Living on a Time Delay
We are on a half second-time delay — the kind of delay radio stations use to avoid broadcasting words that might violate Federal Communication standards. What we believe is happening this moment happened a half second ago. Our brain made a half-second calculation of what we require for survival and tossed out the other 99 percent of the data.
Living on a Time Delay
David Eagleman demonstrated the concept of this time delay by asking volunteers to press a button to make a light blink. Experimenters programmed a slight delay from the time the person pressed the button to the time the light lit. But after 10 or so presses, people caught onto the delay and began to see the blink happen as soon as they pressed the button. Then when the experimenters reduced the delay, people reported that the blink happened before they pressed the button.
Recalibration
Eagleman coined this, “recalibration.” Your brain expects your motor actions to produce an immediate effect. So if you were to make the effect happen a tenth of a second after you press the button, the brain recalibrates and makes your pressing the button and the flash of the light instantaneous.
When the experimenter then took away the time delay, the brain recalibrated and made it appear like the light lit before the button was pushed. So you readied to push the button and just before you pushed it, the light came on. So it seemed.
In “Why Time Flies” Alan Burdick went to check this out in person. Eagleman revised his experiment. He used a nine-square cube with one of the squares colored. You press the square where you want the color to move to.
Eagleman programmed a 100-millisecond delay between the mouse click and the movement of the colored square. When Burdick clicked the mouse he did not notice the delay.
Removing the Time Delay
Then Eagleman removed the delay and to Burdick’s amazement, the colored square jumped to his chosen destination before he clicked the mouse. It magically knew where he wanted the colored square to jump right before pressed the mouse. Burdick repeated this again and again and each time the computer knew where he wanted the colored square to jump and it jumped right to that square just before he clicked the mouse.
Free Will?
Burdick tried not to press the mouse immediately after he saw the colored block move to his selected square, but he could not stop himself. It was not possible not to click the mouse, because he had already pressed it. When Eagleman had removed the time delay, Burdick’s brain had recalibrated and the colored square seemed to jump before his motor action took place.
Even knowing the reason, it still seemed like the computer magically moved the colored square to his chosen square before he pressed the mouse. And since he had actually already pressed the mouse, he could not stop himself from doing so.
Free will? Who is deciding? What if you shot a man dead and you thought you had just envisioned shooting him, not actually pulling the trigger? But then you could not stop yourself from pulling the trigger, because you had actually already done so and killed the man.
We are living on a time delay.
45 Bits
Out of the millions of bits of information, our brains process each second, 45 bits give or take are devoted to conscious thought. We can give our total conscious attention to around of one-millionth or 0.000001 of the sensory input available to our brain. We are programmed for virtually total inattention.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
