Leave My Cowboys Alone

"Cowboys are awesome" is the revelation granted to me by listening to the song "You Look Great When I'm Fucked Up" by The Brian Jonestown Massacre. They never actually say that but you...just, you know, you can hear it in the song. When I hear that song, I think of cowboys dueling, and dueling is awesome.

Then some physicist named Niels Bohr decided he was going to figure out why bad cowboys always lose in duels. According to the article, he enlisted a fellow physicist to do a few pretend duels and Dr. Bohr always came out on top even though he pulled his guns last, probably because the guy he was dueling with was on his payroll. SCIENCE!

Going off that, British experimental psychologist Andrew Welchmann did his own experiment (this makes sense because he is an experimental psychologist as we learned previously):

His experiment didn't have any subjects aiming pistols at each other, sadly, but instead had them competing to push three buttons on a console in a specific order. Those who reacted to the first movements of their competitors moved around 9% faster then those who initiated the exchange, though the reacting subjects' movements tended to be less accurate.

Welchman believes: "It would be sensible for the brain to have a reactive system that went a bit faster than a system based on decisions or intentions." An inaccurate, but quick response system may have evolved in the human brain for when survival is at risk, where making an error is less important than having some kind of reaction at all.

I think both Welchmann and Bohr are incredibly silly if they didn't realize the bad guy pulls first and dies first because it's in the script, but they need their government grants and everyone loves cowboys.