But that's for events that can be planned in advance, right? I wouldn't be surprised to find that while those people are very fast at responding in general, that for some things they've offloaded the timing to their nervous system through repetitious training and/or subconsciousness.
I doubt a major league baseball player has time to consciously decide exactly when to start the swing for many pitches, but instead relies on feel and training, and allows their mind to instead determine whether they should abort entirely. A speedrunner is just another form of highly trained individual, so I think whether they are good at hitting sub 100ms timing events (as long as they are advertised ahead of time or are regular) is sort of orthogonal as to whether people can consciously measure periods that small in general terms.
I think this is exactly right. Speedrunners (and film editors) can perform actions with frame-perfect precision when they can plan those actions ahead of time. It might be similar to how musicians can perform notes with extraordinary temporal precision, as long as they know ahead of time what the timings will be (and in some cases as long as they have external references to resynchronize with).
I don't think there are any speedrunners who can be expected to give a frame-perfect response to an unexpected event.
The observational astronomy version could be that a human being could synchronize two clocks to less than 0.1 second difference (by starting one when the other reached a specified time, maybe), but still not measure an uncontrolled natural event to the same precision.
I'm not sure how this works with timing human athletic performance using a stopwatch, but I think I would actually be wary of trusting a stopwatch-measured time much below 0.1 second precision, even if the stopwatch displays more decimal places. I think athletic records in the timeframe this book is talking about were reported to the nearest 0.1 second and not below, and having more decimal places in our measurements has required video replay and, later, other electronic timing methods.
> I don't think there are any speedrunners who can be expected to give a frame-perfect response to an unexpected event.
This is the reason why tool-assisted speedruns are faster than speedruns without a tool. TASBot (a great thing to search for fun videos from Awesome Games Done Quick) certainly can react within a single frame, every time.
Humans generally rely on cues usually called a "setup" do to these.
That's funny, I've watched many speedruns, both RTA and TAS, and thought about the reaction time issue a bit, but never fully articulated this important difference to myself. Thanks for putting it so clearly!
> But that's for events that can be planned in advance, right?
Not planned, but an unconscious reaction or muscle memory. There isn't enough time to think about something and then trigger your muscles to move. It's got to be second nature to hit that level of "reaction time".
Yeah, that's also along what I was thinking (as noted later), but also I think you can also get close or achieve if you can prime yourself because you know the event is coming, and get the timing down. Sort of like the cyclone arcade game (if it wasn't a scam[1]). I think there's a huge difference between hitting a random 100ms time and hitting a 100ms time that's coming at a set time that you can see and judge. That's what I meant by "planned", even if it poorly encapsulates that.
I think in some cases it can be planned, in the sense that Walter Murch talked about frame-perfect cuts in video editing (which apparently is common and other expert film editors can do it too, not just Walter Murch). In that case the details of the video you're reacting to would literally be different for every cut, so the ability seems slightly more generic, because it's not aligned to exactly the same sensory or physiological cue each time it's used.
> "One of the most obvious reasons for this standard pattern is that while it is possible for any number of factors to extend the response time of a given trial, it is not physiologically possible to shorten RT on a given trial past the limits of human perception (typically considered to be somewhere between 100-200 ms), nor is it logically possible for the duration of a trial to be negative."
Because you're not reacting immediately. You're watching something move over a second or longer and hitting the button when they line up.
To prove it's not reaction time, you could even close your eyes for the last half second. And someone could do this on a trick they just learned and don't have muscle memory for.
> nor is it logically possible for the duration of a trial to be negative.
Yet hitting the button early for a trick with a small window of frames happens constantly. That by itself should show it's not a matter of reaction time.
The pitch length is 20m, and typical fast balls can be 120km/h=33m/s. For a "yorker" that might mean only 20.12/33=0.6s for the ball to reach the batsman, but for a typical bounced delivery, it's probably like 1 second.
However, the ball bounces usually 5 m from the batsman, and changes direction after the bounce, and that gives only 5/33=0.15s (or maybe 0.2-0.25s) to reach the batsman after the bounce.
Which means that the batsman is unable to change their swing after the bounce. That I find hard to believe. I think they do.
I doubt a major league baseball player has time to consciously decide exactly when to start the swing for many pitches, but instead relies on feel and training, and allows their mind to instead determine whether they should abort entirely. A speedrunner is just another form of highly trained individual, so I think whether they are good at hitting sub 100ms timing events (as long as they are advertised ahead of time or are regular) is sort of orthogonal as to whether people can consciously measure periods that small in general terms.