You don’t know this because your brain lies to you and then covers up the lies, which is a good thing. If your brain didn’t fudge reality, you wouldn’t be able to hit a baseball, drive a car, or even carry on a conversation.
It takes about 80 milliseconds for the brain to generate consciousness, to take the information flowing in, and construct a model of reality from moment to moment. Everything you think is happening now already happened 80 milliseconds ago, and you are just now becoming aware of it — over and over again.
Since you live in the past, it should be impossible to do things like hit a baseball or duck a punch, yet athletes do these sorts of things all the time.
Professional baseball players and boxers don’t have faster reaction times than the average human being. No human being can make the circuit from eyes to brain to muscles fast enough to hit a ball in midflight or avoid an oncoming fist. You can’t change those natural limits with any amount of practice. So how do they do it?
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