Living in a memory: background event detection
I was doing a short meditation and stumbled upon a clean observation of the “event detection” mechanism, which upon closer look turned out to be related to memory. The meditation itself was a simple one: freely wandering attention, just observing the attention itself (“split-attention” trick). I was watching how attention freely roams, switching from plane to plane (thinking, “lower” inner dialog, imagination plane, etc), when a car passed by window and my attention switched to register that sound. It took some time (<0.5s?) for attention to move to this plane of sounds and “assemble” that sound into representation, but when I started to perceive the sound on conscious level I noticed that I am processing it from the beginning of the sound. This can’t be true, I realized, because the beginning of the sound is what triggered the attention to switch to sound plane, and the actual sound has already moved forward in time. ...