DOES MY BRAIN LIVE A LITTLE IN THE PAST?

Yes, your brain does live a little in the past. It can't help it. The information it receives via your senses is always a little out of date. Whether it's light entering the retinas in your eyes, or sounds vibrating the hairs in your ears, it not only takes time for the data to arrive, but your brain then has to process it. Unfortunately, data transmission in your brain is sluggish.

- KAREN HOMER, SUNDERLAND

Even your fastest neurons can only manage about 431km/h (268mph), which is a lot slower than copper wire at 1.08 billion km/h (669 million mph). The result of this is that what you're sensing now, actually occurred in the world around 100 milliseconds ago (about a tenth of a second).

These delays might not sound like much, but given that control of your body is similarly sluggish, interacting with the world poses a serious challenge. The solution your brain has engineered is to constantly anticipate what's going on. For this reason, your subjective experience of the world is a mix of an outdated sensory snapshot and a predictive best guess.