Shhhh, just lie still, son, don't try to talk. I know what you're
wondering. You come into town with the fastest draw in the West
and I let you draw first and still you're the one lying here with
a bullet in ya. Well, if only you'd studied some neuroscience you'd
know that being the fastest ain't necessarily gonna help you, son.
Why, a study just come out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
That's a Brit journal, don't worry about it. Showed that I can go
10 percent faster reaction to you drawing your gun than if I just
tried to draw my own gun first. Has to do with the way the nervous
system's set up. And that 10 percent, well more than made up for
your puny advantage. They say the great physicist Neils Bohr wondered
why the ones who drew second always seemed to win in Western movies.
Well, now we know. Now gimme back my issue of Scientific American
what you stole, you magazine rustler.
The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.
This transcript includes an error involving the allegedly "puny"
advantage of gunfighter 1, whose advantage in fact is not puny. Although
gunfighter 2 moves about 21 milliseconds faster than does gunfighter
1, the initiation of that movement can take about 200 milliseconds.
So the faster reaction movement would not ordinarily make up for
that delay. In this particular dramatic scenario, gunfighter 2 is
simply the better shot.