4 ms·

the failure to come to terms with the 0.1s limit in human cognition gave birth to modernity I wonder what exactly he means by that. Sure, eyes may start betray

the failure to come to terms with the 0.1s limit in human cognition gave birth to modernity I wonder what exactly he means by that. Sure, eyes may start betraying you at faster speeds but human cognition is in no way limited to one tenth of a second. For example, speedrunners reliably hit 1/60 of one second actions, and I'm sure many other human endeavors require similarly fast thinking.

csours 5y ago
The hand is faster than the eye - you can do things quicker than you can perceive doing them. One time I reacted to a snake before I realized I saw the snake. There are also problems with laying down memories. As the author of the post says, we still have trouble nailing this down in the modern day.
- jfoutz 5y ago
  Not long ago I realized there's a whole bunch of stuff I just "make up" about the world. The "me" part of my brain knows I blink. I know I'm blind, but I don't remember it at all. Turns out it's actually worse thanks to being blind while my eyes rotate in their sockets. "saccades". There's some machinery grinding away all the time, making up little stories about the world to maintain a consistent view. I spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time wondering where else I'm blind. The snake thing is cool. I know I have some hardwired reflexes around heat and pain. I can't think of a case where I've exercised the "hidden monster" reflex, but I believe you, and I probably have it, or something like it.
  - sk0g 5y ago
    I play indoor football regulary, both as a goalkeeper and as a defender. It's similar to the full 11v11 game, but on a much smaller pitch, and thus much quicker. I can't count the number of times I've performed (useful) actions, to then almost be stunned for a moment as I reconcile what happened. The one I remember most vividly is a ball that was passed right at me from across the pitch. I knew my teammate kicked it, but I thought it was a shot towards goal at first. I couldn't see till about 2 metres away from me as it was across a defensive line, but it was a driven, pacy pass towards me. I stuck out a foot to kick it into goal very tidily, before I even registered that the pass was actually coming towards me. Feels like time slowing down around you for half a second, pretty cool.
    - jfoutz 5y ago
      Oh yeah! I was almost in a car accident. Car in front hit the break, car was very close behind. Touched the break, and passed on the shoulder. Definitely relate to the time slowdown. I think it was adrenaline, I remember shaking after.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  As someone who doesn't have any particular phobia or fear of or around snakes (a generous caution, yes, fear, no), I also had the experience of unexpectedly encountering one and discovering my subconcious body had responded and fetched me away from it several seconds before I consciously recognised what had transpired. It was and remains a powerful and fascinating experience.
kbenson 5y ago
But that's for events that can be planned in advance, right? I wouldn't be surprised to find that while those people are very fast at responding in general, that for some things they've offloaded the timing to their nervous system through repetitious training and/or subconsciousness. I doubt a major league baseball player has time to consciously decide exactly when to start the swing for many pitches, but instead relies on feel and training, and allows their mind to instead determine whether they should abort entirely. A speedrunner is just another form of highly trained individual, so I think whether they are good at hitting sub 100ms timing events (as long as they are advertised ahead of time or are regular) is sort of orthogonal as to whether people can consciously measure periods that small in general terms.
- tstrimple 5y ago
  > But that's for events that can be planned in advance, right? Not planned, but an unconscious reaction or muscle memory. There isn't enough time to think about something and then trigger your muscles to move. It's got to be second nature to hit that level of "reaction time".
  - schoen 5y ago
    I think in some cases it can be planned, in the sense that Walter Murch talked about frame-perfect cuts in video editing (which apparently is common and other expert film editors can do it too, not just Walter Murch). In that case the details of the video you're reacting to would literally be different for every cut, so the ability seems slightly more generic, because it's not aligned to exactly the same sensory or physiological cue each time it's used.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Yeah, that's also along what I was thinking (as noted later), but also I think you can also get close or achieve if you can prime yourself because you know the event is coming, and get the timing down. Sort of like the cyclone arcade game (if it wasn't a scam[1]). I think there's a huge difference between hitting a random 100ms time and hitting a 100ms time that's coming at a set time that you can see and judge. That's what I meant by "planned", even if it poorly encapsulates that. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXBfwgwT1nQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXBfwgwT1nQ
dredmorbius 5y ago
Think of that as on the order of as opposed to precisely. Human cognition operates at rates of faster than 1 second, but slower than 1/100th of a second. In most cased, assuming about a 1/10th second response cycle is about right, and, in the context of the article and book, it's when nonhuman mechanical systems began to become capable of operating within that timeframe, that they exceeded human capabilities. The eye and memory will register only a vague blurred impression of an event taking less than 1/10th of a second. With very standard photographic equipment, it's quite possible to capture a single frame in clarity at 1/100th to 1/1000th of a second. The former is considered relatively slow, though good for freezing virtually all macroscopic motion. At 1/1000th of a second, virtually all human-scale activity (say, sports or activities) is frozen, though very high-speed events (high-speed machinery, explosions, bullets) may still show motion blur. A good film camera would typically have a minimum exposure of 1/1000th to 1/2000th of a second. Moreover, mechanised sensing equipment can distinguish between events at these levels. Human perceptions will simply get causality and order all out of sequence. It wasn't until June of 1878 that the very common phenomenon of a galloping horse was conclusively choreographed by means of Eadweard Muybridge's photography, and the motion of the horse and its legs in motion accurately understood. Muybridge's sequence consisted of 24 photographs, at 1/2000th of a second (see discussion above), with the total sequence taking about 1 second. (The cameras were placed 27 inches, or 67 cm, apart, the total span was 16 meters, the horse was galloping at a 16m/s pace, or one mile every 1:40.) Each frame then captured 1/24th of a second, about half the 1/10th second limit discussed in the article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_in_Motion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_in_Motion

csours 5y ago

The hand is faster than the eye - you can do things quicker than you can perceive doing them. One time I reacted to a snake before I realized I saw the snake. There are also problems with laying down memories. As the author of the post says, we still have trouble nailing this down in the modern day.

