I was reading about WW2 bomb disposal squads and one fact got me thinking. If someone was defusing a bomb and it blew up, then that person would know nothing about what had happened to them because the speed at which the bomb blew them to pieces would exceed the speed at which the information could reach the brain.
So, isn’t this the case for every event? Things happen and it takes a while before it registers. Our perception is permanently behind actual events. In which case, how come we can apparently interact so well with our environment?
The “lag” you’re talking about is too small to make a difference. An event occurs, you percieve it, you react to it. If the delay between those things is very short, there would be no problem caused by the lag. In the case of the bomb exploding, the event occurs so fast that the lag is a problem: you can’t react before the shockwave gets to you and affects you.
The human body is hardwired to react to some stimuli without having to conciously react to to them, therefore the whole step of having to percieve the event is bypassed, further shortening the delay between event and reaction.
In short, the human body reacts fast enough most of the time.
IANA Human Biologist or Neurologist, but I suspect that there is a minor lag between receipt of sensory stimulus and the ability of the brain to process that stimulus and formulate a reactive response. Further, I suspect that there are different levels of processing and responsiveness based on genetics and instinct - so a response to sticking one’s hand over a flame will be more genetic/instintive/automatic than recognizing that your drapes are made of a similar fabric as the drapes you are observing for the first time (unless, of course, you are Martha Stewart).
All that serving as context, then a better question might be - when is the lag between stimulus and response a signficant issue? Even situations where someone bobbles a glass and reaches for it - the lag is usually insignificant enough to enable a reaction to recover the glass before it drops and shatters. Ditto with getting your hand out of a flame.
Consciously processing the “oh, shit.” of imminent death in the face of a triggered bomb is more of a Schrodinger’s Cat type of question: No one can interview the victim and understand what was processed, so it is equally likely that both outcomes (consciously recognize one’s death or not) occurred…I think…
If that detonation took place at 6 inches per second, rather than thousands of feet per second, it would be possible to avoid. Perception (and reaction) always lag behind events, but is generally fast enough to allow survival.
Actually, even consciousness may not exist in the “now”. At least according to Tor Nrretranders in his book “The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size”. According to an interesting experiment, there is a measureable delay between when a thought occurs and when it is interpreted.
At the risk of getting into Great Debates territory, I would submit that “thoughts” and “thinking” are not consciousness, or are at least not what I mean by the term. More like awareness (I think).
Some other odd things happen with perception - drop a hammer on your toe and you feel it hit at the precise time you see it, even though the sensation of pain lags behind a little due to nerve transmission rates - even odder is that the flash of light and the sound of (say)fireworks can sometimes get ‘married up’ by the brain, even if the sound is actually arriving a little later than the light (of course if they are too distant, the effect vanishes)
I remember reading something about this and the author’s assertion was that reality was effectively ‘buffered’ and processed on the way to being presented to our consciousness.
If you’ve ever done a timed reaction test you know that the ‘latency’ of the human brain is quite low. I’m not entirely sure whether the reaction test is a conscious action or a reflex, but it’s still on the order of less than a second to a few seconds.
Basically, you press a button, and a few seconds later a light flashes and/or a sound is emitted. When you see the light/hear the sound, you press the button again. (Another kind of reaction time test involves a yardstick suspended by an electromagnet. You hold your hand loosely over the yardstick at a certain place, then close your hand when it falls. The distance it falls can be converted to the time it took for you to see that it was falling and grab it.)
As I said, I don’t know whether this is conscious or reflex, but I think it’s conscious because it’s a specific, learned response to a specific stimulus. (Reflexes probably have even lower latencies – on the order of a few hundred ms at most.)
Anyway, my ‘latency’ on such tests is about 700 ms to 1500 ms. Considering all the things that need to happen in this timeframe, I don’t think consciousness is lagging behind reality by very much. (Hypothesis: on the order of 10[sup]-4[/sup] s, or 1 to 10 milliseconds.)
