I don’t think the speed of the electrical impulse would change, but yes reaction time would. Perception is more about our brain processing signals than it is about the signals themselves. What you experience yourself as seeing is not the raw image going into your eyes. Slower processing means you’re also less likely to see, as in be aware of, details.
This is why tired driving is incredibly dangerous.
I’m not a neurologist either, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but it seems that I’ve gone a bit deeper on the rabbit hole.
AFAIK, “brain processing” seems to be mostly signal propagation. Our brains don’t work anything like the neural networks we use, but it seems to work like some kind of neural network, and “processing” being made by moving signals from one place to another is part of it.
The one effect of sleep that I know of is exactly the kind of “environmental cleanup” necessary to make the electrical signals move faster. Now, there are certainly lots of other effects I don’t know of, and for all I know the speed could actually be bounded and all that sleep does is to keep it at the boundary. Also, “tired” is a very ambiguous word here. But still, I’d expect it to be important.
In this case, what i meant by “Signal propagation” was purely the time delay from retinal stimulation, to optic nerve, to brain
And by “brain processing”, i meant “the time it takes from brain receives visual data to you experiencing it”
Also, if you’re interested, Artem Kirsanov is a really fascinating YT channel that talks about cutting edge research into neurons and information processing
I don’t think the speed of the electrical impulse would change, but yes reaction time would. Perception is more about our brain processing signals than it is about the signals themselves. What you experience yourself as seeing is not the raw image going into your eyes. Slower processing means you’re also less likely to see, as in be aware of, details.
This is why tired driving is incredibly dangerous.
You’d be surprised. The speed of electrical pulses inside neurons change due to all kinds of factors, like training and diet.
I do really expect them to change with tiredness too.
I would expect that brain processing takes orders of magnitude longer than signal propagation
So, while you’re probably correct, I’d wager that the brain processing delay drowns out any variances in signal propagation speeds
(I are computer science, not neuroscience)
I’m not a neurologist either, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but it seems that I’ve gone a bit deeper on the rabbit hole.
AFAIK, “brain processing” seems to be mostly signal propagation. Our brains don’t work anything like the neural networks we use, but it seems to work like some kind of neural network, and “processing” being made by moving signals from one place to another is part of it.
The one effect of sleep that I know of is exactly the kind of “environmental cleanup” necessary to make the electrical signals move faster. Now, there are certainly lots of other effects I don’t know of, and for all I know the speed could actually be bounded and all that sleep does is to keep it at the boundary. Also, “tired” is a very ambiguous word here. But still, I’d expect it to be important.
I think i chose my terms poorly
In this case, what i meant by “Signal propagation” was purely the time delay from retinal stimulation, to optic nerve, to brain
And by “brain processing”, i meant “the time it takes from brain receives visual data to you experiencing it”
Also, if you’re interested, Artem Kirsanov is a really fascinating YT channel that talks about cutting edge research into neurons and information processing
Brains are weird so that checks out