Monday, February 18, 2008

Mindful Timing: A reaction to Bejamin Libet

In 1970, Benjamin Libet performed experiments with the brain and he found out that the brain initiates free choices about a third of a second before we are aware of the choice therefore the person decides to act freely before the body initiates the action. This raised the question; " whether we can speed up our minds relative to physical time...[to] become mentally more productive and get more high quality decision making done per fixed amount of physical time".
I don't know if i can answer that question but i could try. A 100mph major league fast ball is about 4/10 of a second faster than the blink of an eye and some professional players have made their living being successful fastall hitters. To get to this point softball and baseball palyers have trained and trained from pee-wee till the majors as the velocity of pitches have increased. To my understanding, it takes some mind ability to play baseball; you have to make a choice between swinging or not at a pitch does for a 100mph fastball your thinking or decision making or as the article from the internet encyclopedia of philosophy puts it "initiating free choices" has to be quicker. To follow this train of thought then i will have to agree that we can by practice speed up the decision making of the mind just as the hitter who progress along the ranks till professional baseball or softball has to, to become a better hitter.

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