#experimenting

Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot? ↗

— Paul Davies

#now #phi-phenomenon #psychology #reality #time

When I began experimenting, people weren't ready for it. Once it's in its second and third generational stages, people can accept it. ↗

— Joni Mitchell

#began #experimenting #generational #i #once

It was 1967, and the hippie thing was happening. I got into experimenting with drugs while I was in college in Michigan. ↗

— Glenn Frey

#experimenting #got #happening #hippie #i

I was not rebelling by smoking dope or drinking, I was testing ideas. I was experimenting with voice, what I could say and still be heard in an atmosphere of prescribed truths. ↗

— Terry Tempest Williams

#testing-ideas #experience

Perhaps there are many "nows" of varying duration, depending on just what it is we are doing. We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of humans, the subject experiencing subjective time is not a perfect, structureless observer, but a complex, multilayered, multifaceted psyche. Different levels of our consciousness may experience time in quite different ways. This is evidently the case in terms of response time. You have probably had the slightly unnerving experience of jumping at the sound of a telephone a moment or two before you actually hear it ring. The shrill noise induces a reflex response through the nervous system much faster than the time it takes to create the conscious experience of the sound. It is fashionable to attribute certain qualities, such as speech ability, to the left side of he brain, whereas others, such as musical appreciation, belong to processes occurring on the right side. But why should both hemispheres experience a common time? And why should the subconscious use the same mental clock as the conscious? ↗

— Paul Davies

#now #physics #time #time-passing #experience

One week before Pitfall! was to be released, I only gave you one life to play the whole game. I was experimenting with that concept as sort of the ultimate challenge. ↗

— David Crane

#challenge #concept #experimenting #game #gave

I had a bunch of different hair colors. I was experimenting to see what I liked. It started off brown, then I did red, then I got really, really blonde! ↗

— Leighton Meester

#brown #bunch #colors #did #different

I've been in the studio experimenting on making a CD of my own. I'm trying out different producers, styles, sounds. With music, as opposed to acting, you are not playing a character. You are showing people who you are. I really want to have my spirit in it. ↗

— Emily Rossum

#been #cd #character #different #experimenting

It's horrible to think that a small cadre of people would manipulate that information. I mean, for God's sake, we've admitted that we were experimenting on our veterans with mustard gas. So there is no security question. It can't possibly be the reason. ↗

— Dwight Schultz

#cadre #experimenting #gas #god #horrible

I listened to the rock music of that time, but as you know and can easily hear: my music of that era had nothing to do with the common music of this era. I was experimenting, I was searching for something new. ↗

— Klaus Schulze

#easily #era #experimenting #had #hear