The Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub commented that in 73% of all German poems read aloud, the verses last between two and three seconds. Longer line poems are read with a slight unconscious pause in the middle of each line. “In this case, our self lasts three seconds,” he said.
Apparently, two or three seconds is the duration over which our mind perceives the sensory data received as a unique experience. If not, since when are the clocks ticking? A clock ticks ticks tick … always the same sound. But that’s what happens with bedside table clocks; a large clock on the wall tac, tac, tac … Here the duration between taps is greater than approximately 3 seconds. In the bedside table we perceive ticking if the duration is less than 3 seconds and we integrate two tics into a single ticking experience.
The “now” has its problems even in the Spanish language. Who uses the present, “I eat”? No one. What we do is use the present continuous form “I’m eating.” In Spanish the present does not exist.
For their part, psychologists have tried to understand what the “now” means to us in a series of experiments known as the “phi phenomenon.” In a dark room, there are two small, slightly separated points of light that alternately turn on and off every 50 milliseconds and remain on for 150 milliseconds.
For the test subjects, the situation is perceived as a single point of light moving from right to left: the brain somehow “fills in” those 50 milliseconds. But the most fascinating thing is when the two points have different colors. So what they perceive is that the point abruptly changes color in the middle of the false trajectory, and some even point to where it does with a pointer.
The question of what is the present, to be able to decide if you can live the present, is, in essence, a problem of perception of the passage of time. In the case of the film industry, which makes us pass a film through reality, the present is each frame of the reel. And since they project 25 in a second, the now lasts 1/25 seconds.
