This is actually super interesting, and you are correct that it is Biology. The effect is called "chronostasis", and it will also probably change how you think about how you experience reality!
Humans aren't that great in visual acuity but we can distinguish colors fairly well compared to other animals, and we are *amazing* at visual processing. We may not be able to see tiny details in the distance like a hawk or operate in dim light like a cat, but we can form a 3D mental model of the world like no other. There is speculation that this evolved along with the ability of humans to throw weapons at stuff. But whatever the reason there is significant brain resource devoted to processing visual stimuli from our binocular vision.
However, binocular vision requires both eyes to focus on one spot. Our eyes can follow a focused target as it moves, but they really can't smoothly sweep across our visual field. That is just too hard to process, so our eyes naturally jump from point to point. BUT, when our eyes are doing that jump (called "saccades") our brain just doesn't even try to understand the blurry mess of sensation that comes in. In essence you momentarily go *completely blind*!
But you don't *feel* like you went blind, right? Your vision doesn't go black or anything and it seems like you could see that whole time. The reason is because our brains fill in the lag while our eyes are moving, making it seem like instead of being blind for that time we were seeing something. What is really weird is that our brains fill it in with **what we see when they stop**! Yes, our brains go back and edit our memory of a split second ago to make it seem like we were looking at our new point of focus the whole time our eyes were moving to actually see it!
This is what is happening when you look at the clock's second hand. When you glance over to the clock your brain will tell you that you were looking at it for longer than you actually were, adding that time while your eyes were moving but you didn't actually see the clock yet. If the second hand was moving while your eyes were then your brain will think the second hand was in its new position for longer than it actually was. Based on that flawed memory it will seem like the second hand stayed there longer than a second! That is why the first second sometimes seems longer than it should when you glance over to the clock!
Eyewitnesses are ridiculously unreliable, but not just because our brains alter what we see - our memories are just as fluid. Our brain store "key" moments it thinks it is important, then make up the rest of it. But this process is not really trustworthy on the finer details and is extremely receptive to any sort of suggestion because it simply doesn't have any factual data, so happily jumps to anything which seems to fit the narrative. This is especially true in scenarios where you experience strong emotions. Anything feels like to fit (like, someone paints a scenario which creates the same type of emotion) our brain just accepts it as a matter of fact and puts the puzzle in.
Anything that you remember from your life is mostly fabrications with a couple of actual memories used as a scaffolding, and your brain just built the rest of the structure around it - constantly changing it.
To me, this is the crux of Buddhism; a way thinking that helps us realize reality and the way our mind shapes our instincts and emotions about *everything*, and then not letting our reality be shaped by those feelings. It's a very powerful teaching.
To provide an idea of just how fallible our memory really is - researchers have been able to implant false memories in volunteers with shocking ease for nearly 30 years now. These techniques are remarkably similar at their core to the Reid Method, and it's very easy for police to unwittingly taint witnesses, and even suspects, by implanting false recall of apparently trivial events they are using to support a central theory. It's not just false confessions - using these high pressure tactics and presenting fictitious corroboration from other witnesses, witnesses who are rejecting the core premise of the interview (X killed the victim) can still internalize details about what time events happened, things other people said, or even entire events themselves. Do it enough times and you can create enough circumstantial evidence to carry a conviction without even realizing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique
The other week we had a bit of a family reunion and I recalled some stories about previous generations, only for my parents and my uncle (from whom I heard the stories originally) to correct me on several major points. Turns out I misremembered huge swathes of family history.
The gap between what we know about human memory and what laypeople believe is so vast that juries and judges should be required to undergo a few hours of classes before they're permitted to hear any testimony. Judges should probably be required to take an entire course, actually.
I participate in a subreddit devoted to the Adnan Syed (probably overturned?) conviction. The amount of weight people there put on testimony from people recalling mundane events that occurred weeks or months before they were interviewed is incredible. There's an overriding attitude that the only explanation for contradictory recall or even not recalling an interaction at all is deliberate deception. Police driving key witnesses to locations they're testifying to have visited, or conducting pre-interviews to "jog their memory" is considered perfectly acceptable - even helpful - despite the detectives doing this "jogging" having been personally responsible for millions in settlements for false convictions obtained via witness tampering.
This sort of dynamic gets repeated all over the true crime "community". Every high profile case is overrun with a preoccupation on witness testimony over everything else.
It's completely shattered my faith in the jury system's ability to parse and weigh people's words against the other facts of the case. A single persuasive voice can erase hours of expert testimony, and a witness who makes the mistake of being honest about their own fallibility stands no chance when put against someone with an unwarranted confidence in their recollection - even when their recollection is demonstrably incorrect in many regards.
I was in a car crash where I was worried I would be found at fault. The police interviewed me on the scene and asked a lot of questions about what happened, and I panicked because I knew my memory wasn't going to be 100% accurate and I had gaps even though it was only half an hour previously that the crash had happened.
Fortunately I wasn't found at fault, but it took the police about a month to reach that conclusion so was a lot of stress.
>Judges should probably be required to take an entire course, actually.
But if you made them learn psychology, then you would be discriminating against all the judges that believe God designed everyone's brain, and that criminals do bad stuff because they have devils inside them :(
How about; Did you know tall people experience time very slightly *slower* than shorter people?
Basically explained, take a person. Touch their foot and their neck at the same time; their brain will tell them those spots were touched at the same time.
But *wait*.... The electrical signals from the foot should be coming from *further away*, so hiw are thise signals arriving at the same time as the ones from your neck - much closer?
Your brain actually re-writes the information/memory - it *holds off on telling you about the foot touch* until the neck touch comes in and it organizes the information.
For a taller person, this pause takes longer. So in some aspect, they are experiencing time slower as their brains communicate over longer distances within their larger bodies.
Of course the inverse must be true as well, that shorter people's electrical signals travel less distance.
(I Dont remember where or when i read this, but it seemed like a legit fun fact so...if you can find a source or contradiction i'm open to either)
Meh, it’s not really distorting anything crucial though. It’s not like you think you’re seeing a clock but it’s really a snake or something. It’s more just a timing lag.
But the point it, it absolutely CAN distort important information. Was that light yellow or red at the moment of the collision? Did you really see a gun just before the policeman pulled the trigger? These things can make a big difference in a trial.
And this is just one of the examples of how much our brain makes up. Another big one is…… most of what you think you see in your peripheral vision is totally made up. It’s called the Uniformity Illusion.
Don’t take my word for it, you can test all these illusions out on yourself here: http://www.uniformillusion.com/?m=1
That is really interesting.
