Do you know really what you’re doing?

It’s called “the temporal factor in consciousness” and it’s become the hottest topic in neuroscience. The basic tenet: reality runs about half-a-second ahead of our conscious awareness of it. And, worse , we never do catch up. A piece of evidence that may bring this arcane subject closer to hand: the hypothesis explains fast reaction times, such as the behavior of a champion 100-meter sprinter who leaves the block a mere 130 millisecond after the starting pistol fires, suggesting that they are only aware that the gun has fired after they have left the block. For further explanation, test your reaction time to the finely reasoned explanation in a recently published Harvard University book, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, by Benjamin Libet.

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