Transcriber: Fatma Abdeldaem

Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs

Good evening, everyone.

So the theme of today's event is change.

Change from within,

but what is the one thing

that all change needs?

The one thing that

all change needs is time.

Change needs time, it needs now and then.

Without either of those there's no change.

But what is now?

And perhaps even more profound,

when is now?

And to answer that question,

we need to look at the brain.

We need to look at time in the brain,

time in our perception, in our experience.

And I think you can share with me

the experience that time

in our mind, in our experience

is perhaps a little bit more flexible

than time in the real world, right?

Sometimes it can go a little faster,

it can go a little slower.

I think we have all learned

as young kids, five, six years old

that five, 10 minutes waiting

in the dentist office takes hours,

whereas an hour in the playground

flies by in five minutes.

So time in the brain is subject to change.

Now, where does that leave us

with the question of when is now?

When is now in the brain?

Now, in answering that question,

I'll show you a few things along the way.

I'll show you that sometimes

we can be blind with our eyes wide open

and not even notice.

I'll show you why it's so difficult

to hit house flies in midair,

And I'll show you that

as opposed to real time,

which goes only in one direction,

in our brain we can actually

go back in time and rewrite history.

So let's start with that moment

of blindness with your eyes wide open.

This is where you can pull out

your little purple mirrors.

So, I'd like to invite you to take out

your mirror and look in it.

Look at your own left eye.

All right, everyone doing that?

Now, move your eyes

so you're looking at your right eye,

and go back and forth between

your two eyes a couple of times.

Once you get the hang of that

ask yourself this question.

Do you ever see your own eyes move?

(Laughter)

Well?

And I think you'll find the answer's no.

You don't ever see your own eyes move.

Now, isn't that odd.

Why is that? Why do you

not see your eyes move?

Well, let's approach it from a scientist's

perspective and form a hypothesis.
One possible answer is that

you don't see your own eyes move

because eyes move too fast to see.

Let's test that hypothesis.

So now, put your mirror away,

and now look at your neighbor.

So, this requires a bit of logistics.

So, look at your neighbor's eyes

and one of you -

you have to take turns here -

one of you stare at the other person's

left eye and then look back and forth,

and then the other person can have a look.

Do you see the first person's eyes move?

(Audience chatter)

And now you can swap if you want to.

(Audience chatter)

Okay.

(Audience chatter)

So, I think we've found that when you're

looking at your own eyes in the mirror,

you cannot see your eyes move,

but when [you're] looking at someone

else's eyes, you can see their eyes move.

So what's going on?

The other person's eyes

don't move faster than yours.

So, what's going on?

Why can you see their eyes

and not your own?

And the answer is,

for the briefest moment you are blind.

When your eyes are moving you are blind,

you cannot see when your eyes are moving.

But do you notice?

You don't.

What happens?

It's not like your vision

goes black for a split second,

like when you close your eyes.

It's also not like

there are image stutters,

like you're watching Netflix

on a bad internet connection.

It's also not like

that moment of time is lost

because then my voice

would be all chopped up,

then parts of my sentence

would be falling away,

and that doesn't happen either.

So, what's happening?

And the answer is there's this little gap

when your eyes are moving from wherever

you were looking before to your other eye,

when there is no visual input,

and your brain covers it up,

it pretends it never happens,

it takes what it knows from before

and after and stitches it together

and pretend everything is okay.

So, you were blind

for the briefest instance.

Now,

it actually gets a little bit

more complicated than that.

Your brain takes time to do things.

This is Andy Roddick.

Andy Roddick was a professional baseball -

excuse me - professional tennis player.
(Laughter)

He was a professional tennis player,

and one of the reasons

he was so good at what he did

is that he had the exceptional ability

to hit that little ball so hard

that it would cross

the court at 250 km/hr.

That's really fast.

And what does that mean

for the person on the receiving end?

Now, let's just do the math for a moment.

At 250 km/hr, it takes roughly

a third of a second

for the ball to get to

the other side of the court.