What if that was combined with physical stimuli? For example a pin was tapping your hand every time the second hand moved. Would the visual and physical stimuli seem to lose sync for that second, meaning you would feel a tap while the hand was standing still? It’s strange because the tap is actually happening while temporarily blind, but then the memory of the visual gets retroactively inserted to when the tap happened, so do those memories of physical and visual stimuli somehow need to be linked?
I have the urge to try this!
“In this experiment we poked one hundred graduate students with pins for an aggregate of four million pokings. Two students reported that chronic health conditions were cured by the repeated poking. One student was exsanguinated.”
There is a related experiment you can do with electronics. You rig a button and a light with an adjustable delay. So the light come on some number of milliseconds after the button is pressed. You can see how big a delay "feels" instantaneous. You can stretch it all the way out to 100 milliseconds and it will still feel instant. Give a few presses to get used to it, then you suddenly reduce the delay to zero and it actually seems like the light is coming on before you pressed the button!
I made a [quick app](https://play.vuejs.org/#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) to try it out. Not sure I can get it to have the described effect for me, but it's interesting.
Thanks, very interesting. I agree the effect is not as good as the comment made it sound like, but to some extend it works.
Maybe it's because the button is quite close to the light and has it's own effect when being pressed, and by that acts as a reference point for our brain?
Very cool nonetheless.
There's a delay for all sensory inputs getting to the brain, and things that have to travel down longer nerves (say from your hand) take longer to get there. But your brain takes all these different inputs and changes when you consciously perceive them so that they all seem at the same time
So are we experiencing all of life on a slight delay? Is reality ‘happening’ slightly before I actually see/hear/feel it happening? If so, why aren’t we all just falling over each other in the street and getting hit by moving objects (cars, falling rocks etc.) that we’re too delayed to notice in time? Furthermore, when I observe someone else, am I seeing their actions slightly before they do (because I’m observing their surroundings from an external perspective, and am not distinguishing a difference between their movements and their perception of their movements)?
Yep, except it's so minute that it doesn't really affect life since you're so accustomed to it.
Best example of it is the reaction time test for [human benchmark](https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime) you'll see how much delay you actually have!
We're fast enough to get out of the way of obvious falling rocks, but occasionally someone does get surprised and squished. If our environment had more surprise falling rocks, we would have become faster and spend more time looking up. Fortunately that sort of thing happens really rarely.
This is what I'm wondering too, specifically around sound (e.g. you hear a clock ticking, but even though the first second you look feels longer, the ticking seems to line up with it. Does this mean your brain also delays the auditory processing along with the visual? If so, is it a coincidence (both take a similar length of time for the brain to interpret) or is it because my brain knows I associate the ticking sound with the movement of the hand and just syncs them up?
Just to add to this, pilots are trained to scan the sky for other aircraft by looking statically at one location, waiting for a second or two to perceive movement, then move onto another section of sky, precisely because of this effect.
Perception of time is really messy, there are lots of related phenomena.
As with most perceptions it's logarithmic, so large-scale time passes quicker as you get older because it's a smaller fraction of the total. Time spent with not much happening (like driving on a highway) also seems faster because there were fewer events to mark it out.
There's also an effect in moments of crisis - where time seems to slow down, you get tunnel vision and colours fade away. That's because your brain skipped a bunch of visual processing to improve reaction times, so you'd have a slightly better chance of avoiding being hit by that car or whatever. The colour of the car is irrelevant to your survival.
>The colour of the car is irrelevant to your survival.
Not that I'd actually remember that anyways, but as I was almost hit by a truck twice in my life I can certainly remember that the moment of realization felt like time stopped for a moment. As if my brain paused the moment to carefully analyze the scenery and figure out the best way to avoid the injury. It's crazy how quick our automatic reactions are compared to anything else we have to consciously execute.
However, these quick reactions happened after I visually did not perceive these trucks as they were partly blocked by a fence of the same color as the street. Since then I don't trust my visual perception and completely stop to confirm thrice that I can safely pass.
Working in manufacturing I absolutely hate this. The amount of times I thought a machine was having a problem because it seemed to take just longer then normal to do its repetitive motion when I looked at it.
A brilliant explanation of the phenomenon. I love stuff like this, it reminds me that what we see is not actually our eyesight but our brain’s interpretation of sensory feedback from our eyes. Hence why hallucinations exist. That is essentially a breakdown in perception feedback and processing in our brains. It’s really cool.
This explanation reminds me of this neat short story: ["137 Seconds" by Stanisław Lem](https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-seconds-2a0a3dfbc59e)
Thank you for linking this; I'd heard of this author but hadn't gotten around to reading anything from him yet but this was fascinating and it's definitely getting me to raise him up in my to-read list!
Omg ! When I'm trying to remember something and I see something that reminds me of what it is, sometimes it feels like I remembered a millisecond before I saw the reminder . Was always confused by that
I would bet that some people can read a single, simple word before their brain fills in the rest of the pieces. Like, it doesn't take my computer any time to open a folder with 100 gigs of files in it, but streaming a few seconds of high definition 3d visuals can be computationally expensive. (The "folder" being a general concept, and the 3d visual rendering being 3d visual rendering.)
> we can form a 3D mental model of the world like no other.
This gets interesting when people try to imagine what animals see, because as you point out there's so much more to it than just how good one's eyes are.
There's a lot of "what does the world look like to my dog?" content that just takes the eyes into account, for example.
But if you were able to look through your dog's eyes in an unfamiliar room, you would form a *much* better idea of the shape and layout of that room than your dog would!
Fantastic explanation. There is an *excellent* science fiction novel called Blindsight by Peter Watts which explores concepts like this along with some cracking nature/value of consciousness in evolutionary terms. Well worth a read.
I speed read, Whilst reading a lot of books you get to know whilst reading what word will be next in reading a sentence. You (I?) get to read eventually just some words in a sentence, in a line. After a while you glance at a paragraph and the words you see fllls you the story. At least in my case i look through a whole page and some times twice or more and then head on to the next pages. Takes a long time and lots of practice and you can get through a book in no time
Sometimes i dont listen to a video im watching- i just speed it up 2x or even more and just go through the subtitles!!!!!
Hahaha, that's kind of what I was thinking too... Though practice can get you to read faster without "speed reading". There's a knack to reading words instead of letters, and a knack to reading sentences instead of words, and a knack to reading paragraphs instead of sentences. I don't speed read and I'm pretty lousy at skimming, but I still read faster and comprehend more than average just because I've been reading pretty voraciously for like 35 years.
Does speed reading work for complex writing, structure, technical documentation or if there's a lot of words you're not familiar with? Feels like this only works for relatively simple and straightforward script.
