Suppose you are playing baseball. Someone throws the ball in your direction, and you reach out and catch it. Most likely, you’d experience this as two events: seeing a ball and then catching it. If your brain actually reacted like this, however, baseball couldn’t exist as a sport. Your brain has about half a second to prepare to catch a baseball in a typical game. This isn’t enough time to process the visual input, calculate where the ball will land, make the decision to move, coordinate all the muscle movements, and send the motor commands to move you into position for the catch.15
This is tau and largely works for regular shaped and understood items if it is fast enough.
