Alexander's Time Illusion Game

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxsu8BPK-S0


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow6VC6NjPNk

This video for my entry "Time and Schizophrenia" did generate some controversy when it went up on YouTube a couple of weeks ago. Some people simply could not get used to the "echo" laid in to demonstrate the concept we're talking about in this video. Why do I have "echo" in quotes? Because that's not quite what's happening here. In addition to my voice, there are five other copies of my voice, each one offset a different amount, and if you watch the five shadowy mouths that are around my head you will see that each is also offset in the same way: starting at the bottom left mouth and working around the semi-circle clockwise, the first one you're seeing/hearing is one second early, the second is .5 seconds early, the third is .5 seconds late, the fourth is 1 second late, and the fifth is - you guessed it - 1.5 seconds late.

As I pointed out in the comments section at YouTube, these echoes do, of course, tie directly into what I'm talking about in this particular video and that's why they're there. If you, like some of the viewers on YouTube, find them too distracting, the answer is simple - turn your speakers down a bit. Because the main voice is 20 dB louder than the echoes, you'll still be able to hear what I'm saying but the echoes will be less noticeable. Same goes for the people who wish the echoes were louder, just turn your speakers up more and the echoes become more noticeable. :)

In this blog entry (Time and Schizophrenia), we looked at studies suggesting that schizophrenic symptoms could be related to the brain not properly "time-stamping" incoming information - a schizophrenic could be watching television, thinking about certain products, then within seconds seeing those products advertised. Did the TV read this person's mind? No. Their subconscious is seeing the products being mentioned, but other parts of their mind are lagging behind, giving them the disturbing impression that the TV knows what they are thinking and is responding to their thoughts!

Another of the things discussed in this blog entry was an experiment reported in a New Scientist article on Schizophrenia written by Douglas Fox. Here's two paragraphs from that article again:

In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane's response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. After the modification, the players' performance initially worsened; but in time their brains compensated for the delay, to the extent that they actually perceived the movement of the mouse and the movement of the aircraft to take place simultaneously.

But the subjects' strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That's uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

The next day after the above video was posted, a YouTube user named Alexander, who calls himself WASDsweden on Youtube, posted a simple but effective java game he had just created to demonstrate what it would be like to play a video game where your input is delayed by .2 second. If you have java on your computer (most computers do) then you'll be able to play it right away: just click on this link to download the game.
bit.ly/db01k6

Here's a screen shot from the game:

You are the red ship at the bottom of the screen, and you use your mouse to move back and forth across the screen trying to avoid collisions with the green aliens. A check-box at the bottom, when turned on, introduces a .2 second delay in the way the ship responds to the mouse. Try it!

I suspect you would have to play this game for quite a while in .2 second mode before the effect noted in the article above would come in to play, but this is really great that Alexander took it upon himself to create this demonstration. Bravo, WASDsweden!

To finish this entry, let's look at one more just-published video that ties into this conversation: it's based upon my text blog entry, "Time and Music". In this entry, we look at a split-screen video of the classic Canadian rock band Lighthouse, performing with different band members in different geographically-separated studios. My friend Paul Hoffert, keyboard player for the band, sent me this vintage clip and described how he had to play roughly 200 milliseconds ahead of the music he was hearing from the rest of the band (coincidentally, the same .2 seconds we're talking about here) in order to compensate for the latency introduced by the digital hookup that was available for this experimental performance. Trust me! This is not an easy thing to do, and I am fascinated every time I watch Paul playing in this video.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCKDcjBsw1Q

Enjoy the journey!

Next: Flow and the Now

El Tiempo y la Esquizofrenia

We're going to talk about the English version of this video in detail with our next entry, "Alexander's Time Illusion Game". In the meantime, here's another Spanish video translation provided to us by EmpoweredByKnowledge for my video blog entry, Time and Schizophrenia.

Enjoy!

Rob


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaNy-IybtOg

Skhizein

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Bertie on Vimeo.

