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Vivian Cruz, Saskia Guerrier, Eurie Kim

Hypothesis
We started out with the assumption that some kind of distraction would affect our reading and thinking abilities by slowing the process. The distraction we chose was music (randomly selected songs; iPod on shuffle).
Thus, music would slow our reactions in Case 3 and Case 4 (which both required reading), but not so much in Case 1 and Case 2 because they were based on looking at graphics rather than words and simply reacting to those graphics.

Observations
Vivian
Case 1 207 millisecs.
Case 2 300 millisecs.
Case 3 401 millisecs.
Case 4 466 millisecs.

Saskia
Case 1 220 millisecs.
Case 2 383 millisecs.
Case 3 494 millisecs.
Case 4 613 millisecs.

Our Story
According to the observations, music had no significant effect on any of the cases. This could mean two things:
1) The brain is parallel processor, therefore has different neurons working on different activities/functions. For instance, sensory neurons that focus on processing senses (in this case, listening to music) versus other neurons that focus on processing actions/reactions. This shows that neurons could possibly be highly specific (kind of like how certain enzymes only function with certain molecules) to certain stimuli.
2) Both Vivan and Saskia have done the experiment before, therefore having already been "trained", music may not have had much effect in slowing reaction processes.

So we believe that reaction processes as a whole are physical processes in the brain, as opposed to being mental ones.