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When light hits our retina, what our brains would like to do is instantaneously generate a perception of what the world looks like. Alas, our brain can’t do this instantaneously. Our brains are slow. It takes around a tenth of a second for your perception to be built, and that’s a long time when you’re moving about. If you perceived the world the way it was when light hit your eye, you’d be having a tenth-of-a-second old view of the world.
Because of this, visual systems have evolved mechanisms to try to generate a perception not of the way the world was when light hit the eye, but generate a perception of the way the world will be by the time the perception occurs in a tenth of a second. By the time the perception is elicited, the anticipated future will have arisen, and the perception will be of the present. That is, in order to perceive the present (have perceptions at time t that are of the world at time t), our visual systems must anticipate the near-future.
// Neuronarrative
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