The millisecond gap and futures thinking

Our experience of the present moment, or our phenomenal consciousness, is a higher-level organising function of the brain which captures all phenomena of current subjective experiences (from embodiment, thinking and moving to touching, feeling, seeing and hearing) to produce an ‘immediate and undeniable’ subjective present in a subjective space akin to ‘here and now’. In other words, the brain (our objective neurobiological reality) seemingly becomes aware of itself (our subjective mental reality).

The present of the present

The implication of phenomenal consciousness is that we are trapped in the present and cannot experience reality from anywhere else. The past has happened, and the future does not exist since it is a mere mental representation of a time yet to come. Both are beyond our physical reach. An everyday example is having a cup of coffee at our favourite café. While enjoying our brew at a streetside table we recall the disappointing cup we had yesterday, and hope tomorrow’s will be at least as good as this one. We have not moved from the café chair (the present) but have mentally travelled to the past and the future in real time. In other words, we have experienced the past in the present, the present in the present and the future in the present.

The four barriers

To complicate matters further neuroscientists tell us the human body does not have a dedicated sense organ that registers time on an absolute scale. We are therefore not conscious of the time it takes our nervous system (including our brain, spine and neurons) to collect and interpret data to provide us with an experience of the present moment. There are generally four barriers separating us from the present reality: (1) the time it takes physical stimuli to reach our senses (like light and sound waves traveling from an aeroplane overhead to reach our eyes and ears), (2) the time it takes our senses (in this case our eyes and ears) to relay that data to the brain, (3) the time it takes the brain to convert the data to information (it is a passenger jet) and (4) the time it takes the brain to become aware of what it is thinking about (I am experiencing a passenger jet flying overhead).

From the past to the present

The neuroscientific and psychophysical debate regarding this distinction between brain time (neurobiological reality) and mind time (mental reality) is ongoing and may have significant implications for a range of concepts including sense of agency and free will. Suffice to say there is a time delay, or millisecond gap between us and our experience of objective reality.

The significance of the millisecond gap is that it prohibits us from experiencing reality directly. We unknowingly experience something that has just happened (the immediate past) as something that is happening (the present). The implication for futures thinking is that we are not moving from the present to the future, but from the immediate past to the present. The present becomes the outcome of the future we planned in the past.