OneAndOneIs2

They say you can't beat the clock.

Your brain has a clock, and you can change its speed fairly easily. Which can give the illusion that you can, in fact, escape its influence. The truth is, though, that it controls almost every move you make.

I imagine you're familiar with the old childhood favourite of "Pat your head and rub your tummy" which demonstrates how hard it is to get your limbs to do two completely different things.

But that can be overcome with just co-ordination. Getting your limbs out of synch rhythmically is waaaaay harder.

Try this: First, alternate tapping on the desk with your hands: Left, right, left, right

Easy, right?

Second, try going slightly out of synch by using a 2:1 ratio: Left, left, right, left, left, right

Also totally simple.

Now, stick with a 2:1 but this time in-step: Left, BOTH, left, BOTH, left, BOTH

This is also easy, but I'm willing to bet that you're having to think about this rather more than the previous two steps.

The reason? The way your brain dealt with the first two steps was to tie into its 'clock': Every 'beat' triggered a single movement, and it simply alternated which side it sent the movement to. Even a simple 2:1 sequence was just a slight variation on the theme.

But now you're doing two different actions: Your brain's not running the "single tap, single tap, single tap" 'program' and just alternating sides: It's alternating between two different programs: "single tap, double tap, single tap, double tap" and that makes it trickier.

But here's where it gets really hard: Try and get your hands out of synch, with one tapping fast and one tapping slowly.

I'm willing to bet you can't. Sure, it might seem like you can if you don't pay close attention. But EVERY time your 'slow' hand taps, it'll do so BETWEEN two taps of the 'fast' hand. When I try to just tap one hand fast and the other slow, I fall into a natural 4-then-1 ratio.

Try getting your slow hand so it's moving constantly up and down, just slower than the fast hand, so it can't sneak in between the other hand's tapping. Even then, I bet you'll still be starting and stopping between the fast hand's taps.

If you manage it, well done. If not, don't worry, I can barely do it myself. But here's one virtually nobody can do: Completely asynchronous tapping. Try and have one hand tap 3 evenly-spaced times whilst the other does 4. No pauses, no skipping beats: One hand doing three equal beats for every four equally-spaced beats that the other hand does.

I'm told that, if you really work on it for a long time, you can eventually make this work. It actually requires you to effectively re-wire your brain: Your brain ties every move it makes into its 'clock', and for good reason - when you walk, for instance, you really don't want your left leg to move out of sequence with the right.

To be able to do a 3:4 tapping sequence, you need to actually create a second 'clock' that your brain can tie into: something it neither evolved to do, nor has any convincing reason to learn to do in normal life.

The only person I know who even claims to have met anyone who's done it is a martial arts nut who claims it makes you able to do attacks faster if you can begin one attack with one hand before you've finished the attack of the other. I can kind of see his point.. but not enough to make the effort to try and do it myself.

I can't remember what started me thinking about this whole topic.. but it's vaguely interesting to try and catch when your brain is slaving your movements to its internal clock sometimes.