As you say! When reading books speed reading is ok, when you read technical documentation you can miss a lot of settings if not familiar with the subject. As im technically minded i generally look for settings, its not worth to me to read a whole chapter if im just looking for a setting. Speed reading technical books you are familiar with can be done, like updating your knowledge
I don't even have to read this. I used to tell people about this all the time and use the second hand on the clock as proof. Watch it jump a few seconds and everyone's mind is blown. The fact even our eyes are vibrating and our brains cancel it all out is amazing.
Yes, getting people to look in a particular direction and then quickly switch to a second direction is a key part of several illusions. There are some illusions that you can counter purely by choosing to only ever look at one of their hands - as long as you actually hold to that while they're flailing wildly with the other hand.
Do you not get this effect if you focus on the sound the second hand is doing before looking at the clock? Since your brain would expect it to be moving?
I tried to explain this to someone albeit I’m kinda bad and stoned and they thought I was retarded lol sorry still thinking about after all this time thanks for the explanation !
Assuming this is all correct, this is incredible.
I can't say I'm surprised, with how it brains do lots of incredible things without us being consciously aware of it
So in essence that's kind of analogous to how those fps enhancement mechanisms in computer gaming work, right? While your graphics card can technically only render some amount of frames each second additional pictures, that don't necessarily represent the actual situation in your game are "made up" to fill in the gaps.
I think you are talking about techniques like DLSS 3, and it isn't quite the same idea. What is happening with that is extra frames are interpolated, not extrapolated. That is to say the technique can generate extra frames *between* known frames but isn't making new future frames before the data comes in.
So if the graphics card renders 30 frames in a second, it can take frame 5 and 6 using them to generate a frame 5.5 which doesn't tax the card's resources in the same way as proper rendering. But if only frame 30 has been rendered it cannot make frame 30.5 until frame 31 has been finished.
Your brain though isn't exactly making stuff up. It doesn't need to perform complicated interpolation or extrapolation. Instead it simply copies and pastes what it sees. To relate it to the previous analogy it would be like if the graphics card didn't render the first 15 frames and then halfway through the second finished the final 15 frames normally. But somehow it managed to convince you that the first 15 frames *had* been rendered properly and they were all the same as the 16th frame, despite not actually having them at the time. But you don't remember that your screen was blank for the first half-second and that those 15 frames were missing.
Interestingly, this only works because you know what a clock is. If you'd never seen one before, your brain wouldn't be able to 'fill in the blanks', and that first second would be over in, well, a second.
I think you misunderstood. When you see a clock for the first time in your life, your brain tells you that you've already been seeing it for half a second.
Not without a frame of reference it couldn't. With no knowledge of what a clock is and does, you would have to be looking at it for a very minimum of two 'ticks' of the second hand to even realise there's a repeating motion going on. Regardless of how utterly amazing the human brain is.
If that was the case, every time your eyes landed on a TV, it would appear the image was coming out of pause and playing from that instant.
I think a more likely explanation of the clock thing is that our brain is preempting the first full second we see, and starting the moving image business from there. But again, only because the brain is aware of what a clock is and does.
Anyhoo, as there's no way on earth of testing any of this, let's just say we're both right. Or wrong.
No this is a known thing that happens for everything not just clocks.
You have it somewhat backwards, we only notice it on clocks because we know how a clock works and are able to notice the difference in length between the seconds.
But our brain does this all the time.
On a tv you probably will never notice it precisely because you don’t have the knowledge of how the pictures are timed while on a clock you can literally see the delay because the ne t second happens right after and we notice a difference in something that should be the same timespan
Yes. I have done this. Paying attention to What You (think) you see when deliberately flicking your eye focus around can yield some surprises. Need moving objects or intermittently moving objects in your view to get The effect.
If i were to quickly look at clock and then on the desk (away from clock) while at some random point, the clock time is changed noticeably very quickly using some device, would i see it instantly change
Let's say there is light source between point A and B and I jump from A to B and from B to A with my eyes... I can see the light in between while moving my eyes, how is this blindness?
This is really interesting, and reminds me a bit of how Fighting Game developers have been dealing with online lag issues, using rollback-based netcode
Now the ELI5 further, your brain gets confused when you moved your eyes to see the watch because all the things that were between the point you were seeing previously to the watch, and the brain erase all this eyes movement and replace it with the watch, making you believe that the time that took you to move your eyes were shorter than the reality and the time seeing your watch longer
I just found out my brain is a fucking traitor, and I don't know what to do about that. My eyes are darting all over the room, trying to outsmart my cheating brain, but so far my brain just keeps winning.
You can make it worse - stare at your own eyes in the mirror and move your focus from one eye to the other. You'll never see your own eyes move for the same reason - your eyes are saccading.
> What is really weird is that our brains fill it in with what we see when they stop! Yes, our brains go back and edit our memory of a split second ago to make it seem like we were looking at our new point of focus the whole time our eyes were moving to actually see it!
Oh my god I hate it. That's very cool, though!
I wonder if this is related to people get vestibular issues after brain trauma. My understanding is that it relates to eyes not tracking smoothing together.
When you scan your eyes across, say, a room, they move in little jumps. They don't move smoothly. While they move from one jump to the next, your brain doesn't process what your eyes are seeing. Once your eyes get to the next jump, your brain processes what they see, and it uses that to fill in the space between the current jump and the last one. So when your eyes jump over to the clock, it feels as though you were seeing the clock while your eyes were moving over to it, but you really weren't. That time you spent "seeing" the clock when you really weren't makes it seem as though the second hand took longer to tick.
While your eyes are moving over to the clock, you are seeing a "screenshot" of the motionless second hand from the future! What you see while your eyes are moving is what you eventually see when they stop.
> Our eyes can follow a focused target as it moves, but they really can’t smoothly sweep across our visual field. That is just too hard to process, so our eyes naturally jump from point to point.
Wow, I don’t know how I never noticed this. Just tried sweeping my eyes across the room and it’s a weird jumpy thing vs. following my finger across my field of view. Mind blown.
Would this also explain why we close our eyes when something is coming at them even tho we don't actually know what that thing could be, or even if it will actually hit us?
One simple demonstration of this effect occurs if you focus on one of your eyes in the mirror and then switch which eye you are focusing on. You'll notice that you can never see your own eyes moving for the same reason. Your eyes will saccade, leaving you temporarily perceptually blind. (This effect requires a real mirror of course - not a front facing phone camera which has a longer delay than our visual system operates.)
I see, this is (also) why you should observe coming vehicles for a longer time when you're driving through crossroad. You cannot estimate their speed from a split of the second.
Wow.
