Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-30967537-20190108000156/@comment-35745775-20190111215156

Amrosa wrote:

The reaction time that RattleSnack is talking about is that of responding to an unexpected stimulus. With braking, the brain is simulating everything before hand, so the signals are being sent just when they need to be. Take the first turn. You are pretty much looking for the braking point the instant you cross the start line. Your brain already has a plan for what it is supposed to do well before it. Now if a deer suddenly ran across the road, that is where that instantaneous reaction comes in.

I agree that reaction time is not the right phrase. My point is about hitting that braking point consistently. Your brain thinks „I‘m gonna hit it right there“, anticipates, and sends a signal to your hand. But much as we might like to think that we are always braking at the same point, we are not. For slower cars this is not such a big deal because the difference in distance travelled is not so great. The track doesn‘t get any bigger just because we are travelling faster!

Try a slightly different test. Try to stop the stopwatch on your smartphone exactly at 1.00 second. You know how long a second is, and you can practise this too. You can see the second approaching on the screen. Now combine your experience with visual input and anticipate hitting that 1.00.

I bet you can hit it exactly sometimes, but other times you will be somewhere in the range 0,95 - 1.00 seconds.

Now work out how many metres of distance travelled that 0.15 seconds spread equates to at 200 mph. It‘s 13m. And you thought you were always anticipating hitting that braking point at exactly the same spot??