Jo Marchant

You know, sensations have just arrived like a few hundred milliseconds ago for the events, but it's also using that entire lifetime of history.

That's what I mean by the brain is drawing all of these different timescales into a single moment.

Everything that you've learned through your life is feeding into what is happening.

you perceive is happening now another example i quite like is the tennis there's a photograph of the tennis player roger federer and he's playing in um the final at wimbledon and he's just had the ball served to him and there's his photos really dramatic where he's kind of stretched out with his his racket and he's he's looking at the ball just about to return it um which seems like fairly

Obvious, like, of course, he's looking at the ball, but there's this speedometer behind him showing that that ball is traveling at 125 miles an hour, which means that in the time it would take for the light signals from the ball to reach his eye and then for those signals to reach the visual cortex of his brain and be processed by his brain.

That ball would have traveled eight feet.

So if he was basing what he saw on the latest possible signals he could possibly have received from that ball, it would have been eight feet away in a completely different part of the court.

And yet he's not looking at that out of date position.

He's looking at exactly where the ball is now.

And so what is he looking at?

He's looking at his brain's model based on all the information that it has on where that ball is going to be now at this moment.

And that's what enables him to hit that ball now.

So all of the time, this is what's happening in all of our brains, where the brain is gathering all of the information that it can, and it's using that information.

Everything you've learned since you were a baby up to a millisecond ago is feeding into that model of your present moment.

And that is going to be very different for everybody.

yeah i mean the brain is working really hard um we feel like now is just this very natural thing that we have this direct connection with events around us and we're just sitting back you know like we're watching a movie or something and it's just all being beamed into the brain and you're seeing what's happened but it's not it's a really active personal process we are working all the time we are interacting our eyes are darting around our

There's little hairs in your ear are vibrating.

To feel something, you have to run your fingers across a surface.

If you don't move, if you don't interact with your world, there will be no sensation.

So it's like a dance with the world is a phrase that I use, that everything that you experience, you are experiencing.