Reaction time is the time taken to transmit a signal to your brain from a sense (i.e. sight, sound, touch, & the 6th sense) then to relay a message back to a part of your body to react to an action. An example of this is when someone holds a ruler up and tells you to grab it when they drop it, to measure your reaction.
This is also called the cogitative process, the thinking time taken for a signal to be communicated between the mind and body. This momentary process time is recorded at between 0.3 to 0.4 of a second, depending on the individual’s evaluation of a situation, remembering this time can be reduced or eliminated by effective training. Training makes the action an automatic process, changing a negative process to reflex of action.
There are many negative factors that cause this reaction to become slower such as; fear, pain, tension, fighting stance, and outside influences like noise and distractions.
Fear slows our reaction time down when we think that we cannot overcome a situation, such as passing a test or beating someone in a fight. First we think that we are not able to achieve our goal and panic, losing our focus and time.
Pain slows this reaction time down; when we concentrate on an injury we have received within a fight. Once again we loose focus on what we are doing and think of the negative factor of pain, slowing our response time.
Tension or tight fists and fighting stance, is bad because our body is drained of energy and then our muscles become exhausted. First you would have to fight against your our body, before fighting against an action of an aggressor. It would benefit us to be relaxed so we could move and respond much quicker to an action.
Outside influences is when someone is talking, pointing, fidgeting, or yelling, these factors take your mind off what is happening and distract you by taking your focus away from the moment.
Within Jujitsu we practise to train our mind and bodies in negative situations, so basically we are training ourselves to cut out this cogitative process. An example of this is; getting pushed, punched or grabbed, multi-attack, and weapons attack.
Some more explanations of reaction time are when an attacker has a gun pointing at you at close range. The reaction time here is the time the attacker is giving you while he/she is asking you for your money or telling you what to do. At this stage they are not in a killing mode, or he/she would have already shot you. Another reaction time demonstration would be when a person has a knife held to your stomach. I say to this person to stab me when they see my hands move. They slow their reaction time down, because they are focusing on my movements first, before focusing on sending a message to their brain to stab me in the stomach.

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