The most surprising experiment about how our brains work

You probably think that your conscious experience of the world around you is a perfect representation of reality. You hear and see things as they really are out there. But is this true?

Neuroscientists did an odd experiment a few years ago and the results were absolutely surprising! Here’s how it worked:

You press a button and a light flashes. Nothing surprising there. But here’s the clever thing the scientists did: for the first 10 times you press the button there’s a delay before you see the flash, like this — you press the button -> a few seconds during which nothing happens -> you finally see a flash. Again, nothing surprising yet. But after you press the button 10 times the delay before the light flash is removed, so that the flash appears immediately after the button is pressed. Care to guess what happens next to you in this experiment?

This happens: you see the flash -> and then you press the button… Wait, what? Was that some sort of giant typo? No. I’ll say it again: when the delay is removed, you see the flash of light before you press the button. Now, that is surprising! Specially because, in reality, the flash keeps appearing after the button is pressed. So what is going on?

The culprit is your subconscious brain (not yours specifically, there’s nothing wrong with you, our subconscious brains are the ones responsible). It’s very important for us humans to consciously understand cause-and-effect (when I do A, B will happen), so that we can share this precious information with others. This way they will also know that when they do A, B will happen. Collective learning, I guess.

So when your subconscious brain detects a cause-and-effect pattern in which there’s a small delay before the actual effect takes place (like in the experiment) it adjusts your conscious perception so that you perceive the effect (light flash) to occur immediately after the cause (button pressed). In other words, it anticipates the effect in relation to the cause. This way your conscious you will have no trouble to understand the cause-and-effect and share this knowledge with others. Now, when the delay between cause and effect is removed, your subconscious brain keeps doing this time adjustment regarding when your conscious self perceives the flash. And you will see the flash happening before you press the button…

Spooky, isn’t it… What this all means though is that our amazing brains work in very surprising ways and that we’re still very far from completely understanding it. It also points to the fact that, as Daniel Dennett says, “consciousness is an illusion” created by our brains, and that what we hear and see may not necessarily be reality…

Note: if you wan to read more, here’s the experiment — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16950162/