Can You Really Stop Living In The Past?
DID YOU KNOW THAT human beings never fully experience the “present”? Nope, in reality, we’re always living in the past. Every human being is living at least 80 milliseconds in the past. David Eagleman, neuroscientist and writer at Baylor College of Medicine, believes that our consciousness lags behind actual events and that when you think an event occurs, it has already happened before your brain has a chance to create a cohesive picture of the world for you!
So in a way, our brains operate as you’ve likely seen a computer behave. When it’s needing a restart, sometimes you’ll type something and there’s a lag before the letters appear on the screen. In a similar way, your brain lags slightly in forming a comprehensible picture to your brain of what is happening in the world in front of you.
So that bird that just flew by or that buzz your phone just made actually happened in the past, but you’re just now knowing about it via what amounts to a rerun broadcast courtesy of your brain! It’s basically a recorded virtual reality.
So the next time someone tells you to “stop living in the past,” just tell them the truth…you can’t!
