Thread: Science Science is Cool....
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Old 08-20-2013, 12:46 PM   #974
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Chronostasis. The fascinating phenomenon where your brain seems to briefly perceive time as freezing or even going backwards... for... some reason.....



Do you have an explanation for human-perceived chronostasis ?

Human eyes have constant breaks in perception whenever they flit about, in blind jumps called saccades. To experience this temporary blindness, look at your own eyes in a mirror and shift your sight focus from one eye to the next. Although a person standing next to you and watching you will effortlessly see your eyes flit and shift from one direction (line of sight) to another, you will never be able to see your own eyes move - even though they do move and are indeed seen as such by the other person. This blindness is due to the saccades.

Almost everyone has had the slightly odd experience of looking at their watch, and believing that the watch had stopped. Then, after a perceptibly longer time than a second , the seconds hand of the watch (or its digital display) starts moving again and all subsequent measured seconds last for, well, a second.

This well known effect happens because the brain fills backwards in time the period of time when it was blind with more of the same, to wit, with the image it saw first when the cascade ceased. So far, so good, although we can wonder at how the brain can fill time backwards in our perception. But at least this is an explanation that only involves our brain and our perceptive skills.

And then this explanation breaks down, because of something called the dead phone illusion. It's a like effect that can happen when picking up a telephone handset with an intermittent dial tone (pause/tone/pause/tone …): The first pause seems longer than the subsequent ones, and the explanation by saccadic eye movement does not apply.

Yarrow et al. have investigated further reproducible kindred cases, such as when tactile perception actually precedes the time of actual physical contact, and so on.

An ultimate explanation for chronostasis - when time stands still - is still elusive.
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