4 ms·

Brain lives 15 SEC 'in the past' to help you see the world with stability

Jtype 5y ago
I'm not sure if the article is poorly worded or the study was poorly implemented. If the study consisted of having test subjects watch a 30-second face morphing, and afterwards the subjects selected the face at the 15-second mark as the one most representative of what they saw, it would tell me that they chose based on the face that averaged out to the morphing face they saw. The average look of the morphing face would likely be right in the middle, 15 seconds in. I don't see how anyone could assume that it meant that their brains were processing images from 15 seconds in the past.
LocalH 5y ago
This subject is extremely fascinating to me. I've had a very direct experience with perception of time being very non-linear, via N,N-DMT. While there was still an internal sensation of a straight chronology to some extent (as in, I can remember roughly which events happened in which order), my perception of it was such that I actually feel like I saw the same exact moments multiple times, and that at the very least my perception was pulled back and forth along a short timeline that started at the comeup and ended at whatever "now" was during the trip. The truly amazing thing is that the experience gave me a good solid two months of full relief (or at least perceived full relief) from normal everyday ADHD symptoms, took six months to completely fade, and also helped me greatly in processing my mother's death, which happened not quite a month after this experience. However, it was also immensely terrifying in the moment in terms of the subjective feeling, and so for me it takes a lot of mental preparation to approach it again. Ever since that moment I've "known" in some capacity that our time perception is very fluid, and of course our brains fill in visual data constantly. Every time we move our eyes, our mind actually rewinds the clock to fill in the gap, hence why sometimes you look at a second hand and the first tick feels like it takes a little bit longer than usual. I realize that a lot of this can be chalked up to the "drug" affecting me, but the direct perception of such looping (including the feeling of such) was sufficiently striking that it doesn't really matter, if anything it's also an potential argument that "unaltered" perception shouldn't be trusted at all either, since we can never truly actually verify what someone perceived or experienced.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

I'm not sure if the article is poorly worded or the study was poorly implemented. If the study consisted of having test subjects watch a 30-second face morphing, and afterwards the subjects selected the face at the 15-second mark as the one most representative of what they saw, it would tell me that they chose based on the face that averaged out to the morphing face they saw. The average look of the morphing face would likely be right in the middle, 15 seconds in. I don't see how anyone could assume that it meant that their brains were processing images from 15 seconds in the past.

LocalH 5y ago

This subject is extremely fascinating to me. I've had a very direct experience with perception of time being very non-linear, via N,N-DMT. While there was still an internal sensation of a straight chronology to some extent (as in, I can remember roughly which events happened in which order), my perception of it was such that I actually feel like I saw the same exact moments multiple times, and that at the very least my perception was pulled back and forth along a short timeline that started at the comeup and ended at whatever "now" was during the trip. The truly amazing thing is that the experience gave me a good solid two months of full relief (or at least perceived full relief) from normal everyday ADHD symptoms, took six months to completely fade, and also helped me greatly in processing my mother's death, which happened not quite a month after this experience. However, it was also immensely terrifying in the moment in terms of the subjective feeling, and so for me it takes a lot of mental preparation to approach it again. Ever since that moment I've "known" in some capacity that our time perception is very fluid, and of course our brains fill in visual data constantly. Every time we move our eyes, our mind actually rewinds the clock to fill in the gap, hence why sometimes you look at a second hand and the first tick feels like it takes a little bit longer than usual. I realize that a lot of this can be chalked up to the "drug" affecting me, but the direct perception of such looping (including the feeling of such) was sufficiently striking that it doesn't really matter, if anything it's also an potential argument that "unaltered" perception shouldn't be trusted at all either, since we can never truly actually verify what someone perceived or experienced.

deleted 5y ago

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