you caught the ruler right at the 30 cm mark, it’s still all taking only a split second to occur.
What’s pretty cool is that reaction time can be trained with practice. If you did the ruler drop 100 times, chances are you’d show much better times toward the end of your 100 than at the beginning. Just remember that if you want to train your reaction time, make sure you do it in the context where you’ll be using it. A goalie’s ability to stop a puck won’t benefit from learning to catch a ruler real fast, and a boxer training to return a tennis volley won’t improve his ability to dodge his opponent.