This multi-award winning short film from 2008 appeals to me for obvious reasons - it's a unique exploration of dimensions, and gives a fanciful new interpretation to what it could mean to be "beside yourself". According to this blog from Short of the Week, the film's creator Jérémy Clapin says the title of this movie derives from the Greek, meaning “to split” or “to cleave” — sharing that root with schizophrenia. As a little bit of synchronicity, you might want to go back to a blog entry published here a couple of weeks ago, called Time and Schizophrenia.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Next: You are the Point

Time and Music

We've been talking a lot about time and consciousness with the last few entries, starting with Life is But a Dream, where we looked at a video outlining some of the connections being drawn between the quantum wave function and the role of an observer in a system. In Time and Schizophrenia, we looked at scientific research indicating that schizophrenics have trouble processing the arrival times of different events through their senses, and that this can contribute to the hallucinations they experience. And in Time is in the Mind and Consciousness in Frames per Second, we looked at various theories proposing that our consciousness is not continuous, but rather divided into "frames" of awareness.

At the end of our last blog we talked about the speed of sound, and how that can complicate things for a musician. There are many other factors that can also affect a musician's timing, and in this modern digital world one of the factors we sometimes have to deal with is "latency" - time lags introduced by the time it takes a computer or the electronics of a system to process or respond to our input. This is hard to describe if you haven't experienced it, but playing a note and then hearing the instrument respond in a delayed manner introduces a whole different kind of experience, a challenge which requires a musician to adjust their mind in a way that I would say is more fifth dimensional, since it requires the performer's consciousness to operate at an additional "angle" outside the limits of the "now" of our 4D spacetime.

Now I'd like to show you a video that was provided to me by my friend Paul Hoffert, an award-winning digital visionary and one of the founding members of the classic Canadian rock band Lighthouse. Before I do, though, I'd like to let Paul tell you about this little video we're about to look at:

The clip is from a conference that was held in Toronto, InterActive ’96 (1996). The bass player and drummer were in Montreal, the guitarist was at York University, Toronto, the horn players were in a downtown Toronto club, and I was at the Bravo! TV studios. The network latency (delay) then was high - about 0.2 second. We each had to play ahead of the beat in order to sync with each other. It was very difficult and, in rehearsals, we could not do it. However, the adrenalin of the live performance plus our previous practices resulted in a synchronized demonstration of the potential of collaborative performances.

For the record, we used a few techniques to help bring it off. 1) The mental compensation required to physically play ahead of the beat is common in musical performances, but usually for much smaller latencies. Certain instruments, such as harpsichord and pipe organ, produce sounds that significantly lag the keydowns and players need to adjust what they play to what they hear. An orchestral example is that percussionists are usually at the back of the orchestra and the speed of sound is a significant factor that would make all their playing sound behind the beat if they followed the conductors baton beats. So percussionists routinely play "ahead of the stick" in order to sync with the sound coming from the fiddles. In these case, the adjustments are usually milliseconds or tens of milliseconds. .2 seconds is 200 milliseconds, a much longer and more difficult adjustment. 2) after the first run-through, I suggested that we use a technology tweak to assist and I think it was helpful. Since the bass and drums were in the same room, we turned down their playback tracks of the other instruments and suggested that they "drive" the rhythm without much regard for our monitor feeds. That kept the groove tight. In Toronto, we had to do most of the adjusting, but at least we were playing to a constant delay because the rhythm section wasn't wandering.

As a keyboard player myself, I watch Paul on keyboards here, playing 200 milliseconds ahead of the beat as he's striking these syncopated chordal stabs, and I feel a certain amount of wonder at what Paul and his talented group of musicians were able to pull off back then. Paul tells me that the band participated in another similar experiment a few years later which showed how much the technology had improved, to the point where dedicated fibreoptic links provided almost no noticeable delay between geographically separated groups of musicians who were then able to jam together quite comfortably. For me, though, I like to watch the following video as a celebration of the indomitable human spirit, where a healthy mind is able to interface with the reality around it in ways that can really be astonishing. Have I built this video up enough yet? It's only twenty seconds long, check it out!



