Taxi Wheels

I was looking at a taxi rolling by on the street. I looked at the wheels spinning. Most of the time, they were blurred, but every few moments they'd look perfectly still. Of course they were still spinning, but I could see the details on the wheel, only for the quickest moment. I wondered, "why does this happen?"

I remembered something I read in a magazine (reliable source right?) about some sort of slices of consciousness in time, or something like that. They were saying something about how the brains of creatures get input from the world, and there is a time before that information is processed and understood. The understanding is kind of like "mental output." There is time between output and input where I would think you could say you're not conscious. Different animals have different lengths of time between input and output. They said in the article that snails have a long period of time, and flies have a very short time, and humans are somewhere in the middle.

This article really stuck with me. I think it could explain many things. For example, I'm sure people wonder why it feels like it takes so much longer to go somewhere than it does to return from that place. Things you do for the first time feel like they take much longer, but when you've done it many times, the time seems to fly. I think some moments just feel like they go faster than others. When you're day dreaming, sometimes long periods of time will pass and you don't even realize it.

I think this period of time between input and output is to blame. It seems like every slice of time that your brain does this process is how often your mind oscillates into the realm of consciousness. If you're doing something new, your brain needs to learn about it, so it slices time very thin, and spends more time in a state of consciousness because of it. Time will feel slow. It works exactly the same way as video cameras. If you increase the frame rate, things move more slowly, but you can also see more detail of the action taking place. If your brain is working at a higher "frame-rate", it will see more and learn.

So that is my explanation of the taxi wheels momentarily appearing stationary. I think the frame-rate of a mind fluctuates from moment to moment. Some moments they were just a blur, other moments, the frame-rate skipped a beat and I could see the wheels as if they were still.

The much simpler explanation is that sometimes your eyes can catch things as they spin, and follow them just for a split second. I don't know, which one makes more sense?