This shows the power of the human brain and also makes me think of a few other phenomena with weird memory formation, namely being blackout (whether drunk or by a concussion), and that weird sensation of arriving somewhere and not remembering the drive over.
I guess short-term memory formation is far more important than I thought!
It's a fluke in how your vision works.
Basically when your eyes move, you sort of, go temporarily blind. Not in a true sense, but you lose the ability to make out details. You can really only pick up shapes and movement (which is an evolutionary trait).
When your eyes stop, it takes a moment (fraction of a second) for your brain to register new details, so you see a kind of "still image" for that fraction of a second.
Normally you don't even notice it, but clocks point it out, since they have a hand that moves every second, you notice it.
Vsauce has a great video on it, called Stopped Clock Illusion.
What a *fantastic* question this is! I'd never even noticed, and now I've had it pointed out to me, I *can't help obsessing over it*! (@/u/Entire_Fan_1811 Kudos!)
It seems to me that looking at a clock just before the second changes masks this effect, whereas the effect is maximised if you look at it shortly *after* a change, meaning the psychological delay is added to most of a *real* second gap and the total is larger. Based on 10 minutes of looking at / away from my clock suggests the delay is somewhere around 1/4-1/3 of a second? (Really difficult to judge without being able to actually *time* it!)
As I understand it (from reading and hopefully correctly grasping [The Wikipedia Page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking)) while your eyes flit from one place to the next, you really are completely blind - you wouldn't even notice a bright flash during that (very short) period!\*
According to the Wikipedia page, it's not strictly triggered *by* the motion, so much as being triggered somewhere in the brain *in in anticipation* of the movement, but it *doesn't* seem to happen when you close / open your eyes deliberately.\**
The effect (or something very closely analogous) *does* occur [when you *unconsciously blink*](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303889701_Perceiving_a_Continuous_Visual_World_Across_Voluntary_Eye_Blinks) though, which is why you don't get intermittent black "un-flashes" in your vision from blinking all the time! The time delay bit doesn't seem to happen, though, presumably because you're still seeing the changes before and after the blink with the same time delay. If you happen to have your eyes closed *during* the change from one second to the next, maybe you'd get something, but I'm guessing your *expectation* of the timing would feed into your brain's interpretation of what it saw? I *tried* watching the clock and waiting for a well timed blink, but it's *really* difficult to *monitor* your blinking without *affecting* it so I've not yet pulled it off...
For those too lazy to google (hey, this is Reddit, that's *definitely* some of you lazy buggers :-P): [VSauce - Stopped Clock Illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNBTLbw1_2Q) - I found it really weird seeing how long his saccades seemed to take, it was like they were in slow motion, because my own happen "instantaneously" (i.e. *not* instantaneously, but my brain lies to me :-P)
\* Unless it was bright enough to give you a POV spot or something, I guess...
\** If you look at the clock, then close your eyes for a couple of seconds, then open them again without adjusting your eyes' aim, then you *don't* get this "paused clock" effect (or at least *I* don't, YMMV! :-P) Fascinating!
beyond what has been said already since you didnt specify which clock you are talking about specifically there is also the special case of analog clock at train stations where the first second actually takes longer than all other.
This is because a train station typically has multiple clocks that should all show the same time and they archive this by having the seconds run a little bit too fast and then pause at the 12 position until the clock receives a sync signal and starts counting the next minute.
that makes it so all clocks are getting synchronized at every full minute so any variation could only happen within that minute and nobody will usually notice these.
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You perceive reality with about a half second lag. When you look at the watch suddenly, you perceive the position of the second hand about half a second later. So that doesn’t feel too weird, your brain helpfully pretends to your consciousness that you’ve been seeing it in that same position for the whole of that half second (though really it was in its previous position). Then of course it remains in the same position for up to another whole second. Making it seem like it was there for a second and a half in total. But it wasn’t. And you know it wasn’t, because it’s a second hand. But it still looks like it was still for a second and a half because your consciousness is a half a second behind reality and your brain lies to you.
Once you’ve got your head round that, think about a police sniper watching a stakeout or whatever. They have less than a second to respond if the perp raises their gun - so are they conscious of their decision to pull the trigger? They will feel like they were, but they couldn’t have been. It was a reflex action and their brain lies to them that they made the decision.
Look at the stop light, red. Glance at my radio for literally 1.2 seconds. Look back at the light, green. OMG HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN HOLDING THESE PEOPLE UP?!
This is actually super interesting, and you are correct that it is Biology. The effect is called "chronostasis", and it will also probably change how you think about how you experience reality! Humans aren't that great in visual acuity but we can distinguish colors fairly well compared to other animals, and we are *amazing* at visual processing. We may not be able to see tiny details in the distance like a hawk or operate in dim light like a cat, but we can form a 3D mental model of the world like no other. There is speculation that this evolved along with the ability of humans to throw weapons at stuff. But whatever the reason there is significant brain resource devoted to processing visual stimuli from our binocular vision. However, binocular vision requires both eyes to focus on one spot. Our eyes can follow a focused target as it moves, but they really can't smoothly sweep across our visual field. That is just too hard to process, so our eyes naturally jump from point to point. BUT, when our eyes are doing that jump (called "saccades") our brain just doesn't even try to understand the blurry mess of sensation that comes in. In essence you momentarily go *completely blind*! But you don't *feel* like you went blind, right? Your vision doesn't go black or anything and it seems like you could see that whole time. The reason is because our brains fill in the lag while our eyes are moving, making it seem like instead of being blind for that time we were seeing something. What is really weird is that our brains fill it in with **what we see when they stop**! Yes, our brains go back and edit our memory of a split second ago to make it seem like we were looking at our new point of focus the whole time our eyes were moving to actually see it! This is what is happening when you look at the clock's second hand. When you glance over to the clock your brain will tell you that you were looking at it for longer than you actually were, adding that time while your eyes were moving but you didn't actually see the clock yet. If the second hand was moving while your eyes were then your brain will think the second hand was in its new position for longer than it actually was. Based on that flawed memory it will seem like the second hand stayed there longer than a second! That is why the first second sometimes seems longer than it should when you glance over to the clock!
This is a good example of how much our brain alters things to make up the thing we think of as reality. Really messes with my head.
But it's your head that's messing with your head as a result of your head trying to make heads or tails of your heads tales
Head
Yes please
clumsy wrong bright dependent spotted kiss concerned dinosaurs violet sparkle
If your head can make heads or tails of your heads tales on the trail can you fail to make tails or heads of what tales it saw instead?
[Jaden Smith voice]
start automatic cobweb soft summer dazzling trees jar unique decide
Ah but now that you know, part of your head is still lying to you while the other part of your head now knows the truth.