Now, this is where it gets problematic

because your brain needs time

to process incoming sensory

information including vision.

You might think that goes

pretty fast and that's true,

but this ball is also going pretty fast.

So, it actually takes - a conservative

estimate - about 1/10 of a second

for the brain to process

the visual information

about the location

of the ball as it's flying.

So,

in that moment of time,

The receiver sees the ball

in a particular location,

it takes 1/10 of a second for his brain

to figure out, What am I seeing?

It's right there.

In that tenth of a second,
the ball has continued moving.

Now, how relevant is this?

Is this a an intellectual curiosity,

these minute segments of time

that don't really matter in real life?

No.

In professional tennis, the ball has moved

seven meters in that time.

Which means that this poor receiver

is seeing the ball seven meters

behind where it actually is.

Now, as impressive
as Roddick's achievements are,

I think the receiver's achievement

at even getting near this ball

is at least as impressive.

So how does the brain do this?

How does the brain manage

to interact with a ball

at seven meters away

from where it's seeing it?

And the answer is that

the brain predicts the future.

It knows about its own delays,

and tries to compensate for them

by predicting what's going to happen.

And the brain can do this

because the trajectory of a ball,

for a professional tennis player

at least, is fairly well established,

it's very fairly predictable.

But what about if that

prediction breaks down?

What if the future is not so predictable?

This is a common housefly.

A common housefly flies at approximately
eight kilometers an hour.

This is 1/30 of the speed

of Roddick's serve.

So, if this thing moves so much

more slowly than a tennis ball,

why is it so hard
to hit these things in midair?

And the answer is,

they move unpredictably.

Why is that a problem?

Because your brain still has the same

delay in its own internal processing,

and it tries to compensate for it.

So, this housefly is moving.

Your brain knows

it's behind on the real world,

so it compensates for that

and predicts where the fly is going to be.

It gives you a location

where the fly never goes.

You see the fly where the fly never is,

never will be, never was.

So, no wonder you will miss it

when you try to hit it.

So the prediction works sometimes,

but it also breaks down sometimes.

And actually it gets even more complicated

because this delay period isn't constant,

the delay is variable depending on

what sort of features were talking about.

What do I mean by that?

Here's a scene - there's the baseballer

I was referring to earlier.

So, when you look at this scene,

you see everything together, right?

You see the color, you see the motion,

you see the shape -
it's one object, one person.

But in the brain, all of those

features are pulled apart

and processed in different

areas of the brain.

More importantly, they're processed

at different speeds.

So, it turns out that color is actually

processed more quickly than motion,

and that, in turn, is processed

more quickly than form.

So why does that matter?

Well, let's see.

You see this image?

It comes on your retina, in your eyes,

and your brain gets to work on it,

and then the color

information is extracted.

Well, according to this image

not at all - there it is.

It's processed more quickly

than the motion information,

which, in turn, is processed more quickly

than the form information.

So, one moment is spread out

over time in terms of processing,

which means that at any given time,

the finished information

that the brain has about the outside world

comes from different pasts.

It comes from different moments in time,

which means even if we just sort of

put everything together that it has,

what you would see is not this ...

what you would see is this.

This scrambled mess where the color

is more recent than the motion,
and that, in turn, is more
recent than the form.

But that's not what we see, right?

This is not what we experience.

We see a baseballer with a color

and a form and a motion

all together belonging to the same object.

So how does a brain fix this?

How does the brain stitch

all those features back together again?

Well, one possibility

is that it simply waits.

So, it sees something coming,

you get a formless color and then ...

it waits until the motion

information is available,

and the form information is available,

then it tells you, here's that baseballer.

But if you think about it, that's a pretty

inefficient strategy, right?

From an evolutionary perspective, you've

got information that might be relevant,

and you just wait until

you know more about it?

So imagine our caveman ancestors.

They're sitting around

a campfire in the dark,

and they're talking

or grunting or whatever,

and at one point one of them sees motion

in the darkness behind his companion.

