Delay by 0.1 Seconds Causes Failure
The researchers have discovered that delay by 0.1 seconds in the neural communication is the cause of our inability to revise our planned activities. This delay is the reason for many accidents. This delay, and not physical fitness, interprets a lot of failures in your daily lives.
You have drafted an email. The cursor is on the send button of the email. Your finger is on the left click button of the mouse. You decided to send the email but just then your eyes spotted a grammatical error in the email and you don’t want to send the message now. You couldn’t stop sending it.
Richard is playing table tennis. A lofty ball is coming to his court. He decides to smash it but just then sees it’s spinning. He changes his decision and wants to defend it. He could just manage to defend it.
Leena is driving her car. She is about to take a left turn. Just then she spots a child in from of the car. She decides to go straight. She could just manage to go straight and save the child.
There are dozens of such moments in our daily life when we have to change our mind from ‘Send’ to Don’t send’, ‘Smash’ to ‘Defend’, ‘Turn’ to ‘Don’t turn’. We are able to do it sometimes and unable to at other times. The neuroscience of the changing these actions has been discovered by
Our ability to abruptly modify a planned behaviour is controlled via a single region of the brain’s prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the area involved in planning and other higher mental functions. By studying other parts of the brain in both humans and monkeys, however, Johns Hopkins University researchers have now concluded that last-moment decision-making is a lot more complicated than previously known, involving complex neural coordination among multiple brain areas.