Neuroscience For Action Photography

A grizzly sprinting at 35 miles an hour from hundred feet away will sink its teeth into your expedition cargo pants in less than two seconds, giving you just enough time to engage the autofocus, select burst mode, and press the shutter. Depending on your reaction time and camera model, your closest ones may inherit ten or twenty premortal frames that could be made into a very short viral video clip.

Reaction times for trained athletes vary from superfast 40 ms for Muhammad Ali’s fastest punches to
150 ms required to return a table tennis ball. Sprinters need 100-150 ms after registering the starting
pistol to jump off the blocks.

There is a difference between the reaction time and the reflex. Reaction time is a measure how quickly
an organism responds to a stimulus. In contrast, a reflex is involuntary, used to protect the body, and
usually faster than a reaction. For example, the knee-jerk reflex, also called patellar reflex, is a sudden
kicking movement of the lower leg in respon...