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We May Not Live in the Present
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What if we told you that what you think of as "the present" is actually slightly in the past? Basically, your life isn't a live feed: It's a delayed broadcast that your brain is constantly editing and censoring for your convenience.
The delay isn't much -- what's 80 milliseconds between you and your brain? Nothing, right? Well, a group of neuroscientists disagree. They've come up with some freaky time-altering experiments to prove that this difference can change your perspective of cause and effect. For example, in one experiment the volunteers were told to press a button that would cause a light to flash, with a short delay. After 10 or so tries, the volunteers were beginning to see the flash immediately after they pressed the button -- their brains had gotten used to the delay and decided to edit it out. Yes, that's a thing your brain can do.
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"Being a brain is kind of boring, but we've got lots of time for pranks."
But that's not the freaky part. When the scientists removed the delay, the volunteers reported seeing the flash before they pressed the button. Their brains, in trying to reconstruct the events, messed up and switched the order. They were seeing the consequence first and the action second.
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"You really don't want to see the copies."
Not convinced? Try this: Touch your nose and your toe at the same time. Logic says that you should feel your nose first, because it's right there in your face (hopefully) and therefore the sensory signal doesn't have to travel too long before reaching the brain, whereas your toe is at the extreme opposite end. The physical distance a message has to travel on neurological pathways is much longer from toes than from nose, and yet you feel both things at the same time. According to neuroscientist David Eagleman, that's because your brain always tries to synchronize the sensory information that it gets from your body in a way that will make sense to you, but it can only do that by pushing your consciousness slightly into the past, like a radio station that's always on a five-second delay in case somebody curses on air.