Breaking the rhythm

This by way of a follow-up to the post on waves and regions at reference 1.

I had occasion the other day to learn the NATO alphabet, the alphabet used to make the call signs for civilian aircraft, with the occasion being the occasional need to spell words out in a hyper-audible fashion.

Then waking this morning, I thought to silently rehearse this alphabet while firmly tapping my finger at rate of around one tap per second, that is to say 1Hz.

The drill seemed to be that while I could sometimes get all the way through, I would usually break at some point and take some seconds to recover. After ‘Golf’ and after ‘Romeo’ were popular break points for some reason, although by no means the only ones. And once the rhythm was broken, it was clearly taking some considerable brain-work to get restarted again. I remember that a long time ago, I used to notice something of the sort when telling my young children stories which I made up as I went along. Breaks were nearly fatal.

Trying the same thing without finger tapping did not work nearly so well. Much more likely to make a mistake or drift off somewhere else altogether. One seemed to need the finger tapping to keep the brain on the job.

Question one: when I do restart, do I restart on the same beat, or is the restart random with respect to that first beat? Thinking here of Winfree's phase resetting experiments on circadian rhythms reported at reference 3.

Working at it, I found I did better when I kept the beat slow, a bit less than 1Hz. And contrary to allegations in the past that one can only think of one word at a time, partly because thinking of a word activates the vocal machinery of which there is just the one, I found that thinking a few letters ahead improved accuracy. This seemed to happen spontaneously at the slower speed, without having given the matter any thought. With the letters ahead being rather faint, rather shadowy compared with the letter that one was sub-vocalising. A bit fanciful, but perhaps what one has here is a succession, a sequence of words going down a long pipeline, with the brain at one end and the mouth at the other - and that with practise it is possible to inspect or delete the contents at different points along that pipeline.

Sometimes, I also found that when I was on the verge of breaking the rhythm, that the right word would appear after all, with only a very slight delay, as if out of nowhere. I remember that from time to time I almost forget my bank PIN number, to find that my fingers seem to have remembered it, even if my part of my brain has not. Perhaps something of the sort is happening here: the relevant information is stored in more than one place, there is redundancy and one can sometimes use that redundancy to recover from error.

I then tried the ordinary alphabet, on which errors are far fewer and far between. On the other hand, I seem to have been trained to recite the alphabet in three groups of seven, followed by two letters (V, W), followed by a last group of three (XYZ). The groups of seven are split into a subgroup of three (for example, ABC) followed by a subgroup of four (for example, DEFG). And there is a tune to go with it. If I try to avoid this particular rhythm and tune, I am more likely to make mistakes: presumably things which were fixed in my brain at some point during my first years at school.

Question two: can I time this sort of thing in Excel? Having never got down below whole seconds in the matter of time. For example, using the VB ‘Now’ function – which is not good enough for present purposes.

A few minutes with Bing and Excel and I turn up a function called ‘MyTime’ which appears to deliver seconds and milliseconds, albeit with curious behaviour of these results inside Excel VB. And using the ‘Msgbox’ function I find that I can write the exact time of a series of finger taps on the stationary mouse to an Excel worksheet and that I might now be able to answer the first question posed above. We have a plan for the day ahead!

The point of all this being that keeping to the rhythm seems to be important to the brain when doing tasks of this sort. Rhythm is important to the brain. And where there is rhythm there are likely to be sine waves.

PS: early results suggest that while my mean tapping rate might be quite close to 1Hz, there is a lot of variation. Standard deviation high.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/waved-up-regions.html. 

Reference 2: https://www.freevbcode.com/. The source of the all important function, the work of one Brian M. Matumbura. Using bits of VB which I usually leave well alone.

Reference 3: The geometry of biological time – Winfree – 1980.