In summary, your consiousness lives in the past, with Christof Koch estimating that it lags behind the outside world by about a quarter second. Intriguingly, you can often react to things faster than you can become conscious of them, which proves that the information processing in charge of your most rapid reactions must be unconscious. For example, if a foreign object approaches your eye, your blink reflex can close your eyelid within a mere tenth of a second. It’s as if one of your brain systems receives ominous information from the visual system, computes that your eye is in danger of
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