reaction times

[Les Snyder]

I didn't want to hijack the thread on PCC vs Open speed, so I'll re-post from some years ago...I'm going on a 71 year old memory, so the times may not be exact to the original post, but pretty close

 

I'm a retired high school teacher, and for 30 or so years I had a pool of lab rats at my disposal, namely my students, and fortunately at the time I was young and thin and liked to play USPSA...one of my labs was to determine the gravitational acceleration of a tennis ball dropped off our school football stadium... the problem encountered was for the students on the ground with the watches to get a classmate on the top to drop the balls consistently...to get a good start time, so a 3-2-1- drop command was adopted, but still those on the ground with the stopwatches had various reaction times starting the watches

 

so a preliminary reaction time determination was made, by having them drop rulers for each other, fingers at the end but not quite touching ...then dropping with and without warning to see how far down (in centimeters) they trapped the ruler with their fingers.... from this distance measure we could refer to an acceleration curve to determine the time ( d= 1/2 t^2)... I went one more step, which after reading early books on sports visualization to further quantify my results... what I concluded had to do with brain hemisphere dominance as it relates to athletes... I attempted to group these athletes by brain dominance (right brain dominance controls left side motion)

 

there were 4 identifiable reaction time groups (naturally there are outlying individuals)

 

 the quickest were those that were left handed, and  most were <.11s

second were right handed but were left eye dominant, <.16s

third were right handed but when asked to interlock their fingers and cross their thumbs, had a left thumb on top, <.20s

and finally those that were right handed and ended with a right thumb on top...>.20s

 

over the years I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of World Class shooters, and all but Ken Tapp were right handed and dominant left eye, and my premise is that most World Class athletes are also

 

 

[Bwillis]

I’m in the third, I’ve always known my first step to be slower. 

[Les Snyder]

unfortunately I'm a 4

 

Les

L747

[Bwillis]

I’ve given this some thought, what about a lefty that’s right eye dominate? Also did you get any data on ambidextrous people? 

[Les Snyder]

Bwillis... no, sorry on the ambidextrous, and some students fell outside my predictions... my sample pool was 9th graders, and most of the data was collected from the student athletes that used their reaction times as a stepping stone to science projects that were targeted at improving their athletic performance due to visualization.... with more emphasis on the visualization than reaction times, as the visualization was a teachable skill... I stole a lot from "the inner game of tennis" and a film by Lanny Basham in the paper I gave all my student athletes...

 

with some coaching, the JV Girls basketball team shot 80% from the foul line one season, had a student win the Knights of Columbus state free throw championship, and a girl win the first Fla 3 point state championship

 

I added the categories to the SOPMOD manual for the M4 carbine I had a chance to proof read

 

one of the skills I taught was factor label calculations... and "global" thinking students (especially honors students) would not attempt to "learn" a new system, if they could already "do it better my way"...the interlaced fingers, thumb over was a very good indicator of those that would have problems later in the year, when they could not "see" the answer