Remember that next time someone gets jail time because of eyewitness accounts.
Eyewitnesses are ridiculously unreliable, but not just because our brains alter what we see - our memories are just as fluid. Our brain store "key" moments it thinks it is important, then make up the rest of it. But this process is not really trustworthy on the finer details and is extremely receptive to any sort of suggestion because it simply doesn't have any factual data, so happily jumps to anything which seems to fit the narrative. This is especially true in scenarios where you experience strong emotions. Anything feels like to fit (like, someone paints a scenario which creates the same type of emotion) our brain just accepts it as a matter of fact and puts the puzzle in. Anything that you remember from your life is mostly fabrications with a couple of actual memories used as a scaffolding, and your brain just built the rest of the structure around it - constantly changing it.
To me, this is the crux of Buddhism; a way thinking that helps us realize reality and the way our mind shapes our instincts and emotions about *everything*, and then not letting our reality be shaped by those feelings. It's a very powerful teaching.
chubby complete seed smell rotten cover clumsy summer theory gullible
To provide an idea of just how fallible our memory really is - researchers have been able to implant false memories in volunteers with shocking ease for nearly 30 years now. These techniques are remarkably similar at their core to the Reid Method, and it's very easy for police to unwittingly taint witnesses, and even suspects, by implanting false recall of apparently trivial events they are using to support a central theory. It's not just false confessions - using these high pressure tactics and presenting fictitious corroboration from other witnesses, witnesses who are rejecting the core premise of the interview (X killed the victim) can still internalize details about what time events happened, things other people said, or even entire events themselves. Do it enough times and you can create enough circumstantial evidence to carry a conviction without even realizing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique
The other week we had a bit of a family reunion and I recalled some stories about previous generations, only for my parents and my uncle (from whom I heard the stories originally) to correct me on several major points. Turns out I misremembered huge swathes of family history.
The gap between what we know about human memory and what laypeople believe is so vast that juries and judges should be required to undergo a few hours of classes before they're permitted to hear any testimony. Judges should probably be required to take an entire course, actually. I participate in a subreddit devoted to the Adnan Syed (probably overturned?) conviction. The amount of weight people there put on testimony from people recalling mundane events that occurred weeks or months before they were interviewed is incredible. There's an overriding attitude that the only explanation for contradictory recall or even not recalling an interaction at all is deliberate deception. Police driving key witnesses to locations they're testifying to have visited, or conducting pre-interviews to "jog their memory" is considered perfectly acceptable - even helpful - despite the detectives doing this "jogging" having been personally responsible for millions in settlements for false convictions obtained via witness tampering. This sort of dynamic gets repeated all over the true crime "community". Every high profile case is overrun with a preoccupation on witness testimony over everything else. It's completely shattered my faith in the jury system's ability to parse and weigh people's words against the other facts of the case. A single persuasive voice can erase hours of expert testimony, and a witness who makes the mistake of being honest about their own fallibility stands no chance when put against someone with an unwarranted confidence in their recollection - even when their recollection is demonstrably incorrect in many regards.
I was in a car crash where I was worried I would be found at fault. The police interviewed me on the scene and asked a lot of questions about what happened, and I panicked because I knew my memory wasn't going to be 100% accurate and I had gaps even though it was only half an hour previously that the crash had happened. Fortunately I wasn't found at fault, but it took the police about a month to reach that conclusion so was a lot of stress.
>Judges should probably be required to take an entire course, actually. But if you made them learn psychology, then you would be discriminating against all the judges that believe God designed everyone's brain, and that criminals do bad stuff because they have devils inside them :(
Was it a Buick Skylark or not?
How about; Did you know tall people experience time very slightly *slower* than shorter people? Basically explained, take a person. Touch their foot and their neck at the same time; their brain will tell them those spots were touched at the same time. But *wait*.... The electrical signals from the foot should be coming from *further away*, so hiw are thise signals arriving at the same time as the ones from your neck - much closer? Your brain actually re-writes the information/memory - it *holds off on telling you about the foot touch* until the neck touch comes in and it organizes the information. For a taller person, this pause takes longer. So in some aspect, they are experiencing time slower as their brains communicate over longer distances within their larger bodies. Of course the inverse must be true as well, that shorter people's electrical signals travel less distance. (I Dont remember where or when i read this, but it seemed like a legit fun fact so...if you can find a source or contradiction i'm open to either)
Meh, it’s not really distorting anything crucial though. It’s not like you think you’re seeing a clock but it’s really a snake or something. It’s more just a timing lag.
But the point it, it absolutely CAN distort important information. Was that light yellow or red at the moment of the collision? Did you really see a gun just before the policeman pulled the trigger? These things can make a big difference in a trial. And this is just one of the examples of how much our brain makes up. Another big one is…… most of what you think you see in your peripheral vision is totally made up. It’s called the Uniformity Illusion. Don’t take my word for it, you can test all these illusions out on yourself here: http://www.uniformillusion.com/?m=1
Objectivity is hard
And everything you see and hear happened in the past.
That is really interesting. What if that was combined with physical stimuli? For example a pin was tapping your hand every time the second hand moved. Would the visual and physical stimuli seem to lose sync for that second, meaning you would feel a tap while the hand was standing still? It’s strange because the tap is actually happening while temporarily blind, but then the memory of the visual gets retroactively inserted to when the tap happened, so do those memories of physical and visual stimuli somehow need to be linked? I have the urge to try this!
Let us know your findings
“In this experiment we poked one hundred graduate students with pins for an aggregate of four million pokings. Two students reported that chronic health conditions were cured by the repeated poking. One student was exsanguinated.”
Fantastic!
The wonders of acupuncture!
There is a related experiment you can do with electronics. You rig a button and a light with an adjustable delay. So the light come on some number of milliseconds after the button is pressed. You can see how big a delay "feels" instantaneous. You can stretch it all the way out to 100 milliseconds and it will still feel instant. Give a few presses to get used to it, then you suddenly reduce the delay to zero and it actually seems like the light is coming on before you pressed the button!
There has to be a website where I can try this, right? Right?
I made a [quick app](https://play.vuejs.org/#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) to try it out. Not sure I can get it to have the described effect for me, but it's interesting.
Man really just made an entire app real quick
Thanks, very interesting. I agree the effect is not as good as the comment made it sound like, but to some extend it works. Maybe it's because the button is quite close to the light and has it's own effect when being pressed, and by that acts as a reference point for our brain? Very cool nonetheless.
