Can you speed up your brain?

[double_pedro]

Perhaps shooting faster (i.e. fast clicks) helps your brain run faster so you "see more". It would be interesting to see studies done in the context of shooting.

Full article

Take the peculiar case of an individual known as BW. As BW drove his car one day, the trees and buildings by the road began to speed by, as if he were driving at 300 kilometres per hour. BW eased up on the accelerator, but the cityscape continued to whizz by. Unable to cope with the speed of the world around him, BW stopped his car by the roadside.

While BW perceived the world as having accelerated, in reality what had happened was that BW had slowed down. He walked and talked in slow motion: when his doctor asked him to count 60 seconds in his head, he took 280 seconds to do it. It turned out that he had a tumour in his brain's frontal cortex.

The case is not unique. Other people with damage in that area have reported similar symptoms. Though such drastically altered perception can clearly be debilitating, it might occasionally be advantageous to change the brain's internal clock. "Accelerating" the brain - the opposite of BW's experience - might help a footballer, say, or a soldier to view the world in slow motion when things get tight. The difficulty, however, is in finding a safe way to induce the phenomenon on demand.

Speeding up the brain

John Weardon, an experimental psychologist at Keele University in the UK, claims to have found a way. When Weardon exposed his subjects to 10 seconds of fast clicks (about 5 per second) and then asked them to estimate the duration of a burst of light or a sound, they believed that second stimulus lasted about 10 per cent longer than if they'd heard silence or white noise before the burst.

It looked as though their central pacemaker had accelerated but, again, the results might simply have been due to a distortion of memory. So Weardon's former student, Luke Jones at the University of Manchester, UK, decided to test the subjects' rate of mental processing during the experience. After exposing them to the clicks, he measured how quickly they could accomplish three different tasks: basic arithmetic, memorising words or hitting a specific key on a computer keyboard.

The results, to be published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, showed that the clicks accelerated the subjects' performance in all three tasks by 10 to 20 per cent. It was as if the drumbeat of their brain's internal slave galley had sped up - compelling each neuron to row faster. White noise had no such effect. "Information processing in the brain is running in subjective time," says Weardon. "If you speed up people's subjective time, they really do seem to have more time to process things."

[Duane Thomas]

Sure. We do the same thing by training ourselves to see multiple, distinct sight pictures per second.

[Sam]

Speeding up the brain is one way of expressing what happens. In many things that we do repeatedly, there are increasing levels of understanding.

[benos]

It also seems - the more you see, the slower things seem.

be

[lugnut]

I really wish there was a way to speed up the speeding up!! Without inducing schizophrenia !!

[SN13]

Hrm. Wonder if you could sleep with something like this on?

Also, this is the same way to train yourself to read faster. have things scroll by faster than you can read them and do it over and over and then cut back to normal speed and it will seem like you have all the time in the world.

[benos]

I really wish there was a way to speed up the speeding up!!

There is. By slowing down.

[DWFAN]

I really wish there was a way to speed up the speeding up!!

There is. By slowing down.

+1

Some of my best run (fast time, good hits) stages have felt veeerrrryyyyy slow.

[edison]

What a coincidence, I read this getting an eye exam for shooting glasses.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flies

[lugnut]

I really wish there was a way to speed up the speeding up!!

There is. By slowing down.

You know.. the more I shoot this game.. the more completely puzzling it becomes. One thing is for sure... I've run some IDPA classifiers recently for example- my times are approaching the low 90s with consistency... yet much of it feels very slow to me. Sometimes I just have NO concept of time. Sometimes I say I will slow down and pay more attention to the sights.. but then my times are fast. When I try to push- my times aren't always as fast as my "slow" runs. I find it hard to slow down as I often feel like I'm shooting too slow as it is. My raw times are often much faster than other shooters... it's completely baffling!!

[Duane Thomas]

That's the frustrating and fascinating thing about entering the higher skill levels. Your perception of time becomes almost completely unreliable. Therefore the only thing we can really do is watch the sights and let the time take care of itself.

[benos]

That's the frustrating and fascinating thing about entering the higher skill levels. Your perception of time becomes almost completely unreliable. Therefore the only thing we can really do is watch the sights and let the time take care of itself.

After complaining about a stage that felt slow and was slow, I remember the TGO replying (something close to) - "When you are doing it right you will not have any concept of slow or fast." Then he added to hammer me, "You should know that." So obviously I wasn't doing it right. Or at best I had forgotten howt to do it right. But it was what I needed to hear at the time.

Great things happen when you are not thinking about fast or slow and are just paying attention.

be