All people living in the world for a long time and persistently for some reason imagine that they live in the present time, but this is a little different. Before getting into consciousness, information about the external world goes a long way from the receptors of one or another analyzer to the brain.
The fastest conductor of data is the optic nerve, which (more precisely, the retina of the eye, the cells of which form the optic nerve), are considered by many physiologists not even as a nerve, but as a part of the brain, carried to the periphery. But still, the signal delay is quite large - about 80 milliseconds. Therefore, seeing this or that event in the present as it were, in fact we see only the past. This can be compared to observing the stars that we see in the sky, although many of them have been gone for a long time.
Thus, we perceive all visual information after 80 milliseconds, after the fact, which was investigated in detail by physiologists in the 1950s, when the name for the phenomenon was coined - the term flash-lag, that is, like a flash with a delay. Using this phenomenon, sometimes also called postdiction, one can create quite amusing (at first glance) illusions of perception.
One of these illusions was posted on its website by Caltech, California Institute of Technology on October 8. We will not explain the focus right away, so see it yourself. The text in the video prompts you to focus on the cross in the center of the screen and start counting the flashes at the bottom of the screen:
Thus, you, like us, counted three outbreaks. However, in fact, there were only two outbreaks and the brain itself, as it were, finished drawing.
This is postdict in its purest form: while the signal goes to the brain and is processed there, the brain uses this delay to compare with the signals from the sound analyzer, after which it outputs a picture that is completely inappropriate to reality.
"Illusions are a really interesting window to the brain," says Noelle Styles, author and leader of the project. “By examining illusion, we can study the decision-making process in the brain. For example, how does the brain determine reality using information from multiple senses, which are sometimes contradictory?"
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If we consider this trick exclusively in the form of fun, then this topic could be finished. However, Caltech is far from a simple scientific institution; in terms of various important secret projects, it has only a competitor at Massachusetts Technology, where a lot has been developed to influence consciousness.
In particular, in the same 1950s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology actively researched such a method of influencing consciousness as subliminal messages, better known as "25th frame". And only now, after half a century, Caltech reveals the secret of yet another miracle technology of influencing the brain by TV. Now we don't even know how many more such tricks they have in stock, but we are following the development of events with interest.