The present is not exactly what you think it is? By Katherine Lightwood

The present is not exactly what you think it is? 

By Katherine Lightwood

For the years leading up to the President Roosevelt's first live speech in 1939, engineers have been working on one particular technical problem. How to ensure the audio and video to remain perfectly synced during the live broadcast? And without this, the words and lip movements don't match which would be annoying and be distracting for the viewers. So, how did they do it?

Actually, they didn't? Instead, they discovered something pretty incredible. And that is, we are not very good at discerning whether audio and video are in sync. The engineers at that time also found that there is an asymmetry in our tolerance for this misalignment. We don't really notice if a sound lags video by 125 milliseconds but we can tell if something is wrong if it's lading the video by more than 45 milliseconds.

Imagine if you are at the basketball game and because of how far away you are sitting, the sound is delayed. Your brain can handle that but if the sound precedes the sight of an event that would look really odd. Because that's something that would never happen in nature. This is why the broadcast guidelines for acceptable audio and video mismatches are skewed in favor of audio lagging behind the video. Our brains are good at aligning audio with the vision that preceded it. We can actually exploit our audio syncing capabilities to produce some strange results.

Causality is something we are very hardwired to recognize. But even this core part of our brain can be fooled. The underlying cause of every illusion is the same. What we perceive as the present is not just one moment but a short interval of time which is about a tenth of a second long. And during this period your brain can perform manipulations that distort your perception of time and rearrange causality.

My question is that Why do we experience time in an illusory way? It feels like we are living in each instant but what we are actually experiencing is a short period of time. I think it's not so that our brains can sync up the sight and sound of the distant events or so that we can watch TV and movies without distractions. But fundamentally our brains need to hold multiple moments at once to make sense of the world.

So, that was my thought of the day. To see more posts like this make sure to visit our main page. And Do not forget to visit our institute's page to know more about graphic design, 3D, animation courses and other awesome stuff. Till then good day to you.

Katherine Lightwood