The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

If we now add up all the time delays between an event occurring in the outside world and our perceiving it, we discover the following lovely fact. For events occurring at a distance, we see them first and hear them with a delay, as we do, for example, when seeing lightning and hearing the thunder afterward. But for events taking place close to us, we hear them, because of our rapid auditory system and relatively slow visual one, slightly in advance of seeing them. There is, though, a point at which sights and sounds are perceived as occurring simultaneously, and that point is located about 10 to 15 meters from us, a point known as the “horizon of simultaneity.”