How Long It Takes to Think

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 7, 1880

How Long It Takes to Think

Prof. Helmholtz has demonstrated that it requires an appreciable time to think. In a frog, sensation travels along a nerve at the rate of eighty-five feet a second; in a whale, the rate of progress is one hundred feet a second; in man, the velocity is doubled. So that if a whale fifty feet in length were struck on the tail, the sensation of pain would require half a second to reach the brain of the animal. But sensation is not felt as soon as it reaches the brain. The results of carefully conducted experiments show that the brain requires one-tenth of a second to receive a sensation. In other words, it takes one-tenth of a second to think.