THE SPEED OF THOUGHT.

Kumara Times, Issue 1581, 21 October 1881, Page 2

THE SPEED OF THOUGHT.

Heliriholtz showed that a wave of thought would require about a minute" to trarerse a mile of nerve; and Hirscli found that a toudh on the face was recognised by the brain, arid responded to by a manual signal; in the seventh of a second. He. also found that the' speed of sense differed for different organsj the sense of hearing being responded to in a sixth of a secondj while that of sight required only one-fifth of a Becond to be felt and signalled. Iu all these cases the distance traversed was about the same, so the inference id that images travel more slowly than sounds or touch. It still remained; however, to the portion of this interval takeu up by the action of the brain; Professor Dondera, by very delicate apparatus, has demonstrated this to be about seventy-five thousandths of a second. Of the whole interval forty thousandths are occupied in the simple act of recognition, and thirty-five thousandths for the act of willing a response. When two irritants were caused to operate on the same sense, one twenty-fifth of a second was required for the person to recognise which was the first; but a slightly longer interval was required to determine the priority in the case of the other senses. The results were obtained from a middle-aged man, but in youths the mental operations are somewhat quicker than in the adult. The average of many experiments proved that a single thought occupies one-fortieth of a second.—Engineer.