D.C. Humans make 150,000 eye movements a day and the process that takes place in single cells in the brain before each of these movements is the focus of Schall's work. By studying the few hundred milliseconds it takes for the eye to focus on an object in an image, scientists can further unravel the inner workings of the human brain. Reactions to a stimulus can vary randomly over a half of a second or more. A good example is a sprinter's reaction time. British sprinter Linford Christie was disqualified from the 1996 Summer Olympics for starting too soon after the gun.
Sprinters are at the mercy of randomly varying reaction times.
The problem of reaction time is one of the fundamental problems of psychology that goes back 140 years, Schall said. Many originally thought that brain processes were infinitely fast. It is fast - but it is measurable. Schall and his colleagues are testing this variability. Although research has already determined the general idea of variation, Schall's work provides the first insight into what's happening in individual neurons to produce the effect.