I don't believe these metrics, because I can certainly tell the difference between a 10ms ping and a 60ms ping in an online game. Yet there is this cat in my neighborhood that makes me think I'm deluding myself, and that I'm actually a quarter-second behind the real world.

It is a long-haired black cat. It doesn't like us. But it does like taking a shortcut through our front yard. If it sees us, it freezes. It waits, mid-stride. Then when it's satisfied we're not a threat, it starts moving again. If I move my arm or shift my body, it freezes again, sizing me up, sure that this is the day -- after all these years -- that I'm finally going in for the kill.

What's weird is I am convinced that this cat knows when I'm going to start moving. It halts before I move. By the time my head is moving or my arm is waving, it is already frozen and on high alert.

My working theory is not that this cat is telepathic or that it has defocused temporal perception. Rather, I think that because the cat is smaller than I am, its eyes are closer to its brain, its nerve impulses don't have to travel as far, and it really and truly knows before I do that I'm moving. Otherwise I can't explain this cat's superhuman reflexes or its blatant disregard of general relativity.

It seems likely to me you're just experiencing the stopped clock illusion, especially since you mention moving your head.

When your eyes focus on something new, your brain deletes the blur from your memory and fills it in with what you start looking at. The cat could notice and stop during your refocus, and because you can't see it during that period, all you see is it already stopped and perceive it as having been stopped the whole time.

Stopped cat illusion. That might be it. I will experiment.

Did you ever touch the cat? Can other people see the cat too?

Did you show this story to different people? Can other people see that different people?

I, for one, do not actually exist. Sorry.

Cats are certainly known to have good reflexes.

>human perceived-as-instantaneous time (~100ms)

Nonsense. You can test this yourself. Open a fast terminal, eg. xterm (libvte based terminals have a low framerate and are unsuitable).

Try:

    sleep 0; echo "test"
    sleep 0.05; echo "test"

The difference is immediately obvious.

Also, it's immediately obvious to anyone who's ever ssh'd to a server on another continent. The added ~100 ms latency makes for a very different "feel".

That is describing a different issue.

This test shows your visual system can detect the difference of 50ms between animations. Indeed, the human visual system can also tell the difference between 60 FPS (16ms) and 120 FPS (8ms), and even higher! This doesn’t mean that you can tell the difference striking a key and seeing the character draw on the screen after 8ms instead of 16ms.

Typing (i.e. pressing many keys in sequence instead of only a single key) could then be interpreted as animation, which by this logic would make such a difference in latency detectable again.

~0.1s is the limit after which there is a distinct delay between action and response. This is not the same as the point at which things feel instantaneous.

> 0.1 second: Limit for users feeling that they are directly manipulating objects in the UI. For example, this is the limit from the time the user selects a column in a table until that column should highlight or otherwise give feedback that it's selected. Ideally, this would also be the response time for sorting the column — if so, users would feel that they are sorting the table. (As opposed to feeling that they are ordering the computer to do the sorting for them.)

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/powers-of-10-time-scales-in...

I’m not denying that. I’m saying that anything over 100ms is meaningfully deficient, and anything under that is nice to have but not distractingly bad.

... for single events.

A latency of 100ms in online games is definitely not perceivable as “instantaneous.”