Exercise reduces reaction time, I’ve found. What’s the threshold? I wondered — how little exercise do you need to get the effect? I wanted to know so that in my omega-3 experiments, I could be active — e.g., walk to a cafe — without distorting the results. Also, for practical reasons, I wanted to produce the effect as easily as possible.
To learn more about the threshold, I walked on my treadmill for 15 minutes at a comfortable speed (2.8 miles/hour). Here’s what happened:
If anything, the short walk increased reaction time. Thirty minutes of walking produced a clear (and repeatable) decrease, so the the effect appears to require between 15 and 30 minutes of walking.
I did this experiment three days ago. Self-experimentation is many times easier than conventional science; blogging is many times easier than conventional publishing. A powerful combination, I hope.
In this set your pre-walk reaction times are lower than in any other experiment. I’m not surprised that you don’t see an effect in this set because you’re already responding faster than you do in other sets (even post-exercise). Any speculation on why you did better across the board on Saturday?
This is my first comment to your blog so I also want to take a moment and thank you for the consistently intriguing posts.
Thanks, Bob.
Why I did better across the board? My reaction times have been steadily going down for a long time. I’m just learning the task better and better; how long the learning has continued (hundreds of tests) surprised me when I did the analysis that showed it.
This experiment was followed by another experiment in which I did see an RT decrease due to exercise.