I’ve often been struck by the fact that, although being tall is considered an advantage in most American sports, the greatest (or second greatest, depending on who you ask) player of all time in the most popular sport on earth — Maradona — was well below average in height (he’s 5’5″, while the average Argentinian male is about 5’8″). And that’s always made me wonder about what advantages shorter people might have in various arenas. So this caught my attention:
If a person touches your toe and your nose at the same time, he says, “you will feel those touches as simultaneous. This is surprising because the signal from your nose reaches your brain before the signal from your toe. Why didn’t you feel the nose touch when it first arrived?”
It may be that our sensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest piece of information to arrive, Eagleman says.
[….]Because for the taller person it takes a tenth of a second longer for the toe-touch to travel up the foot, the ankle, the calf, the thigh, the backbone to the brain, the brain waits that extra beat to announce a “NOW!” That tall person will live his sensory life on a teeny delay (at least as regards toe-touching). This, of course, could apply to all kinds of lower-extremity experiences — cold or heat against the skin, tickles, rubs, hitting a soccer ball — the list goes on and on.