What these musicians achieved is really no different than the delays subjects playing specially rigged video games were forced to deal with in the scientific studies we looked at in Time and Schizophrenia. With a healthy person, having to "re-tune their interface with reality" so that a physical impetus to strike a note connects with a sound they hear back 200 milliseconds later is demanding but not impossible. I wonder if the members of Lighthouse might have experienced the same disconcerting effect as was reported in that video game study, where the return to instantaneous response momentarily gave participants the impression that their observed responses were preceding their actions!

I'd like to thank Paul for providing me this video, apparently this is the first time this clip has ever been put up on the internet. And I'd like to add just one more thought here, about frames of consciousness and the quantum observer. Let's return to the idea that our consciousness is really not continuous, but rather it's divided into a certain number of "bings" per second (to use Dr. Stuart Hameroff's term).

In entries like Slices of Reality and The Statistical Universe we've talked about the important idea that just like consciousness, our reality is also not continuous: rather, it's divided into what loop quantum gravity theorists call "atoms of spacetime", and these tiny slices are the "quanta" of quantum physics. As reported at this web page on the Planck Unit, we see that the duration of these planck-unit sized "frames" calculates out to 1.855×10⁴³ of them per second.

Now, let's look at the equally non-continuous nature of consciousness and pick a number - let's say that on average we operate at about 50 frames per second (as we've been discussing, this number is generally thought to be between 30 and 90 frames per second and may vary for individuals during their day, and will also vary according to their current state of health and their overall state of mind). This would mean that we can divide those planck frames by 50 and end up with this astonishing fact: for every "frame" of our consciousness, there are about .0371 ×10⁴³ different branches of possible outcomes encapsulated into that "frame" of your consciousness.

Next time you're feeling like you're trapped into a situation where there's no possible way out, think about that number. Roughly speaking, that's 371,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible choices encapsulated within every observed frame of consciousness! Wow.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Flow

Time and Schizophrenia

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow6VC6NjPNk

In Time is in the Mind, we looked at the work of neuroscientist David Eagleman, and quoted from a New Scientist magazine article written by Douglas Fox. Here's some more from that article:

Schizophrenia certainly seems to affect people's perception of time. If someone with schizophrenia is shown a flash of light and a sound separated by 1/10th of a second, they typically have trouble discerning which came first. Such people also estimate the passing of time less accurately than most others. Now a flurry of studies has shown that if you upset the internal clocks of healthy people, you can create some of the symptoms and delusions associated with schizophrenia.

In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane's response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. After the modification, the players' performance initially worsened; but in time their brains compensated for the delay, to the extent that they actually perceived the movement of the mouse and the movement of the aircraft to take place simultaneously.

But the subjects' strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That's uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

Fascinating! I found this particularly interesting to think about within the context of recent studies that show people can form their decisions to do one thing or another well before they are consciously aware of their decision: in Is Creativity a Quantum Process we briefly looked at some articles (like this one from the Wall Street Journal) discussing the recently published work of psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya of London's Goldsmith College. Amazingly, Dr. Bhattacharya's brainwave monitoring experiments revealed evidence that people can have arrived at a solution to a problem as much as 8 seconds before their conscious minds become aware of it!

There have been arguments proposing that results such as these demonstrate that our free will is an illusion, because the neuro-chemical activity that forms our decisions may be some inevitable "behind the scenes" process which we interpret as our free will by the time we consciously feel ourselves choosing (and persons familiar with this project will know that I strongly disagree with any conclusions that free will doesn't exist). Here's one more paragraph from that New Scientist magazine article:

The idea could explain many of the experiences reported by people with schizophrenia. By muddling the order of thoughts and perceptions within your brain, for example, you might move your hand before you are conscious of the decision, making it feel as if someone else is controlling your movements. And when an ad appears on TV, your brain might picture the product before it consciously registers seeing it on screen - creating the disturbing illusion that your thoughts are being broadcast on television.

