Technical: Chronostasis
No, chronostasis isn’t the name of the next big-budget blockbuster sci-fi movie (note to self: write screenplay for Chronostasis), but it is pretty cool, and chances are you’ve experienced it multiple times. Ever looked at the clock and thought for a second that it’d stopped, only for it to keep on ticking? Time seemed to have frozen for a moment, right? Well, it sort of did—at least, it did for you. That’s what chronostasis is.
So what’s going on? It all boils down to a phenomenon between our brain and our eyes that occurs during a sudden eye movement, known as a saccade. During these saccadic eye movements, we experience saccadic suppression, where the brain does not register what our eyes see. This empty visual portion of time is antedated—backfilled—with what we see next. This is known as an event shift.
Back to the frozen second hand: if we look at the clock, our eyes moving in a quick, saccadic fashion, there is perhaps a half-second between the beginning of the motion and the end, where we now perceive the time to be, say 08:00:01. The clock will take at most a second to move to 08:00:02, depending on how recently it changed from 08:00:00, however the brain has antedated that visualisation of 08:00:01 back for the half-second of visual stimuli it lost because of the saccade. This is the event shift.
Assuming that we looked at the clock at the exact moment it arrived at 08:00:01, then with the additional half-second of antedating from the saccadic suppression we will perceive the clock to take one-and-a-half seconds to get to 08:00:02. To us it’s like we’ve seen the future a half-second ahead . . . but, thanks to chronostasis, the reality is that we’re just catching up.
Brain illustration drawn by Charles Bell and supplied by Wellcome Images
