The 80 milliseconds rule

Have you ever noticed how your brain is able to sync up both light and sound waves to present a cohesive picture for you ? Sound travels at the speed of only 330 m/s whereas light travels at a speed of 3X108 m/s.

Experiment 3:

So when you see a person clap his hands or speak, we should see the clap first or his lips move before we can even hear the sound. But this does not happen. We can both see and hear at the same time. This is because there is a delay of 80 milliseconds when the brain waits for all the signals and constructs a cohesive picture of the reality for us. Everything we see is delayed by 80 milliseconds. This 80 ms rule is universal and gets offset only beyond a distance of 30 metres. When the person stands beyond 30m and claps his hands, we will see it first before hearing it just as in the case of lightning and thunder.

Similarly, you can notice that if you touch your toe and the nose at the same time by your two different hands, both the sensations are felt at the same time eventhough the signal from your nose should have reached your brain first. Have you ever noticed that our consciousness is also able to cover up gaps in information like for example when we blink our eye ? – the eyeblinks are never consciously visible.

It can be demonstrated by simple optical illusion experiments that our conscious brain is capable of making up a lot of stuff pretty quickly and fill up the gaps by itself. So do we know what else our brain is making up? Can we really trust that our brain to produce the full picture of the reality with our mere five senses ?. We can only assume that the reality is an illusion which is formed by the brain or the individual mind based on the signals from the five senses while adding its own perspectives.

Thanks
Leo

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