Is it normal that your brain starts to percieve things faster after doing some mediations practice for a while?

Substituting the words noting mind for brain, my experience is that it does get faster... although, it's not a straight line up... sometimes faster and sometimes slower.

For instance, from Manual of Insight, Chapter 5 by Mahasi Sayadaw:

[indent]When first beginning the practice, one changes the bodily posture often without noticing it. Because of this, one tends to think, “The body is fast; the noting mind is slow.” However, as empirical knowledge matures, it seems as if the noting mind is welcoming objects in advance. One is able to note the intentions to bend or stretch, sit, stand or walk, and so on, as well as noticing the different movements involved in bending, etcetera. Then, one realizes, “The body is slow; the noting mind is quick.” One experiences for oneself that only after the intention to move has arisen, can the movement of bending, stretching, etcetera, take place.[/indent]

For me this is typical of the A&P stage. Have you read the book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha?

I actually got to go up and play at Yale as a research subject, and one of the tests is called the Emotional Blink Test, and they flash these very rapid fire images of various things and you have to figure out something about the images.

It was so much fun, and I really got to see the value of vipassana training for doing that test, as it was the closest thing like that I had seen to what insight practice is really like when done well, and when I made comments about the test and all the fun little things I noticed about phase problems and timing and some mind tuning things, they really thought that was unusual and actually presented my comments at a neuroscience meeting as something quite remarkable, but I suspect that anyone with good vipassana training would have noticed basically the same things, and it just shows that this stuff really does increase mental resolution and ability to perceive reality clearly.

that's funny.. i remember in a book, Happiness, how Tibetan monks were the best (out of the people they tried) at reading emotions quickly. they associated reading the emotions more accurately with being happier, so were concluding the monks were happier (i.e. meditation works to make you happy). but i didn't realize that doing vipassana for many hours a day would be excellent training for doing stuff like that, regardless of happiness level.

Actually, the test involves sets of rapid sequences of images, one of which in each sequence is a landscape or building that is rotated either right or left, with the rest being various things, many neutral, but some being faces, animals, corpses, deformed bodies, and the like.

The test is designed to see for how many frames the more emotionally charged images throw you in terms of messing up your ability to see the rotated image, the theory being that an emotionally changed image would cause you to internally process something and thus distract your attention from trying to see the rotated image as the images fly by at remarkable speed, if I understand the test correctly.

Thus, it is not about reading emotions but much more about:

a) just being able to see and process something about images that arise and vanish that fast
b) whether or not emotionally charge images distract you from a).

A week ago I downloaded some sort of brain game app for my droid phone, where you try to touch squares as fast as they light up for a score.. I didnt do so well.

I sat a very long time yesterday, and for fun afterwards when I noticed I was fairly concentrated I picked up the phone and tried the game again and got a silly high score. I wouldn't say I was 'faster' just that a higher percentage of my brain was applying itself to the task - i.e. not getting in my own way.

Although I have had A&P where I could perceive things much faster than normal, but it didnt last long.

I did try, for a bit, doing this test before and after meditating. i'd consistently get 20-30ms faster afterwards. tho i could never tell if i was biasing the results (e.g. trying harder after meditating cause i thought it should work).

Hey, if the Yale folks who conducted the study are already impressed with you, why not hit them up about your ideas mentioned here:
http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/1798259

Steph