you are never experiencing now

[00:00:00]You are never experiencing now.

[00:00:03]Not really.

[00:00:04]What you're experiencing right now, this second, already happened. Your brain is showing you a rerun and telling you it's live.

[00:00:12]My brain did a thing. This one's called the delay effect.

[00:00:17]Here's the wild part. Every single thing you see, hear, and feel has to travel through your nerves, get processed, get assembled into something that makes sense, and only then does it reach your conscious awareness.

[00:00:32]And that whole process is not instant.

[00:00:36]Depending on what you're sensing, it can take anywhere from around 200 milliseconds up to 400 milliseconds for raw sensory information to become something you're actually aware of.

[00:00:47]That means the version of the world you're experiencing right now is already a few hundred milliseconds old by the time you notice it.

[00:00:56]Scientists at EPFL even proposed that consciousness doesn't arrive as a smooth, continuous stream.

[00:01:03]It might arrive in chunks, little windows of processing up to 400 milliseconds long, stitched together so seamlessly that you never notice the gaps.

[00:01:12]Like watching a movie and forgetting it's actually just frames flashing one after another. And here's where it gets stranger. This delay isn't fixed.

[00:01:20]Researchers at the Max Planck Institute found that when your brain already expects what it's about to see, conscious awareness can kick in about 100 milliseconds faster than when you're caught off guard.

[00:01:31]Your brain is constantly making bets about what's coming next, and when it guesses right, it cuts the delay down.

[00:01:37]So, in a very real sense, your brain isn't just reporting reality to you.

[00:01:41]It's predicting it, then double-checking itself, then showing you the version it settled on.

[00:01:47]This is also why reflexes exist completely outside of this loop. If a car swerves towards you, or something flies at your face, your body can react in about a tenth of a second, way faster than the 300 to 400 milliseconds it takes for you to consciously realize what's happening.

[00:02:04]You're already ducking before you know why.

[00:02:07]Your spinal cord and brain stem handle it before the delayed conscious version of you even gets the memo.

[00:02:13]This is the same delay that shows up in Benjamin Libet's famous experiments in the 1980s.

[00:02:18]He found that measurable brain activity, called the readiness potential, builds up before someone becomes consciously aware of deciding to move. Some of his patients needed about half a second of continuous neural activity before a sensation even registered as something they could consciously feel at all.

[00:02:35]Put it all together and the picture gets uncomfortable.

[00:02:38]Your senses lag behind reality.

[00:02:40]Your awareness lags behind your senses.

[00:02:43]And your sense of deciding something might lag behind the brain activity that set it in motion.

[00:02:49]So when you catch a ball, dodge a punch, or slam the brakes, that was never really you doing it in the moment.

[00:02:56]That was your brain doing it.

[00:02:58]Then handing you a slightly delayed highlight reel and letting you believe you were there the whole time.

[00:03:04]Which raises the question, >> [clears throat] >> if everything you experience is already old news by the time you notice it, how much of right now have you actually ever lived in?

[00:03:15]Anyway, my brain did a thing.

[00:03:17]See you in the next one.