Something I've been wondering about for a while now...

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G.T

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Paganisterr
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It's quite hard to explain, but I'll try my best.

Take a digital watch for example. Seconds pass by normally when you watch it, but when you look away for a while then look again, you see that it stays on that one second for what seems like 2 seconds or so then carries on normaly. Same thing happens with an analogue watch's second hand. I noticed the same thing with my PSP low battery warning light. I look at it after a while, it stays green for what seems like a long time then carries on flashing normally again.

Is it something to do with your brain tricking you? I have no idea. An explaination of how it works would be great (if it isn't too complicated :lol:).
 
I do that :D

I think it's something like the time that it takes for your brain to adjust to something, although i'm not sure what.
 
I think it's on the off chance that you catch it just after it has moved. Seems to take ages to move again, but after that, settles into a rhythm.

I don't think I have explained it well either!
 
Could probably be explained by school science teachers or something like that, but yeah it is quite weird.
 
It's all an optical illusion. Your brain tends to "fill in the blanks", so if you glance at a digital watch milliseconds before it changes from 1:00:52 to 1:00:53, your brain simply decides it was 1:00:53 all along. This is why, no matter how hard you try, you can't recreate the illusion consciously, because you have taken over full control of your brain and it no longer has to fill in the blanks.
 
Well, if it's your brain tricking you, then it's not optical illusion, is it? Anyways, I've wondered about this before as well. I'm glad G.T asked. :D
 
i always feel that the object 'activates' w/ a glance. the brain attaches information about what verbs to use on the object & the object 're-aligns' w/ the 'meaning' of the object to include it's purpose e.g a second-hand will tell the time because the visual will spend time getting processed by the linguistic verb. the light on ure PSP indicates activity & readiness for verbs and input, ure vision is re-align w/ survivalism, predatorial usage.
 
DQuaN
I think it's on the off chance that you catch it just after it has moved. Seems to take ages to move again ...
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Yep, that's what I think too. 👍

When you look back and it says 52 it may have just changed to 52. You expect it to say 53 within 0.50 of a second or so, but you have to wait 0.95 seconds for it to change, making it seem like it's stuck.

That's my theory anyway. :indiff:

Although, it does seem to happen often doesn't it? You'd expect it to be random but more often than not it seems to get 'stuck'. Maybe there is more to this than meets the eye... :odd:

*cue twilight-zone music*
 
Hmmmmm, interesting.

About DQuaN's theory (I thought the same thing at first), I agree with ferrari_chris, it does seem to happen often so it might not be that.

Anderton Prime's makes a bit more sense, but I still don't get how your brain imagines the 53 when it was 52, milliseconds before the 53. You don't get see the 52 so your brain knew it was 53 already? I don't know...
 
I'm glad you said that, because I notice this all the time as well - very strange.

My Mum has a clock on the wall in her kitchen, and I noticed that every time I looked at it, the second hand appeared to be go backwards for a second :boggled: It would then immediately resume normal service and go forward. (I reckoned that if I kept looking back and forth at the clock, I could possibly go back in time far enough to have that pizza for dinner again!) Anyway, I realised that the second hand was quite springy, and every time it clicked forward, it's own momentum being abruptly halted by the clock's mechanism would make it spring back slightly at the end of every 'tick'... but the only time you perceive it is when you look at the clock for the first time - watch it for any longer and you don't notice any more.

The same thing kind of applies to the 2 second digital watch thing - because your brain is happily ticking along at it's own pace, it has no frame of reference to judge 'what is a second?' - so when you look at your watch, your brain doesn't perceive it as a second passing, but some arbitrary length of time - only when your brain later perceives what a second looks like (by seeing the numbers increasing at regular intervals) does it resume normal service. It's almost like Schrodinger's Cat again - (how many cats did he have anyway??) - until the observation is made, it doesn't have a quantifiable value. Hence why your brain is fooled....
 
Touring Mars
I'm glad you said that, because I notice this all the time as well - very strange.

My Mum has a clock on the wall in her kitchen, and I noticed that every time I looked at it, the second hand appeared to be go backwards for a second :boggled: It would then immediately resume normal service and go forward.
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I noticed that too, and it never fails to catch me off guard. But I keep watching and it doesn't 'sping back slightly' as you said any other time, even on the very second it happened a minute later. I just thought I had one too many Mountain Dews....:lol:
 
I'm glad I'm not alone on this. I've noticed this quite a bit over the past few years. It's one of the main reasons I stopped wearing digital watches.:D
 
I stopped wearing digital watches because they tell the whole world you're either a kid who can't tell time properly or a computer nerd with the Periodic Table of the Elements programmed in there.
 
Anderton Prime
I stopped wearing digital watches because they tell the whole world you're either a kid who can't tell time properly or a computer nerd with the Periodic Table of the Elements programmed in there.
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:lol: Yeh, and weren't the buttons impossibly small?
 
But my digital watch is solar powered and weighs about 2 pounds...(G-Shock) Plus the big numbers are pretty to look at...aaaaaaa...:p
 

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