INRM
1st June 2009, 10:58 AM
The Secret Advantage Of Being Short
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104183551
Making Sense Of A Sensory Delay
"It may be," he proposes in his essay "Brain Time," that "if the brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive.
"To accomplish this, [the brain] must wait about a tenth of a second. In the early days of television broadcasting, engineers worried about the problem of keeping audio and video signals synchronized. Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop, and as long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers' brains would automatically resynchronize the signals.
"This brief waiting period allows the visual system to discount the various delays imposed by the early stages; however, it has the disadvantage of pushing perception into the past. There is a distinct survival advantage to operating as close to the present as possible; an animal does not want to live too far in the past. Therefore, the tenth of a second window may be the smallest delay that allows higher areas of the brain to account for the delays created in the first stages of the system while still operating near the borders of the present."
There's another way to think about this, Eagleman says. If a person touches your toe and your nose at the same time, he says, "you will feel those touches as simultaneous. This is surprising because the signal from your nose reaches your brain before the signal from your toe. Why didn't you feel the nose touch when it first arrived?"
It may be that our sensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest piece of information to arrive, Eagleman says.
"Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people."
What a strange idea!
I am aware that everybody technically lives in the past, in that it takes time for data to be picked up then relayed to the brain, as small as it may be.
What I'm wondering if this "temporal binding" effect always applies, or just sometimes? To all senses or just the same senses (hearing, touch, smell, etc)?
I'm also wondering why with such delays that tall people and large animals still can have very good reflex times even despite sensory delays of as much as a tenth of a second
INRM
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104183551
Making Sense Of A Sensory Delay
"It may be," he proposes in his essay "Brain Time," that "if the brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive.
"To accomplish this, [the brain] must wait about a tenth of a second. In the early days of television broadcasting, engineers worried about the problem of keeping audio and video signals synchronized. Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop, and as long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers' brains would automatically resynchronize the signals.
"This brief waiting period allows the visual system to discount the various delays imposed by the early stages; however, it has the disadvantage of pushing perception into the past. There is a distinct survival advantage to operating as close to the present as possible; an animal does not want to live too far in the past. Therefore, the tenth of a second window may be the smallest delay that allows higher areas of the brain to account for the delays created in the first stages of the system while still operating near the borders of the present."
There's another way to think about this, Eagleman says. If a person touches your toe and your nose at the same time, he says, "you will feel those touches as simultaneous. This is surprising because the signal from your nose reaches your brain before the signal from your toe. Why didn't you feel the nose touch when it first arrived?"
It may be that our sensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest piece of information to arrive, Eagleman says.
"Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people."
What a strange idea!
I am aware that everybody technically lives in the past, in that it takes time for data to be picked up then relayed to the brain, as small as it may be.
What I'm wondering if this "temporal binding" effect always applies, or just sometimes? To all senses or just the same senses (hearing, touch, smell, etc)?
I'm also wondering why with such delays that tall people and large animals still can have very good reflex times even despite sensory delays of as much as a tenth of a second
INRM