How fast are your thoughts

The fastest is the startle reflex. Within five milliseconds, hundreds of muscles are recruited into a self-defense reaction: eyelids shut, shoulders and chest tighten up, hands clench.

Given a few more milliseconds, the body is able to respond in a more nuanced way. The amygdala triggers an immediate fight-or-flight response: your heart rate goes through the roof, your pupils dilate, and you hear yourself scream. We tend to think of startle and panic as bad things, because more often than not, they turn out to be overreactions.

But once in a while, they can save your bacon. I was holding a measuring cup full of flour when I suddenly found myself spinning around, flour flying everywhere, and grabbing my son, who had bounced too far forward and was at that moment falling head first toward the floor. We change lives. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. And we can prove it.

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About Us. Get stories that empower and uplift daily. See our other FREE newsletters. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy. Select free newsletters: The Weekender. Today's Highlights. Christian Science Perspective. It may seem like an instant, but just what is the speed of thought? A wave group, a coupled state of thought particles electroweak or a collection of synaptic connections.

Either way, the more the merrier. If you have a wide thought channel, you will be able to transfer more data in a shorter time, which explains why smarter people are indeed smarter. As to why some people will never be able to think about certain things, it could be the layout of brain topography, which dictates what the human CPU can do.

If you do not have enough connections for a certain thought, then it will never happen. A simple analogy would be to try to encode a cipher than is larger than the entire RAM of a machine. There would be no place where to store it. Thoughts can be faster than the speed of light, methinks. Deja vus. That's what happens when you exceed the speed of light and make time twitch. You create a temporal disturbance, although highly localized in your brain, which is then interpreted by our intellect as a delay in a thought already conceived in the past.

This makes us think we just had this thought, which we did. We registered the thought twice, once as the super-physical faster-than-light disturbance and once as pure physical information that our senses can register. This also explains why we have no idea that we just experienced a thought until we receive the information, because there's nothing to process the faster-than-light part.

To make a simple analogy, think of spurious thoughts as superluminar phase. And this means that our thoughts are not quite bound by physics, although the process of cognition is. Well, this is a daring claim, but we'll talk about that some more quite soon. However, there's a mathematical contradiction. Another question you may ask is: are thoughts as fast as we thought them or as fast as we think we thought them?

I'm not trying to be philosophical, but having a thought and understanding it is different. A good example is a physical reaction to change. If someone tries to slap you, you will blink, even though you may have not thought about it. So does this reflex constitute as a thought? And your understanding of the event will be as fast as your physical senses permit.

But what happens when the entire process is limited to internal processes in your brain? For example, if you're lying on a bed, with eyes closed and trying to solve a puzzle. There will be a moment when you figure out the puzzle, hopefully. You may ask yourselves how fast was the process of realization when you solved the puzzle?

Mind, it's not the same as asking how fast was that thought. For all practical purposes, measuring change is near impossible. At best, you have an approximation of a step function, but any physical thing requires a reasonable amount of time to measure, lest you end up with infinite uncertainty.

Therefore, trying to conceptualize thought is like trying to lift yourself off the ground - difficult.