“You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?” (2018)

Re:“You want to know something about how bullshit insane our... by highfrequency on Sunday June 21, 2020 @11:19AM (#23592458)

I'm a bit suspicious after spending 5 minutes trying to replicate the frozen clock phenomenon and having no success. Often, the second hand ticks within a very short window (<150ms) of looking at the clock, consistent with what I would expect.

When you shift your focus to look at an analog clock, the time to the next tick of the seconds hand should follow a uniform distribution between 0 and 1 seconds if there are no visual bugs. It seems likely that people experience some confirmation bias, where the delays above 0.9s stand out more in their memory.

I really don't buy the claim that there's a 500ms delay in perception here. At the very least, this should be bounded by the time it takes to move your eyes (~100ms).

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Re:“You want to know something about how bullshit insane our... by xwdv on Sunday June 21, 2020 @11:58AM (#23592736)

I too was unable to replicate that experiment. I took it a step further by not only having an analog stop watch, but also having other things close by that were constantly moving. Even though my timing resulted in variable durations to the next tick, some longer than others, I did not notice any “paused” effect from other things.

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Re:“You want to know something about how bullshit insane our... by thetanuj on Sunday June 21, 2020 @03:36PM (#23594722)

Do it with a fan and you'll see the fan blades going a little slower for few milliseconds when you look at them. Adjust the fan speed for even better results.

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Re:“You want to know something about how bullshit insane our... by csomar on Sunday June 21, 2020 @11:22AM (#23592472)

It's a bad one since a human is very bad at estimating very short (less than 1 sec) time frames. Try the mirror experiment, it's straightforward.

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