Does the brain tap into the future?

Ohh jeez.

While researching my protopanpsychism article, I came across the work of Dean Radin and Dick Bierman whose research has yielded some very eerie results.

Before I get to this, however, I’d like you to conduct a short experiment. While looking at your feet, stomp on the ground. You will notice that your visual perception of your foot hitting the floor matches your sensation of touching it. This would be fine except for one thing: the speed of light is vastly faster than the conduction times and synaptic delays through the long nerves and spinal cord from your feet. As a result, you should be seeing the event before you feel it – and the delay should be noticeable.

But it’s not.

Benjamin Libet and his associates first documented this phenomenon in 1979, which is now referred to as the ‘delay-and-antedating hypothesis/paradox.’ A number of explanations have been posited to reconcile this strange observation.

Perhaps there is a lag in the visual information. If this is the case, then the visual cortex is set for a time delay such that it can keep up with the slow pulses from the extremities. This would be a rather bizarre revelation if true, meaning that we are constantly viewing the world with a small degree of latency. This is almost certainly not the case, as Darwinian selection would favour those animals that do not experience any kind of visual delay. Living in the past would be grossly disadvantageous out in the wild.