5 ms·
I'm a bit suspicious after spending 5 minutes trying to replicate the frozen clock phenomenon and having no success. Often, the second hand ticks within a very
by highfrequency 6y ago
I'm a bit suspicious after spending 5 minutes trying to replicate the frozen clock phenomenon and having no success. Often, the second hand ticks within a very short window (<150ms) of looking at the clock, consistent with what I would expect.
When you shift your focus to look at an analog clock, the time to the next tick of the seconds hand should follow a uniform distribution between 0 and 1 seconds if there are no visual bugs. It seems likely that people experience some confirmation bias, where the delays above 0.9s stand out more in their memory.
I really don't buy the claim that there's a 500ms delay in perception here. At the very least, this should be bounded by the time it takes to move your eyes (~100ms).
- csomar 6y agoIt's a bad one since a human is very bad at estimating very short (less than 1 sec) time frames. Try the mirror experiment, it's straightforward.
- xwdv 6y agoI too was unable to replicate that experiment. I took it a step further by not only having an analog stop watch, but also having other things close by that were constantly moving. Even though my timing resulted in variable durations to the next tick, some longer than others, I did not notice any “paused” effect from other things.
- thetanuj 6y agoDo it with a fan and you'll see the fan blades going a little slower for few milliseconds when you look at them. Adjust the fan speed for even better results.