Andrew Rowe
It's possible to create mental spells that could, for example, allow Corin to increase his processing speed to better anticipate how to move while in Haste and thus help compensate for the awkwardness of moving at high speed. This is something he will be looking into, but it's not as efficient as using Perception mana for that kind of improvement, because it requires a higher degree of active thought and management.
Perception spells can directly improve unconscious processes, like reflexes, which make things like movement spells much easier to use.
With a Perception spell and Haste, Corin can just run faster without having to think about it. With a Mental spell and Haste, Corin has to go, "Okay, I'm now running at 40 miles per hour. When I put my foot down, this is going to create an impact with this amount of force, jarring my body. I will then have to compensate for this impact, adjusting like..."
It's doable, but it's not pretty.
As a note, the line between perception and mental mana is something that even in-world people aren't always clear on. The functionality of the brain - and other things that feed into cognition and sensory information - is still something of a mystery in-world. Names like "mental" and "perception" are simply words that characters in-world try to use to summarize more complex concepts, and they may not always line up exactly the way that characters in the story expect. (Notably, in the War of Broken Mirrors books, the exact same mana types use different names - Knowledge and Deception - because of different cultural concepts of how these types of magic work.)
Perception spells can directly improve unconscious processes, like reflexes, which make things like movement spells much easier to use.
With a Perception spell and Haste, Corin can just run faster without having to think about it. With a Mental spell and Haste, Corin has to go, "Okay, I'm now running at 40 miles per hour. When I put my foot down, this is going to create an impact with this amount of force, jarring my body. I will then have to compensate for this impact, adjusting like..."
It's doable, but it's not pretty.
As a note, the line between perception and mental mana is something that even in-world people aren't always clear on. The functionality of the brain - and other things that feed into cognition and sensory information - is still something of a mystery in-world. Names like "mental" and "perception" are simply words that characters in-world try to use to summarize more complex concepts, and they may not always line up exactly the way that characters in the story expect. (Notably, in the War of Broken Mirrors books, the exact same mana types use different names - Knowledge and Deception - because of different cultural concepts of how these types of magic work.)
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