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.
I started to observe specifically how attention is moving from-to sounds plane, reacting to new and sharp sounds and this uncovered following observation/realization. The initial phase, after the attention fully moved to the new plane (distracted by a new stimuli), at least in the begging of consciouss processing I am percieving a memory, that pretends to be a real-time event.
This is basically the end of pure observation, but there are some weak conjectures:
- first of all, when attention moves to the sound it is seeing “memory replay”, that pretends to be a real-time event. It is very visible in those “sharp” events as the mental process unfolds around them, but it is not limited to them. Much of more conscious processing is actually a memory replay, but I don’t want to jump forward with 100% conclusions until I am able to see more details
- second is an answer to a question: “why attention moves?”. There is clearly a forcing function that reacts to arising strong stimuli, that forces attention to refocus and parse the incoming sharp event, that manages the attention-memory-replay-stich coordination. I don’t have a clear visibility into this forcing function, but this is a good topic for more meditations.
For fun, here’s a UML diagram.