Next, in Consciousness in Frames per Second and in Time and Music, we're going to talk about how musicians deal with these processes all the time. One very general definition of music is that it's "sound organized across time". If, as we've said in the last few entries (Life is But a Dream and Time is in the Mind) reality and time are created by our role as observers in underlying quantum processes, then how does the "frame rate" of our consciousness play into all this? And does realizing the importance of this frame rate help us to better understand theories we've discussed in previous entries such as The Biocentric Universe Part 2, The Flexi-Laws of Physics, and Beer and Miracles? Let's follow that line of reasoning and see where it takes us.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Consciousness in Frames per Second

Time is in the Mind

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3kEx53IaY



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG6nZY9Bxy0

The above video discusses some experiments by neuroscientist David Eagleman of the University of Houston, looking into how different situations alter our perception of time, and how high-risk situations are particularly common for people to come away with the feeling that "it was as if everything went into slow motion". What is the relationship between consciousness and the perception of time?

Here's a link to a recent article in New Scientist magazine that includes discussions of Dr. Eagleman's work, called "Timewarp: How Your Brain Creates the Fourth Dimension". Let me quote a few paragraphs from this piece, which was written by Douglas Fox:

...Eagleman wanted to know whether the brain's clock actually accelerates - making external events appear abnormally slow in comparison with the brain's workings - or whether the slo-mo is just an artifact of our memory.

It's just one of many mysteries concerning how we experience time that we are only now beginning to crack. "Time," says Eagleman, "is much weirder than we think it is."

By understanding the mechanisms of our brain's clock, Eagleman and others hope to learn ways of temporarily resetting its tick. This might improve our mental speed and reaction times. What's more, since time is crucial to our perception of causality, a faulty internal clock might also explain the delusions suffered by people with schizophrenia.

There's a few things I find very useful about what's being said above. First, we return to the old bugaboo about my way of visualizing the fourth spatial dimension and how that relates to "time" as being one of its two possible directions. In the context of the above article, saying "your brain creates the fourth dimension" may seem like a confirmation of the ideas I'm promoting, but the critics who say that the fourth spatial dimension and "time" are two completely different things certainly show us that much controversy about all this remains.

Which leads me to the other significant phrase: "time is crucial to our perception of causality". This, for me sums up quite neatly the difference between the fourth and the fifth dimension. When we look back at the chain of events that led to "now", we perceive that there was only one path, and that is because of the limits of the fourth spatial dimension. I would say that in order for us to be able to conceptualize the multiple paths that extend before us from our current "now" (and likewise, the multiple paths that potentially could have gotten us to this "now" we find ourselves in), we need to think beyond the comparatively simple limits of the fourth dimension.

In other words, causality is the key to understanding a particular chain of events that connect from one position in the fourth dimension to another, and probability is the key to understanding how those two points have multiple connecting paths in the fifth dimension.

Let's look at one more paragraph from the article:

Perhaps the most fundamental question neuroscientists are investigating is whether our perception of the world is continuous or a series of discrete snapshots like frames on a film strip. Understand this, and maybe we can explain how the healthy brain works out the chronological order of the myriad events bombarding our senses, and how this can become warped to alter our perception of time.

This is an idea I keep returning to: our reality is not continuous, despite what our common sense may seem to tell us. Whether we're talking about the planck-unit-sized "atoms of spacetime" that loop quantum gravity tells us our reality is made from, or if we're talking about the illusion that the fifth dimension and above are "curled up at the planck length" (an idea from string theory) because we only experience the fifth dimension one planck frame at a time, the same conclusion can be drawn. And with this article, we see interesting new evidence of an idea we've talked about before, that the brain itself is also operating at a certain number of "frames per second" rather than in a continuous undivided stream, and that ties into all of my ongoing ramblings about the dimensions in very useful ways.

Do you remember Dr. Stuart Hameroff and his theories showing that consciousness works at a certain number of "bings" per second? We talked about this in Music and the Dance of Creativity, Boredom and Consciousness 2, and Boredom and Consciousness 3. As mentioned at the end of our first quote above,this leads us to some fascinating ideas about the relationship between this frame rate and what happens when this frame rate is out of sync with the body. We'll talk about this more in our next few entries, Time and Schizophrenia, Consciousness in Frames per Second, and Time and Music.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Time and Schizophrenia