jfoutz 5y ago
Not long ago I realized there's a whole bunch of stuff I just "make up" about the world. The "me" part of my brain knows I blink. I know I'm blind, but I don't remember it at all. Turns out it's actually worse thanks to being blind while my eyes rotate in their sockets. "saccades". There's some machinery grinding away all the time, making up little stories about the world to maintain a consistent view. I spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time wondering where else I'm blind. The snake thing is cool. I know I have some hardwired reflexes around heat and pain. I can't think of a case where I've exercised the "hidden monster" reflex, but I believe you, and I probably have it, or something like it.
- sk0g 5y ago
  I play indoor football regulary, both as a goalkeeper and as a defender. It's similar to the full 11v11 game, but on a much smaller pitch, and thus much quicker. I can't count the number of times I've performed (useful) actions, to then almost be stunned for a moment as I reconcile what happened. The one I remember most vividly is a ball that was passed right at me from across the pitch. I knew my teammate kicked it, but I thought it was a shot towards goal at first. I couldn't see till about 2 metres away from me as it was across a defensive line, but it was a driven, pacy pass towards me. I stuck out a foot to kick it into goal very tidily, before I even registered that the pass was actually coming towards me. Feels like time slowing down around you for half a second, pretty cool.
  - jfoutz 5y ago
    Oh yeah! I was almost in a car accident. Car in front hit the break, car was very close behind. Touched the break, and passed on the shoulder. Definitely relate to the time slowdown. I think it was adrenaline, I remember shaking after.
dredmorbius 5y ago
As someone who doesn't have any particular phobia or fear of or around snakes (a generous caution, yes, fear, no), I also had the experience of unexpectedly encountering one and discovering my subconcious body had responded and fetched me away from it several seconds before I consciously recognised what had transpired. It was and remains a powerful and fascinating experience.

kbenson 5y ago

But that's for events that can be planned in advance, right? I wouldn't be surprised to find that while those people are very fast at responding in general, that for some things they've offloaded the timing to their nervous system through repetitious training and/or subconsciousness. I doubt a major league baseball player has time to consciously decide exactly when to start the swing for many pitches, but instead relies on feel and training, and allows their mind to instead determine whether they should abort entirely. A speedrunner is just another form of highly trained individual, so I think whether they are good at hitting sub 100ms timing events (as long as they are advertised ahead of time or are regular) is sort of orthogonal as to whether people can consciously measure periods that small in general terms.

tstrimple 5y ago
> But that's for events that can be planned in advance, right? Not planned, but an unconscious reaction or muscle memory. There isn't enough time to think about something and then trigger your muscles to move. It's got to be second nature to hit that level of "reaction time".
- schoen 5y ago
  I think in some cases it can be planned, in the sense that Walter Murch talked about frame-perfect cuts in video editing (which apparently is common and other expert film editors can do it too, not just Walter Murch). In that case the details of the video you're reacting to would literally be different for every cut, so the ability seems slightly more generic, because it's not aligned to exactly the same sensory or physiological cue each time it's used.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Yeah, that's also along what I was thinking (as noted later), but also I think you can also get close or achieve if you can prime yourself because you know the event is coming, and get the timing down. Sort of like the cyclone arcade game (if it wasn't a scam[1]). I think there's a huge difference between hitting a random 100ms time and hitting a 100ms time that's coming at a set time that you can see and judge. That's what I meant by "planned", even if it poorly encapsulates that. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXBfwgwT1nQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXBfwgwT1nQ

dredmorbius 5y ago

Think of that as on the order of as opposed to precisely. Human cognition operates at rates of faster than 1 second, but slower than 1/100th of a second. In most cased, assuming about a 1/10th second response cycle is about right, and, in the context of the article and book, it's when nonhuman mechanical systems began to become capable of operating within that timeframe, that they exceeded human capabilities. The eye and memory will register only a vague blurred impression of an event taking less than 1/10th of a second. With very standard photographic equipment, it's quite possible to capture a single frame in clarity at 1/100th to 1/1000th of a second. The former is considered relatively slow, though good for freezing virtually all macroscopic motion. At 1/1000th of a second, virtually all human-scale activity (say, sports or activities) is frozen, though very high-speed events (high-speed machinery, explosions, bullets) may still show motion blur. A good film camera would typically have a minimum exposure of 1/1000th to 1/2000th of a second. Moreover, mechanised sensing equipment can distinguish between events at these levels. Human perceptions will simply get causality and order all out of sequence. It wasn't until June of 1878 that the very common phenomenon of a galloping horse was conclusively choreographed by means of Eadweard Muybridge's photography, and the motion of the horse and its legs in motion accurately understood. Muybridge's sequence consisted of 24 photographs, at 1/2000th of a second (see discussion above), with the total sequence taking about 1 second. (The cameras were placed 27 inches, or 67 cm, apart, the total span was 16 meters, the horse was galloping at a 16m/s pace, or one mile every 1:40.) Each frame then captured 1/24th of a second, about half the 1/10th second limit discussed in the article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_in_Motion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_in_Motion