London, Feb. 3: In the Wild West of the early Hollywood movies, the gunfight duels between the bad and the good characters always ended in the hero winning. Ever wonder why the quicker draw is always the one responding rather than initiating action?It’s just a question of 21 milliseconds.
British researchers have come up with a scientific explanation: Reaction is faster than action. University of Birmingham researchers have been carrying out “laboratory gunfights” to show that we move faster when we react to something in our environment than we do when we initiate the action ourselves.The research team set up laboratory gunfights — a competition between two people who were challenged to press a row of buttons faster than their opponent. There was no “go” signal, so all they had to go by was either their own intention to move or a reaction to their opponent — just like the gunslingers of legend.The researchers found that the participants who reacted to their opponent executed the movement on average 21 milliseconds faster than those who initiated the movement. However, they did not respond as accurately in the test.“In our everyday lives, some of the movements we make come about because we decide to make them, while others are forced on us by reacting to events. Bohr’s suggestion reflects this everyday intuition. We wanted to know if there was evidence for these reactive movements being swifter than the equivalent proactive ones,” Dr Andrew Welchman, who led the research, said.Inspired by the fact that the man who draws his gun first is the one to get shot at, Nobel physics laureate Niels Bohr had suggested that the intentional act of drawing and shooting is slower than the act of firing in response to another’s initial action.The concept may have been inspired by cowboy movies, but it is more useful to avoid oncoming traffic, according to the study published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.“As a general strategy for survival, having this system in our brains that gives us quick-and-dirty responses to the environment seems pretty useful. 21 milliseconds may seem like a tiny difference, and it probably wouldn’t save you in a Wild West duel because your brain takes around 200 milliseconds to respond to what your opponent is doing, but it could mean the difference between life and death when you are trying to avoid an oncoming bus,” he added.The research team is also exploring whether there are two different brain processes happening for the two types of action, offering a potential understanding of Parkinson’s disease.
Sarju Kaul