David Eagleman

I mean, there's a sense in which you're never perceiving time directly.

You're always living at least half a second in the past.

So it takes, right?

Photons hit your eyes or air compression waves hit your ears or whatever.

You know, I touch your toe and those signals have to travel along nerves, which are very slow.

I mean, thousands of times slower than, you know, electronic signals travel in your computer.

So it takes time for this stuff to move around in the brain digitally.

get to different places in the brain and then it has to get stitched together with other senses.

And by the time all of this gets done and you're served up a conscious perception of what happened, the event's already long gone by that point and you're living in the past.

And by the way, I've been pursuing a hypothesis that taller people live farther in the past than shorter people because it takes longer to get all the signals there.

So anyway, yes, we're never perceiving time directly.

And when you are thinking back on an accident situation, you are...

you're probing your memory.

You're saying, what just happened a moment ago?

And so all you're ever perceiving is your conscious perception.

Now, by the way, of course, your body can do things much faster than that unconsciously.

Like when your foot gets halfway to the brake, when you realize a car is pulling out of the driveway ahead of you, that happens before you're consciously aware.

You become aware by the time your foot's already on the move.

Um, so your brain can do lots of things, uh, that way, you know, when you're hiking with friends and you find yourself ducking out of the way of a tree branch that's swinging back towards you before you even realize that you're ducking, um, you know, that kind of stuff can happen.

But as far as our conscious perception of the world, that's always, uh, an old story.