Abstract
“AS quick as thought” is a common proverb, and probably not a few persons feel inclined to regard the speed of mental operations as beyond our powers of measurement. Apart, however, from those minds which take their owners so long in making up because they are so great, rough experience clearly shows that ordinary thinking does take time; and as soon as mental processes were brought to work in connection with delicate instruments and exact calculations, it became obvious that the time they consumed was a matter for serious consideration. A well-known instance of this is the “personal equation” of the astronomers. When a person watching the movement of a star, makes a signal the instant he sees it, or the instant it seems to him to cross a certain line, it is found that a definite fraction of a second always elapses between the actual falling of the image of the star on the observer's eye, and the making of the signal—a fraction, moreover, varying somewhat with different observers, and with the same observer under differing mental conditions. Of late years considerable progress has been made towards an accurate knowledge of this mental time.
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FOSTER, M. The Velocity of Thought. Nature 2, 2–4 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/002002a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/002002a0