How Consciousness Invents Reality.

[0:00]Here's proof that your consciousness doesn't just observe reality, but actually constructs it. And it's to do with the very weird nature of time. Time is weird. Our entire past has already happened, but where does it go? And does that mean our future's already written and just waiting to play out? These aren't strange questions, but the one that really baffles me is now. The present moment. That's all we have. Everything you have ever done, every thought, every sensation has happened in the present moment. You're in it right now, but it doesn't feel real. I mean, by definition, the present is infinitely small. It's an instant of time so fleeting that the moment we become aware of it, it's already passed. But you and me aren't pure objective observers. We're animals. What we actually experience isn't a single instant, but rather a window stretched about 80 to 100 milliseconds long, called the Specious present. This window is what your brain really considers to be now. Inside that wrinkled lump of fat behind your eyes, your entire reality is being reconstructed through slightly delayed information. And we can test this right now. You see, tap your nose and your toe at the exact same time. It feels simultaneous, but it really isn't. The signal from your nose takes less than a millisecond to reach your brain. But the one from your toe takes about 30 milliseconds. Yet your brain waits, holding one signal back just long enough to merge the two. It literally rewrites time to keep your world consistent. But it gets so much weirder because if someone tapped your nose and your toe at the exact same time without you knowing beforehand, you would experience the nose tap before the toe tap. Without conscious awareness, your brain doesn't have the context to synchronize the signals. Which means that your sense of now isn't discovered, it's invented. You don't live in the present moment. You live in your brain's version of it. A slightly delayed but beautifully edited illusion of reality. Your consciousness doesn't just witness the world. It it constructs it. So how lucky are you that you just get to experience any of this at all? But the present never stops changing and time never stops ticking. This is how many weeks a person has in their life. And for some reason you waste it on your fucking phone. Get off.