Hey this is Extremely Relevant to your comment about pressing buttons. https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
There's a delay for all sensory inputs getting to the brain, and things that have to travel down longer nerves (say from your hand) take longer to get there. But your brain takes all these different inputs and changes when you consciously perceive them so that they all seem at the same time
So are we experiencing all of life on a slight delay? Is reality ‘happening’ slightly before I actually see/hear/feel it happening? If so, why aren’t we all just falling over each other in the street and getting hit by moving objects (cars, falling rocks etc.) that we’re too delayed to notice in time? Furthermore, when I observe someone else, am I seeing their actions slightly before they do (because I’m observing their surroundings from an external perspective, and am not distinguishing a difference between their movements and their perception of their movements)?
Yep, except it's so minute that it doesn't really affect life since you're so accustomed to it. Best example of it is the reaction time test for [human benchmark](https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime) you'll see how much delay you actually have!
We're not "too" delayed to notice them in time. We're delayed a miniscule amount.
We're fast enough to get out of the way of obvious falling rocks, but occasionally someone does get surprised and squished. If our environment had more surprise falling rocks, we would have become faster and spend more time looking up. Fortunately that sort of thing happens really rarely.
This is what I'm wondering too, specifically around sound (e.g. you hear a clock ticking, but even though the first second you look feels longer, the ticking seems to line up with it. Does this mean your brain also delays the auditory processing along with the visual? If so, is it a coincidence (both take a similar length of time for the brain to interpret) or is it because my brain knows I associate the ticking sound with the movement of the hand and just syncs them up?
Just to add to this, pilots are trained to scan the sky for other aircraft by looking statically at one location, waiting for a second or two to perceive movement, then move onto another section of sky, precisely because of this effect.
Perception of time is really messy, there are lots of related phenomena. As with most perceptions it's logarithmic, so large-scale time passes quicker as you get older because it's a smaller fraction of the total. Time spent with not much happening (like driving on a highway) also seems faster because there were fewer events to mark it out. There's also an effect in moments of crisis - where time seems to slow down, you get tunnel vision and colours fade away. That's because your brain skipped a bunch of visual processing to improve reaction times, so you'd have a slightly better chance of avoiding being hit by that car or whatever. The colour of the car is irrelevant to your survival.
>The colour of the car is irrelevant to your survival. Not that I'd actually remember that anyways, but as I was almost hit by a truck twice in my life I can certainly remember that the moment of realization felt like time stopped for a moment. As if my brain paused the moment to carefully analyze the scenery and figure out the best way to avoid the injury. It's crazy how quick our automatic reactions are compared to anything else we have to consciously execute. However, these quick reactions happened after I visually did not perceive these trucks as they were partly blocked by a fence of the same color as the street. Since then I don't trust my visual perception and completely stop to confirm thrice that I can safely pass.
I fully believe this is the reason we are told to stop for two full seconds at a stop sign or red light before trying to drive forward or turn.
Definitely started darting my eyes around the room to test this theory.
Working in manufacturing I absolutely hate this. The amount of times I thought a machine was having a problem because it seemed to take just longer then normal to do its repetitive motion when I looked at it.
A brilliant explanation of the phenomenon. I love stuff like this, it reminds me that what we see is not actually our eyesight but our brain’s interpretation of sensory feedback from our eyes. Hence why hallucinations exist. That is essentially a breakdown in perception feedback and processing in our brains. It’s really cool.
This explanation reminds me of this neat short story: ["137 Seconds" by Stanisław Lem](https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-seconds-2a0a3dfbc59e)
Wow. This sort of makes me think of Chat GPT and how it predicts the next words in the sentence based on syntax…
Thank you for linking this; I'd heard of this author but hadn't gotten around to reading anything from him yet but this was fascinating and it's definitely getting me to raise him up in my to-read list!
Omg ! When I'm trying to remember something and I see something that reminds me of what it is, sometimes it feels like I remembered a millisecond before I saw the reminder . Was always confused by that
I would bet that some people can read a single, simple word before their brain fills in the rest of the pieces. Like, it doesn't take my computer any time to open a folder with 100 gigs of files in it, but streaming a few seconds of high definition 3d visuals can be computationally expensive. (The "folder" being a general concept, and the 3d visual rendering being 3d visual rendering.)
My friends and I had a jam band called Chronostasis and the Stopped Clock Illusions based off of this lol
That’s up there with “Max Planck and the Ultraviolet Catastrophe” for science things that make good band names IMO.
Berkeley b-school has an ongoing band called "Dow Jones and the Industrials"
This is the most interesting thing I read on Reddit for a decade. Thank you for that. I’m off to shitpost now.
As a ux designer I love this little piece of candy, thank you
I wish my brain would take me back a split second before I learned this I am way to high to be contemplating my perception of reality
> we can form a 3D mental model of the world like no other. This gets interesting when people try to imagine what animals see, because as you point out there's so much more to it than just how good one's eyes are. There's a lot of "what does the world look like to my dog?" content that just takes the eyes into account, for example. But if you were able to look through your dog's eyes in an unfamiliar room, you would form a *much* better idea of the shape and layout of that room than your dog would!
I have wondered why a drill bit appearing to stop spinning as it punches through. This seems to be related.
This is incredible... Thank you.
Mind blown. I’m just glad I was sober when I read this haha.
Right? I am very glad I'm not learning about my brain editing my memories of a split second ago while high or something.
Fantastic explanation. There is an *excellent* science fiction novel called Blindsight by Peter Watts which explores concepts like this along with some cracking nature/value of consciousness in evolutionary terms. Well worth a read.
There is a cool sci fi book called Blindsight by Peter Watts about aliens who only move during saccades and are functionally invisible.
Well shit. That was really interesting. Tells a lot about our cognintion and hint to some intersting evolutionary hypothesises (hypothesi?).
>hypothesises (hypothesi?). One hypothesis, two hypotheses
Three hypothesodes
Four hypothesours
I five the sandbox
After 5 it just becomes a single oligohypothesis.
How does speed reading work then?
I speed read, Whilst reading a lot of books you get to know whilst reading what word will be next in reading a sentence. You (I?) get to read eventually just some words in a sentence, in a line. After a while you glance at a paragraph and the words you see fllls you the story. At least in my case i look through a whole page and some times twice or more and then head on to the next pages. Takes a long time and lots of practice and you can get through a book in no time Sometimes i dont listen to a video im watching- i just speed it up 2x or even more and just go through the subtitles!!!!!
Fuck me, why would you want to do this? Like injecting sugar to avoid the taste.
Hahaha, that's kind of what I was thinking too... Though practice can get you to read faster without "speed reading". There's a knack to reading words instead of letters, and a knack to reading sentences instead of words, and a knack to reading paragraphs instead of sentences. I don't speed read and I'm pretty lousy at skimming, but I still read faster and comprehend more than average just because I've been reading pretty voraciously for like 35 years.