Human consciousness does indeed lag behind relaity. By about 1/4 second IIRC. There have ben some neat experiemnts done to prove this. I’ll see if I can dig them out. People are confusing reaction times to consciousness. A person responding to a light or a thrown spear does indeed react in the millisecond range. But they are not consciously aware of the same. The consciousness patches the information together later and so you feel as though you knew what was happening. Of course as anyone who has ever caught an item as it fell of the table will tell you, you don’t make a conscious decision about instantaneous moves. You have caught the falling crockery and are standing their looking stupid with it in your hands and wondering why. Then your brain peices together the events and you pat yourself on the back for a neat save.
This lag also explains why people feel a sense of time dilation in crises. People commonly report that accidents and assaults take place in slow mo. Of course htey recall that way. The conscious centres temporarily shut down to free up the lower centres. As a result we remember things 1/4 second out of phase, which seems in hindsight like slow motion.
Assuming a 1/4 second lag, and a human body 12 inches though, even a low explosive like gunpowder will have killed you before you are consciously aware of the blast. High explosive would probably kill you before you were aware of it even without the lag. I suspect at close range the blast would travel much faster than a nerve impulse.
Such a conscious experience as that of a skin stimulus occurs only when “neuronal adequacy” is achieved, but it is somehow “antedated” of “referred” to an earlier time. That is, despite what is said of the experience’s involving “subjective referral backwards in time”, the experience itself occurs only about 0.5 sec after the beginning of stimulation. The experience does not occur at the time to which it is “referred”.
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The experiments of Libet on the human brain…, show that direct stimulation of the somaesthetic cortex results in a conscious sensory experience after a delay as long as 0.5 sec … although there is this delay in experiencing the peripheral stimulus, it is actually judged to be much earlier, at about the time of cortical arrival of the afferent input… This antedating process does not seem to be explicable by any neurophysiological process. Presumably it is a strategy that has been learnt by the self-conscious mind…, the antedating of the sensory experience is attributable to the ability of the self-conscious mind to make slight temporal adjustments, i.e. to play tricks with time…"
I remember reading an article in the New Scientist a few years ago about some researchers who claimed to have shown that we are aware of our decisions only after they have been made. (This may be related to the book that Trigonal Planar mentions.) The researchers had used brain imaging techniques to observe that the parts of the brain that correspond to a decision having been made always light up before the parts of the brain that correspond to awareness of a decision having been made.
The main point of the article was that this presents serious difficulties for the notion of free will. If you only become aware of your decisions after they have been made, does it really make sense to say that they were your choice? Or did some part of your brain distinct from your consiousness make the choice, and you just got to learn about it after the fact?
The reality of this statement is best demonstrated by 2 things familiar to every one who has taken photographs. If you photograph a piece of white paper under an ordinary light bulb it has a yellowish cast. In fact if you look at the lights of a distant house you can see the yellow glow. If you are inside the house your brain colour corrects and lets you see the paper as white. Similarly if you look up at a tall building with parallel sides your brain will let you see them as parallel and adjust out narrowing caused by perspective. As soon as you frame it in a photo the image looks like it really is.
I call something like this too, but instead of ‘buffering’ it was more of pre-emtive processing, in other words predicting what will happen, presenting that to you in real time. buffering comes inot play if there is a correction.
We don’t live inthe present; we live apporximately 250 milliseconds in the future. The brain is not a passive system waiting for a stimulus and then responding. It is actively anticipating - throwing up hypotheses about what will happen next, based on immediatly prior input. Almost all of the time these hypotheses are confirmed and we get on with our lives.
When someone is dismantling a bomb, their active anticipations are fullfilled until they make a mistake. The bomb going off at that particular moment is not one of the brains predictions. It is unlikely to enter consciousness; by the time the brain has re adjusted its expectations it will have disintegrated.
To add to my last posting: this is why typing errors are hard to spot. We read our work through and there is enough information to confirm our expectations.
Only when you see it later as a posting do you realise that you should have put an apostrophe in “brain’s” and not left a space in “readjusted”!
It would seem that prediction has something to do with it too. If someone throws a ball to you, you don’t process the information for every position the ball is in on its way to you - you make a prediction as to the path the ball will follow and be ready for it when it reaches you. All done instinctively and without having to perform any kind of mathematical calculations. Isn’t the brain amazing?