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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Not All Seconds Are Created Equal

By The Daily Dish
Jun 28 2009, 12:29 PM ET

David Eagleman explains the relativity of time:

The days of thinking of time as a riverevenly flowing, always advancingare over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere. In the movie theater, you perceive a series of static images as a smoothly flowing scene. Or perhaps you've noticed when glancing at a clock that the second hand sometimes appears to take longer than normal to move to its next positionas though the clock were momentarily frozen.

(Hat tip: 3QD)



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