Your Brain and its attentional blink

 

Now you are asked for your opinion/decision on some important matter by the boss. You used to think that your reply was fairly instantaneous, but now you are aware that there is an ‘Attentional Blink’; an  0.5 second delay required for the cortex to model an event. Clearly this has implications for the role of conscious experience in the control of our lives. If experience is always 0.5 seconds behind the true present instant then how can we be said to control anything? The brain must be acting automatically whilst performing most tasks.

And this 0.5 second delay also seems to contradict our everyday experience, for we certainly feel like we are aware of things in less than 0.5 seconds. And what is the brain (cortex) doing in the 0.5 seconds between the start of stimulation and the report of awareness of the stimulation? It is probably synchronising its various processors and creating a waking dream, a structured set of events that accounts for the activity.