Why don’t we notice gaps in time?

How is your consciousness like a flame that continually goes out and gets re-lit? Why can you see other people’s eyes move, but you can’t see your own eyes move in the mirror? And what does any of this have to do with deep sleep, anesthesia, comas, amnesia, and empires of soft-bodied creatures that came before us? Tune in this week for some science that will shift your view of reality.

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More Information:

Eagleman DM. (2008). Human time perception and its illusions. Current opinion in neurobiology. 2008 Apr 1;18(2):131-6.

Eagleman DM. (2009). Brain time. What’s next: Dispatches from the future of science. 2009 Mar:155-69.

Eagleman DM. (2008). Prediction and postdiction: Two frameworks with the goal of delay compensation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2008 Apr;31(2):205-6.

Eagleman DM, (2005). Peter UT, Buonomano D, Janssen P, Nobre AC, Holcombe AO. Time and the brain: how subjective time relates to neural time. Journal of Neuroscience. 2005 Nov 9;25(45):10369-71.

Corkin, S. (2013). Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. New York: Basic Books.

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"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker