3 ms·
It being a biological limit is certainly possible; your post is interesting and I don't want to discount it. But I really do think psychology plays a huge role
by montyf 9y ago
It being a biological limit is certainly possible; your post is interesting and I don't want to discount it. But I really do think psychology plays a huge role in these stories. From my personal experience running track and field this phenomenon occurs rather frequently. All it takes is one person achieving a long-standing milestone for the rest of the team to quickly follow suit. I've seen similar things happen in non-physical competitive games, like chess and dota 2, at the highest level.
Maybe there is some kind of safety mechanism built into our brains preventing us from doing things that we've never observed or heard of being done. Brain: "No one's ever run sub-4 minutes, so I don't know for sure whether doing so would kill me or not. Better not try."
- js2 9y agoI wonder whether this may even dovetail with Tim Noakes’ “central govenor” theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_governor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_governor
- montyf 9y agoThanks, that's really interesting, including the Criticisms section. I think that there must be a mix of psychological and physiological factors at play. Not sure how directly relevant this is but I used to get dead-tired if I had any less than eight hours of sleep. I had spent most of my life hearing about how I "needed" at least eight hours. Then I had a period of insomnia where I would regularly get three hours a night which challenged this deeply-held belief. My functioning was impaired, of course, but it was comparable to how I functioned on 7 hours of sleep prior. Now I can sleep six hours a night without problems, having broken through some psychological barrier.