an experiment: meditation and reflexes

[beoman]

I read somewhere (forgot the source unfortunately) that they did a few experiments to see what could help reflexes. The things they tried were: napping, light exercise, meditation, a few other things. They noticed that nothing really improved reflexes except napping (after a 40 minute period to get un-drowsy, they said), and meditating (which worked immediately afterwards). They said participants meditated for 40 minutes, and even the unexperienced ones had temporarily improved reflexes.

 

I wanted to try this out for myself. I used the reflex test at http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/index.php . So far it looks like it may be true! Here's my results so far:

 

On 8/25, before meditating, avg 237.8 over 10 trials, fastest ~218 . After 30 minutes of noting meditation, avg 227 over 10 trials, fastest ~207 .

 

On 8/29 at 3am, before meditating, avg 240.5, fastest 223 over 5 trials. After 41 min of focusing on breath meditation, avg 250.3, fastest 228 (yes, slower).

 

On 8/29, at 3pm (after sleeping), upon waking I had avg 255.4, min like ~230, after an hour or two of waking up, doing some tai chi exercises, avg 226.8, lowest ~218, and after 49 minutes of noting meditation, I had 198 min, avg 215.3 over 20 trials.

 

First + Third result gave me ~10ms or so increase it seems, with fastest time getting much faster. The site says the median is 215ms, so it's interesting that I'm slower than avg before meditating but faster than average after meditating. The 3am trial I actually did worse on, but I blame that on the fact that I was really sleepy =P.

 

Anyway, anyone want to repeat this experiment and see if they get similar results?

[gendao]

Just tried it without meditating and averaged 189 ms (165-202).

 

After 1 hour of zhan zhuang, my speed then decreased to a 197 average, lol..

[beoman]

Just tried it without meditating and averaged 189 ms (165-202).

 

After 1 hour of zhan zhuang, my speed then decreased to a 197 average, lol..

 

Nice, you're pretty fast.

 

What do you do during zhan zhuang?

 

It'd be nice to get a massive set of data points, but that'd be a tough undertaking.

[NeiChuan]

Stillness in Meditation is key for this.. Zazen is good.