Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

by Dean Buonomano

example of this backward editing in time comes from the so-called cutaneous rabbit illusion. Imagine someone taps your forearm twice near your wrist, and then in rapid succession, taps two times again near your elbow. What people often report to have happened is not what actually happened. The perception is not of two taps near the wrist and then two more near the elbow, but rather of four taps hopping along your arm: starting from the wrist to the elbow with two points in between.7 If someone taps you twice on the wrist, and leaves it at that, you’d correctly report feeling two taps on the wrist. But in the rabbit illusion the third and fourth taps alters the perceived localization of the second tap. The take-home message is that the location of later stimuli alters your conscious perception of the location of the earlier ones, thus consciousness cannot be a uniform and continuous account of the flow of time.