“Right. That gets at another illusion. The paradox of the specious present. What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one. The last two or three seconds, usually. But dump a load of adrenaline into your system, get the amygdala to rev up, and you create that hyper-vivid memory, where time seems to slow down, or stop entirely. If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past. It’s yet another way that the concept of the present
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