Today I learned about a concept so intriguing and powerful that I thought I would share it with you, dear blog reader. I was watching a video on Veritasium (which, by the way is an amazing YouTube channel) entitled “What Exactly Is The Present?” I admit I was drawn to this particular video because of my roots in meditation. I felt like he was going to present one of two things: 1) a treatise on the science around being in the present/mindfulness, or 2) a physics rant about the inability to measure time precisely (him being, in many ways, a physics nerd).

But, in fact, he referenced neither of these 2, but a much more interesting and human-perception-centric paradigm called the “specious present”. (A warning; if you watch the video, the part I’m referencing here doesn’t start until about halfway in, though I think the whole video is worth your time). The idea is simple: through a series of perceptive experiments, psychologists were able to determine that there are times when the brain makes decisions about what to tell you it sees based on information from the future. Specifically, in a certain experiment, a disc was shown moving about, and the perception of the disk at a specific moment in time changed depending on what the disc did next. Now, of course, this does not imply that the brain somehow can tell the future. Instead, it implies something perhaps even more odd: the brain waits to tell us what is going on until it’s sure. In other words, when visual perception occurs in the optic nerve, the brain sometimes holds on to it, packaging up some future perceptions until it can tell a cohesive story to us. This period of time varies depending on the person and the environment, but a rough estimate is about 0.1 seconds. Which, depending on how you look at it, is either not very long or an eternity. As someone who studied computer graphics, that’s about 3 frames of a film, or 6 frames of a video game.

This implies, philosophically, that what we think of as the “present” is in fact a moving basket of input about 0.1 seconds wide, which varies depending on the moment and what’s being presented to us.

Kinda crazy, huh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specious_present