Yeah I know, I like to make life complicated...

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Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I saw a BBC documentary on the human brain (not quite how that sentence usually goes, is it?) According to this documentary, all of us live our lives half a second in the past.

It is the result of a chain reaction. We face a stimulus of some sort. The message is relayed to the brain. The brain decides what to do and the body carries out the decision. Our conscious realization of that action happens only half a second afterwards. As a result, everything that we see and sense around is has actually happened half a second earlier. We see a car zoom past us on the road but in reality, the zooming past happened half a second earlier. What is this half a second? A glitch in the system? Or rather, the time the brain requires to process and deal with the massive amounts of data it receives every micro-second.

This half second hardly has any appreciable effect on our lives. If it did, I'm sure we would have noticed by now and the BBC wouldn't have to reveal it in a documentary. However, I found the implications of such a thing to be astounding. Does this mean that we have never and never will live in the actual present? No wonder we humans cling to the past so much. It's how we've been programmed. Our brains function in the present but we live in the past. So, the harsh reality in this sutuation is that the present is only an illusion because we never quite get to experience it, do we?

Another thing that just wouldn't stop bothering me is that technically, all human beings loose half a second of their lives. The vicious cycle of continously delayed perception of the present starts right from the time we are born. So, at the exact moment of death, we are still busy processing the previous half second. Hence, when the time comes to actually be in that moment of death, well, it's too late. Brain processes cannot take place because we died half a second earlier! You know what this means? No human being can ever experience exactly what it is to die. Quite a startling revelation isn't it?

Well, new researches crop up all the time and it seems as though most of them just enjoy contradicting one another. I have no idea what the next one will say but hey, does it really matter? What's one half second compared to the length of a lifetime? Answer that, darlings.