Annaka Harris

essentially putting all of the information together to deliver you a present moment experience that is most useful for you to navigate the world.

So as I said, I use this example of tennis in my book.

So the sights and sounds are coming at us at different rates.

It takes longer for a sensation in my hand when I hit the ball with the racket,

to travel to my brain than it does for the light waves to hit my retina and get processed by the brain.

So all these signals are coming in at different times.

Our brains go through this process of binding to basically weave it all together so that our conscious experience of that

is of seeing, hearing, and feeling the ball hit the racket all at the same time.

That's obviously most useful to us.

Binding is mostly about timing.

It can be about other things.

But I was just talking to David Eagleman, who was talking about a very simple experiment, actually.

And this kind of shows how...

your brain is basically always interacting with the outside world and always making adjustments to make its best guess about the most useful present moment experience to deliver.

So this is a very simple experiment.

This is from many, many years ago.

And David Eagleman was involved in this research where they had participants hit a button and that button caused a flash of light.

And...

So our brains, through binding, the brain notices, is able to kind of calibrate the experience you have because the brain is aware that it is its own hand that is

causing the light to flash, that there's this cause and effect going on.