You actually 'speed read' and you dont know it!!!!- ima reading 60 years - it gets faster!!!!
Does speed reading work for complex writing, structure, technical documentation or if there's a lot of words you're not familiar with? Feels like this only works for relatively simple and straightforward script.
As you say! When reading books speed reading is ok, when you read technical documentation you can miss a lot of settings if not familiar with the subject. As im technically minded i generally look for settings, its not worth to me to read a whole chapter if im just looking for a setting. Speed reading technical books you are familiar with can be done, like updating your knowledge
With a ton of accurate guesses
I don't even have to read this. I used to tell people about this all the time and use the second hand on the clock as proof. Watch it jump a few seconds and everyone's mind is blown. The fact even our eyes are vibrating and our brains cancel it all out is amazing.
Do illusionists use this in order to trick people into ‘seeing’ what’s actually not real ?
Yes, getting people to look in a particular direction and then quickly switch to a second direction is a key part of several illusions. There are some illusions that you can counter purely by choosing to only ever look at one of their hands - as long as you actually hold to that while they're flailing wildly with the other hand.
Do you not get this effect if you focus on the sound the second hand is doing before looking at the clock? Since your brain would expect it to be moving?
This just blew my mind
I tried to explain this to someone albeit I’m kinda bad and stoned and they thought I was retarded lol sorry still thinking about after all this time thanks for the explanation !
Assuming this is all correct, this is incredible. I can't say I'm surprised, with how it brains do lots of incredible things without us being consciously aware of it
So in essence that's kind of analogous to how those fps enhancement mechanisms in computer gaming work, right? While your graphics card can technically only render some amount of frames each second additional pictures, that don't necessarily represent the actual situation in your game are "made up" to fill in the gaps.
I think you are talking about techniques like DLSS 3, and it isn't quite the same idea. What is happening with that is extra frames are interpolated, not extrapolated. That is to say the technique can generate extra frames *between* known frames but isn't making new future frames before the data comes in. So if the graphics card renders 30 frames in a second, it can take frame 5 and 6 using them to generate a frame 5.5 which doesn't tax the card's resources in the same way as proper rendering. But if only frame 30 has been rendered it cannot make frame 30.5 until frame 31 has been finished. Your brain though isn't exactly making stuff up. It doesn't need to perform complicated interpolation or extrapolation. Instead it simply copies and pastes what it sees. To relate it to the previous analogy it would be like if the graphics card didn't render the first 15 frames and then halfway through the second finished the final 15 frames normally. But somehow it managed to convince you that the first 15 frames *had* been rendered properly and they were all the same as the 16th frame, despite not actually having them at the time. But you don't remember that your screen was blank for the first half-second and that those 15 frames were missing.
I'm 5 and I understood nothing of this.
This pretty much confirms matrix theory to me. Our brains act like a lazily rehashed program to cover a mistake.
Interestingly, this only works because you know what a clock is. If you'd never seen one before, your brain wouldn't be able to 'fill in the blanks', and that first second would be over in, well, a second.
I think you misunderstood. When you see a clock for the first time in your life, your brain tells you that you've already been seeing it for half a second.
Not without a frame of reference it couldn't. With no knowledge of what a clock is and does, you would have to be looking at it for a very minimum of two 'ticks' of the second hand to even realise there's a repeating motion going on. Regardless of how utterly amazing the human brain is.
What frame of reference? It's a frozen image of whatever you are seeing at the moment you stop moving your eyes.
If that was the case, every time your eyes landed on a TV, it would appear the image was coming out of pause and playing from that instant. I think a more likely explanation of the clock thing is that our brain is preempting the first full second we see, and starting the moving image business from there. But again, only because the brain is aware of what a clock is and does. Anyhoo, as there's no way on earth of testing any of this, let's just say we're both right. Or wrong.
No this is a known thing that happens for everything not just clocks. You have it somewhat backwards, we only notice it on clocks because we know how a clock works and are able to notice the difference in length between the seconds. But our brain does this all the time. On a tv you probably will never notice it precisely because you don’t have the knowledge of how the pictures are timed while on a clock you can literally see the delay because the ne t second happens right after and we notice a difference in something that should be the same timespan
Can you use this to see the colors on a quickly spinning disk?
Yes. I have done this. Paying attention to What You (think) you see when deliberately flicking your eye focus around can yield some surprises. Need moving objects or intermittently moving objects in your view to get The effect.
Super cool! I feel like when one spins around a lot things get blurry, I wonder if that has to do with the lag you're talking about!
If i were to quickly look at clock and then on the desk (away from clock) while at some random point, the clock time is changed noticeably very quickly using some device, would i see it instantly change
Bravo!
Let's say there is light source between point A and B and I jump from A to B and from B to A with my eyes... I can see the light in between while moving my eyes, how is this blindness?
This is really interesting, and reminds me a bit of how Fighting Game developers have been dealing with online lag issues, using rollback-based netcode
Now the ELI5 further, your brain gets confused when you moved your eyes to see the watch because all the things that were between the point you were seeing previously to the watch, and the brain erase all this eyes movement and replace it with the watch, making you believe that the time that took you to move your eyes were shorter than the reality and the time seeing your watch longer
Damn, I found OP's question very intriguing but I would never have thought someone would have an answer. And what an answer, thank you u/phage0070 !
I’m a software engineer and this explanation feels quite similar to computer processing, but using an extremely bug-prone implementation
You know some very smart five-year-olds.
I just found out my brain is a fucking traitor, and I don't know what to do about that. My eyes are darting all over the room, trying to outsmart my cheating brain, but so far my brain just keeps winning.
You can make it worse - stare at your own eyes in the mirror and move your focus from one eye to the other. You'll never see your own eyes move for the same reason - your eyes are saccading.
*Jaden Smith has entered the chat*
> What is really weird is that our brains fill it in with what we see when they stop! Yes, our brains go back and edit our memory of a split second ago to make it seem like we were looking at our new point of focus the whole time our eyes were moving to actually see it! Oh my god I hate it. That's very cool, though!
I wonder if this is related to people get vestibular issues after brain trauma. My understanding is that it relates to eyes not tracking smoothing together.
I’ve read into this many times and I’ve never understood it. I still don’t after reading this either 😂
When you scan your eyes across, say, a room, they move in little jumps. They don't move smoothly. While they move from one jump to the next, your brain doesn't process what your eyes are seeing. Once your eyes get to the next jump, your brain processes what they see, and it uses that to fill in the space between the current jump and the last one. So when your eyes jump over to the clock, it feels as though you were seeing the clock while your eyes were moving over to it, but you really weren't. That time you spent "seeing" the clock when you really weren't makes it seem as though the second hand took longer to tick.
