Moving at about 100 metres per second, a signal telling a finger to move has to travel from your brain down your spinal cord and into your arm.
Much of the time it takes you to react to the ruler dropping is the time it takes electrical signals to travel along your nerves. You can take the time it takes to decide things out of the equation. Practice does make perfect because you can create a “muscle memory” that means you do not have to think so much to catch the ruler. All of these processes involve individual neurons that transmit electrochemical messages to other neurons.Ī person’s reaction time depends on a couple of things that can be improved and a couple that cannot. The final process is the contraction of the muscles as the hand grasps the ruler. The motor cortex sends a message to the spinal cord, which then sends a message to the muscle in the hand/fingers. The visual cortex sends a message to the motor cortex to initiate catching the ruler. After the ruler is dropped, the eye sends a message to the visual cortex, which perceives that the ruler has fallen. Rather, this activity is designed to measure the response time to something that you see.Ĭatching a dropped ruler begins with the eye watching the ruler in anticipation of it falling.
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The neural pathway involved in a reaction time experiment involves a series of neural processes. This experiment does not test a simple reflex. The whole process takes between 150 and 220 milliseconds. Your finger muscles move to catch the timer. A nerve signal travels from your eye to your brain then to your finger muscles. When your friend drops the timer in the experiment, you see it start to move. In this activity, the students participate in a simple ruler drop experiment and learn about the body’s response behind it.