Speed and How It Affects Humans

In the podcast, Speed on Radiolab by Robert Krulwich, it talks about speed and how it affects what we hear, see, how we interact and comprehend in the world based on a human time scale. Everything in human life is done at speed and we are experiencing the speed at which one does something. For the podcast, it looks at speed based on microseconds and the other fastest things in the universe.

To start, what is speed? Speed is the rate that someone or something can move and/ or operate. Speed is something that is continuously happening and is even done to humans unconsciously. In the podcast, there was a speaker named Josh Foer who is a science journalist, had talked an obsession with the longest running science experiment of all time. He talks about a material called pitch, which is a visco-elastic polymer, the experiment in 1927 all the way until now to watch the speed at which the stretching, dangling drip will drop. It takes about 8-12 years for this material, held by only four little fibres, to drip. This drip can happen in 1/10 of a second, faster than most would ever see but it takes such a slow time to occur. From this example, Radiolab would continue to talk about speed in a more human sense. Based on the podcast, more human examples of speed are shown in a human’s body, and in our sensory signals. A telegraph can send information to to different places, just like our bodily sensory systems. Nerve impulses like pain signals travel quite slowly at 0. 61m/s and touch signals travel at speeds of 76. 2m/s. This means that the time it takes for humans to process the signals being sent to the brain to comprehend what is occurring could mean that there is a delay in human reactions to things being seen, felt, or even touched.

Human neurons, when it comes to communicating and sending signals, it is much slower than the other network systems. Hearing, on the other hand,the fastest sense since it reacts on a millisecond from your ears to your spinal cord, and skipping the brain. Speed of how signals are sent to the brain for humans to then comprehend what is happening shows how speed, in the sense of being slower, greatly affects humans in their daily lives. Lastly, the speed of financing and business require a fast paced speed to function and produce services and goods at an effective period of time. Without speed, there would be no more competition in business.

If people would not have adapted to changes, others will be going faster to the top to be better than the competition. Delivery of goods is another strong example of why speed is needed and efficient in today’s and in past societies. All of this shows the importance of speed in the industrial and money making factors. To conclude, speed is a huge factor in human function in both the body and in the world. Body systems, industrial means, movement of all things and many other things on the planet and the universe depend on speed for function.