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January 29 - February 8, 2020
it is not really the phantom limb that is the illusion, but the sense of ownership of our actual limbs.
by watching the neural activity within the brain it is possible to predict when people will voluntarily decide to move their finger up to 900 milliseconds before they actually do—hundreds of milliseconds before the subjects themselves seem to be aware of having “freely” decided to move their finger.
like speech, there is also a prosody to Morse code, and experts seem to be able to use slight variations in the timing to identify the speaker through his or her “accent.”
we know from the field of information theory that a code in which all the symbols or elements are used with the same probability provides more capacity to store or transmit information.
Current-day atomic clocks track time with an accuracy of attoseconds—so accurate that, frankly, scientists do not have many other excuses to use the prefix atto (10-18).
In the face of these facts, we should probably also ask to what extent the brain’s inherent limitations and biases constrain the progress of science.
No matter how accurate or inaccurate, clocks are always quantifying change of some physical phenomenon. The consequence of this fact is that it is always possible to express time as some other nontemporal physical measure.
“It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of the changes of things.”
Simultaneity, and indeed the order in which two events occur, can be relative.
the brain has a very opportunistic modus operandi: it’s always borrowing and recycling existing features.
Humans are the only creatures on the planet that can think about and plan for the distant future. We alone plant seeds that can take years to bear fruit or build structures to last across the centuries. And yet, many of the most serious problems facing modern man (and other species) are a consequence of human shortsightedness.
The truth is that even though humans are far better at long-term planning than all other animals, we are not particularly good at it.
