Name: Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day
Uploaded: 2025-03-20T07:27:02.000Z
Duration: 12 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You're not living in this very moment that you're experiencing, and nothing is like it seems.

It turns out your brain constructs your reality as you're experiencing it.

It lives in totally different time spheres and tells you a story about the world that feels real.

What's going on, and who's really in control of your life?

Vision is maybe our main source of information about the world, but in reality we don't really see that much.

Only a thumbnail-sized area of your visual field is in high resolution, while the rest is out of focus.

If it doesn't feel like this, that's because it's made up by your brain, using a pretty neat trick.

Each second, your eyes make three to four sudden jerky movements, saccades of 50 milliseconds, focusing from one point to another, scanning your environment to get different sharp images that your brain then edits together.

During a saccade, your brain shuts down your vision so you don't see a wild motion blur.

This means that each day, for around two hours, you're completely blind.

If you could actually see what your eyes see, it would look something like this.

Instead, your brain fills this time with its best guesses of what happened during the blackness.

It turns out that you're not really experiencing time correctly.

What's really happening when you're stirring milk into a cup of coffee?

As the spoon hits the ceramic, light reflects off it and hits your eyes after 1.3 nanoseconds.

The ceramic vibrates and creates a shockwave of air molecules that travels to your ear in 1.2 milliseconds.

Heat is picked up by fibers in your fingers that send a signal to your brain in 50 milliseconds.

Three very different inputs, all processed in your brain at different times.

You don't experience them separately, but as one smooth, simultaneous, and connected moment.

Your brain takes a moment to process and then invents a reality, a present moment that's not real.

What you feel is now is in fact a selectively edited version of the past.

You really only consciously experience the world 0.3 to 0.5 seconds after things happened.

Except this is also not really true, because your brain is editing time and space way more than that, and it makes decisions completely out of your conscious control.

Your present, what you experience right now, is kind of the future.

Imagine for a second that you're a table tennis pro.

In pro table tennis, balls whoosh around at 25 meters per second, which is pretty fast.

Light passes from the ball to your eye in nanoseconds.

It's converted into electrical impulses that reach your brain to be processed after 100 milliseconds.

Meanwhile, the ball travels 2.5 meters through the air, the length of the table.

If your brain showed you the past, where the ball was 100 milliseconds ago, it would hit you before you could react.

So instead, your brain takes its location, speed, and direction, and calculates where the ball should be in the future, by the time the information reaches you.

And then it creates a fictional version of it.

This is what you see in your fake present, a fake ball that's somewhere else.

If you acted now and started swinging your arm, you'd miss by a mile.

So before the ball even touches your opponent's bat, your brain starts predicting where it will likely be in space after they hit.

Based on the other player's posture and your table tennis experience.

But as it can't be sure if it will be correct, it prepares multiple different responses.

Maybe the ball will be here, or here, or even here.

To be ready for all of these scenarios, your brain sends pre-programmed orders to the muscles you need to jump left, right, or up, telling them to be ready for any of them at a moment's notice.

For a short moment, multiple ghost versions of you exist, all equally real inside your brain.

And then, as your opponent is about to lay into the swing, your brain decides on a single future that it thinks is most likely.

You only ever experience the ghosts that won, never the potential ones.

The order to the muscles to act out the winning movement is triggered even before the ball is hit back to you.

By the time you consciously see the ball coming at you and decide to hit it in a particular way, your body has already hit it back.

In reality, your brain already made all the decisions.

Your conscious experience is nothing more than an invented future, a prediction based on the information your brain received a fraction of a second ago.

This is not just true for extreme sports, like, um, table tennis, but also for walking.

After your game, you're walking back home, seemingly choosing your path and reacting to things.

Meanwhile, your brain is operating in three different time spheres at once.

It processes the sensory feedback of the past, it calculates the current state of your body, and it predicts your future, because walking is intense.

Before the signal from your foot touching the ground has even reached the brain, it's already sent the order to your foot to make the next step, and it's already calculated the muscle patterns for the next two.

But what if something truly catastrophic happens?

There's a banana peel, and you step on it and slip.

It turns out your brain is ready for this.

So far, we spoke of your brain making decisions for you, but this is not really true.

You don't have a central control room where the world comes together.

In reality, different parts of your body are aware of different things at different times.

Your spinal cord usually knows stuff before your brain, and even within your brain, different regions process the same event at different speeds and make independent decisions.

As your foot catches the peel, the gyroscope inside your ears notices a sudden change of your position in space.

It submits this information to your brainstem and spinal cord, the things-must-happen-quickly section of your body.

They immediately trigger emergency recovery patterns and send orders to different muscle groups.

Within 200 milliseconds, pre-programmed sequences activate to catch your fall.

Your arms shoot out, your other leg stiffens to support your weight, your core muscles contract to stabilize you.

100 milliseconds later, when you become aware that you're tripping, your body is already recovering.

Okay, so we've learned that your brain is constantly predicting reality around you, makes decisions about the best way to act, and then shows you an edited version, which totally makes sense, which you really want to be in charge of all that.

But your brain is not just predicting the external world.

Right now, it's predicting a way more complex thing, you.

Why do you feel about the world the way you do?

Your sense of hunger, your energy level, and especially your emotions are not just objective reactions to what state you're in, but predictions.

Your brain's prediction of what you'll need soon or need to be ready for.

You're probably used to getting food or going to bed roughly around the same time.

And as the time approaches, your brain releases hormones to prepare you, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You get hungry or tired because your brain assumes this is the time when this is needed.

This is the most striking thing about your emotions.

They aren't just reactions to the outside world, they're predictions.

When you go to a party, your brain isn't waiting to see how you feel once you get there based on how the party actually is.

It analyzes your experiences of past parties and who it expects to be there.

Maybe close friends you feel safe around.

Maybe people you don't know who are a less socially secure bet.

Maybe your brain remembers a party where you felt anxious and that experience stuck.

If your brain predicts anxiousness, it adjusts your heart rate, hormone levels, and muscle tensions before you even enter the room.