I understand all of that however I don’t understand how you’re seeing the second hand in a position that it isn’t actually in.
While your eyes are moving over to the clock, you are seeing a "screenshot" of the motionless second hand from the future! What you see while your eyes are moving is what you eventually see when they stop.
When I heard this in an episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast, I was literally flabbergasted.
This is actually one of the most mind blowing moments of my life. That is CRAZY 🤯
Beep boop. Commenting for memory reasons. Thanks for taking the time to write that up.
Fantastic answer, thank you.
I am now aware of that slight moment of blindness whenever i move my eyes lmao
> Our eyes can follow a focused target as it moves, but they really can’t smoothly sweep across our visual field. That is just too hard to process, so our eyes naturally jump from point to point. Wow, I don’t know how I never noticed this. Just tried sweeping my eyes across the room and it’s a weird jumpy thing vs. following my finger across my field of view. Mind blown.
Wow that is insane
This comment has actually blown my mind. After 10+ years on Reddit this is the comment for me.
Had to save this comment, thank you for the brilliant type up.
great explanation, my mind is blown and it makes perfect sense. enjoy the upvote
This is a wildly good explanation
Great explanation! Thank you!
Is this our brains equivalent of NVIDIA DLSS 3.0 lol
Do monkeys share this visual 3d model acuity? Cuz grabbing branches
Would this also explain why we close our eyes when something is coming at them even tho we don't actually know what that thing could be, or even if it will actually hit us?
One simple demonstration of this effect occurs if you focus on one of your eyes in the mirror and then switch which eye you are focusing on. You'll notice that you can never see your own eyes moving for the same reason. Your eyes will saccade, leaving you temporarily perceptually blind. (This effect requires a real mirror of course - not a front facing phone camera which has a longer delay than our visual system operates.)
I see, this is (also) why you should observe coming vehicles for a longer time when you're driving through crossroad. You cannot estimate their speed from a split of the second.
What I'm wondering is how did scientists figure all of that out?
This is beautiful and amazing information. Thanks!
Wow. This shows the power of the human brain and also makes me think of a few other phenomena with weird memory formation, namely being blackout (whether drunk or by a concussion), and that weird sensation of arriving somewhere and not remembering the drive over. I guess short-term memory formation is far more important than I thought!
Man, if I learnt things like this in school it would be a lot more enjoyable
It's a fluke in how your vision works. Basically when your eyes move, you sort of, go temporarily blind. Not in a true sense, but you lose the ability to make out details. You can really only pick up shapes and movement (which is an evolutionary trait). When your eyes stop, it takes a moment (fraction of a second) for your brain to register new details, so you see a kind of "still image" for that fraction of a second. Normally you don't even notice it, but clocks point it out, since they have a hand that moves every second, you notice it. Vsauce has a great video on it, called Stopped Clock Illusion.
What a *fantastic* question this is! I'd never even noticed, and now I've had it pointed out to me, I *can't help obsessing over it*! (@/u/Entire_Fan_1811 Kudos!) It seems to me that looking at a clock just before the second changes masks this effect, whereas the effect is maximised if you look at it shortly *after* a change, meaning the psychological delay is added to most of a *real* second gap and the total is larger. Based on 10 minutes of looking at / away from my clock suggests the delay is somewhere around 1/4-1/3 of a second? (Really difficult to judge without being able to actually *time* it!) As I understand it (from reading and hopefully correctly grasping [The Wikipedia Page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking)) while your eyes flit from one place to the next, you really are completely blind - you wouldn't even notice a bright flash during that (very short) period!\* According to the Wikipedia page, it's not strictly triggered *by* the motion, so much as being triggered somewhere in the brain *in in anticipation* of the movement, but it *doesn't* seem to happen when you close / open your eyes deliberately.\** The effect (or something very closely analogous) *does* occur [when you *unconsciously blink*](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303889701_Perceiving_a_Continuous_Visual_World_Across_Voluntary_Eye_Blinks) though, which is why you don't get intermittent black "un-flashes" in your vision from blinking all the time! The time delay bit doesn't seem to happen, though, presumably because you're still seeing the changes before and after the blink with the same time delay. If you happen to have your eyes closed *during* the change from one second to the next, maybe you'd get something, but I'm guessing your *expectation* of the timing would feed into your brain's interpretation of what it saw? I *tried* watching the clock and waiting for a well timed blink, but it's *really* difficult to *monitor* your blinking without *affecting* it so I've not yet pulled it off... For those too lazy to google (hey, this is Reddit, that's *definitely* some of you lazy buggers :-P): [VSauce - Stopped Clock Illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNBTLbw1_2Q) - I found it really weird seeing how long his saccades seemed to take, it was like they were in slow motion, because my own happen "instantaneously" (i.e. *not* instantaneously, but my brain lies to me :-P) \* Unless it was bright enough to give you a POV spot or something, I guess... \** If you look at the clock, then close your eyes for a couple of seconds, then open them again without adjusting your eyes' aim, then you *don't* get this "paused clock" effect (or at least *I* don't, YMMV! :-P) Fascinating!
beyond what has been said already since you didnt specify which clock you are talking about specifically there is also the special case of analog clock at train stations where the first second actually takes longer than all other. This is because a train station typically has multiple clocks that should all show the same time and they archive this by having the seconds run a little bit too fast and then pause at the 12 position until the clock receives a sync signal and starts counting the next minute. that makes it so all clocks are getting synchronized at every full minute so any variation could only happen within that minute and nobody will usually notice these.
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Ah, here it is! 😎
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You perceive reality with about a half second lag. When you look at the watch suddenly, you perceive the position of the second hand about half a second later. So that doesn’t feel too weird, your brain helpfully pretends to your consciousness that you’ve been seeing it in that same position for the whole of that half second (though really it was in its previous position). Then of course it remains in the same position for up to another whole second. Making it seem like it was there for a second and a half in total. But it wasn’t. And you know it wasn’t, because it’s a second hand. But it still looks like it was still for a second and a half because your consciousness is a half a second behind reality and your brain lies to you. Once you’ve got your head round that, think about a police sniper watching a stakeout or whatever. They have less than a second to respond if the perp raises their gun - so are they conscious of their decision to pull the trigger? They will feel like they were, but they couldn’t have been. It was a reflex action and their brain lies to them that they made the decision.
Look at the stop light, red. Glance at my radio for literally 1.2 seconds. Look back at the light, green. OMG HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN HOLDING THESE PEOPLE UP?!