So you ever look down at your watch or up at a clock and the second hand seems to be frozen for an eternity until it starts moving normally again? Why does this happen and what is this phenomenon called?
So you ever look down at your watch or up at a clock and the second hand seems to be frozen for an eternity until it starts moving normally again? Why does this happen and what is this phenomenon called?
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It actually has a really cool name: chronostasis
Basically our brains are always building a simulation off stimuli and that’s how we perceive the world. It takes a second to process a clock and fills in the gap, so it appears to freeze
It’s called the ‘stopped clock illusion.’ When you first move your eyes to the watch, your brain kind of fills in the gap and stretches that first moment, making it feel longer than it actually is. It’s basically your brain trying to make your vision feel smooth, but it ends up tricking you instead.
I’ve never perceived this.
You know how when you move your eyes they seem to move instantly; there’s no blurry panning across. This is a “post processing effect”. Your brain deletes the pan and fills in the missing gap with whatever it thinks is the most likely. That’s a stationary view of the clock as it turns out.
This is saccadic masking
Personally I think it’s partially confirmation bias. Most of the time you will look at a clock, it’s partway through a “tick” you look down and it completes the tick and you think nothing of it. It did what you expected so you didn’t even notice. BUT SOMETIMES you’ll look at a clock almost perfectly timed at the end of one tick and you’ll then have to experience a full second before it ticks again, and since you didn’t catch it mid-tick it just feels like this one is taking noticeably longer to do what your brain expects it to do. That full second is mentally stretched out a lot because usually it doesn’t take a full second for you to look down and see the second hand start moving
It’s like double slit experiment of quantum physics. The watch hand doesn’t need to move unless it’s being observed. Once you look at it, it starts counting and you won’t see movement until 1 second has elapsed. You will never look down and instantly see the second hand moving because you have not registered the observation yet.
So many of these questions are from psych 101 students I swear
I think Vsauce did an interesting video about this a long time ago
it’s called the ‘stopped clock illusion’ or chronostasis. when you glance quickly at something like a clock, your brain kind of ‘freezes’ the first image to give you a stable view. it tricks you into thinking the second hand has paused, but really, your brain is just stitching together your perception in a weird way.
On a reaction basis you’re processing in milliseconds.
The humble clock operates every second.
I noticed that 50+ years ago when I was a perception and cognitive psychology researcher. My professor agreed that it was a real phenomenon, but it was not clear how to operationalize it and do experiments with it.
Like when you watch photons going through the slots. When they don’t know your watching they do what they want. But once the observer is added they act acordingly
Ah, you chronos.