Well, so if this caveman had this brain,

then he would do nothing with this motion.

He would wait until he figures out

what the precise shape is of the thing

that's coming out of the shadows

to eat his companion.
This is not a good thing for this caveman.

A better evolutionary brain would be

to be able to act
on this motion right away.

It's not important

what the shape is of that thing.

He needs to be able to act on the motion

as soon as his brain detects it.

So that would mean that

the color information is available to us,

and then after the motion becomes

processed and the form becomes processed,

then we finally know what the object is.

But are we ever aware of a shapeless form

that then resolves into an object?

Is that how we experience the world?

It's not how I experience the world.

Or is it?

Let me rephrase it more carefully.

That's not how we remember

seeing the world.

Now, what's the difference,

is that as it turns out

we do for the briefest instant experience

a new object as a shapeless color,

but as soon as the form

information becomes available,

that gets added to it, and after that,

it's only that object with the form known.

The original impression

of the shapeless color is gone,

is wiped out, is rewritten.

But that would mean that the brain

is allowed to go back in time

and rewrite its history.

And it turns out that

the brain can indeed do this.
And here's an everyday example.

I put up this clock because this is

the first time I observed this illusion.

This only works for a clock

with a second hand that actually ticks,

that stops and moves.

And my first experience of it

was at the train station.

I looked at the clock

for the first time in that sitting,

and what I notice is that

the first time the second hand moves

seems to last longer than the other times.

Does anyone else get that?

So, that phenomenon

is known as chronostasis,

and in fact, you already know

why that happens.

Because it's the same thing

as with the eyes in the mirror.

When you move your eyes

from some other place to the clock,

there's a gap in your visual input,

nothing's coming in.

Your brain has a gap to fill

with information that it doesn't have.

So, it takes the information

that it gets when it gets there -

the clock hand

at that particular position -

and backfills the history.

It fills that image over

the whole history that was empty,

and you get the impression,

I've been looking at this clock for ages,

and it has been standing still

this whole time,

and after that

it starts ticking on its way.

And so that first time seems

to last longer than the later times.

Your brain rewrites history,

But this is only a matter

of a split second, right?

And it turns out that the brain

is actually able to rewrite

much larger periods of history

than just that second.

And here's a cool experiment

that showed that.

This is a fun experiment where

the researchers took two groups of people

and told both groups of participants

that they had to do a task for 10 minutes.

And in actual fact,

the first group of people,

the researchers came back

into the group after just five minutes

and told them the 10 minutes were up.

In the second group, the researchers

came back after 20 minutes

and told them the 10 minutes were up.

So for one group of people,

time artificially flew.

And for the other group of people,

time artificially crawled.

Now, we know that time flies

when we're having fun,

but can the reverse also happen,

can time flying cause us to have more fun?

And the answer is yes.

The group who thought

the time had flown had more fun,

reported enjoying the the task more

than the group for who time

artificially crawled.

So, where does that leave us

with the question of when is now?

Coming back to this,

we've seen that the now in our brain

is actually the past, predominantly.

Admittedly the brain does a pretty good

job of compensating for its own delay

by predicting the old future and therefore

currently the present, hopefully.

It runs into problems

when the future is less predictable,

so when that housefly changes direction.

You end up seeing things

that never happened,

never will happen, never have happened.

You end up seeing different pasts

because of differences in delays.

And all of this would lead to

an absolutely not understandable memory

or experience of the world

if it weren't for the fact

that the brain, unlike real time,

is actually allowed to go back in time

and clean up its own mess.

So, the brain is able

to restructure the whole story

because it's allowed to go back in time.

So where does that leave us with

the question of when is now in the brain?

I don't know.

And the one thing I do know

is that when you open your eyes -

whether these beautiful

eyes or your own -

when you open your eyes

and look out into the world,
there's one thing that you are not seeing,

and that is now.

Thank you.

(Applause)