The Illusion of Continuity

was there? Was there just some sort of asynchronicity going on there? I don't know. It felt a little weird, didn't it. Yeah, a little skipping about kind of felt like David Lynch just edited us. Yes, noel or editor. All right, well let's shake that off, alright, and uh and and move forward, Because indeed, continuity is is an important part of the way that we perceived the world and and and how we make sense of the world.

But to what extent isn't an illusion? How much of the perceived continuity uh in life is just a sort of an accident of the brain. You know, I was thinking about this lately because I'm watching the Olympics and Winter Olympics and searching, and I don't have cable or satellite TV, and um super lazy, and I didn't go get some rabbity or antennas. Instead, I'm streaming it to my Roku player through an app called us TV now.

Are us TV now And anyway, the point is is that there are so many weird time lapses in the streaming that it really does feel like David Lynch is presenting the Olympics, and there's all sorts of odd conversation loop back that happened three four times, and it starts to feel like it's just even those little tweaks are putting me into a different universe, into an alternate universe. And I thought about that, just that that little tweak

can really be unsettling and fe centering. Yeah, I mean, that's just the way that our our brain is seeing and hearing things. We get these chunks that even though they're they're out of sequence due to the realities of our time system here on Earth, but we can't help to try and piece them together and make sense of it,

because that's what our brains do all the time. Yeah, and we really take for granted this idea of perceptual constancy and how we see the world, because if you see an image in front of you, think, oh, that's that's just something that's that is exactly as it is that I'm perceiving it, um, just as it is in reality, and nothing could be further from the truth. It is a constructed reality by your brain, by your visual system UM, which analyzes let's slow down that moment and you're watching

the socio Olympics, right. It analyzes the interactions between visible electromagnetic waves and the objects in our environment. So not just the you know, when I'm watching on the TV screen, but the light in the room, the dimensions of that room. All of that is being penciled in by little artists in my brain essentially trying to tell me what I'm seeing. Yeah, we often experience reality with this idea that hey, it's

it's me experiencing reality, and ultimately that's the truth. You are your body, so anything your body does, it's all working together as a single unit. But when you start breaking it down, you realize that you or your conscious mind, and your conscious mind is just kind of the froth on the beer that is the brain, and then it's it's then that beer is just setting in a dark room and it's only getting information um passed onto it from these from these these eyes that are outside of

the room, uh, outside of the brain itself. So you're getting this information passed to the brain and then to the mind, and uh, it's not a accurate version of what is actually going on outside the room. Yeah. We talked about this a little bit with Liliputian hallucinations and how that our brains have to create this perceptual constancy.

And if you think about it, it's doing this by reconstructing a three dimensional dimensional world with two dimensional images on your rentness, and so when you look at an object, each of your eyes sees a slightly different picture. So think about a fork and a plate on the table. Now you're okay. So your brain has to move between these two objects and create scale in shape, and there has to be a perceptual constancy in there in place, and it's doing that behind the scenes with a lot

of different processes. We're talking about minocular vision providing the image perceived by each separately, and then you have binocular vision that's getting in on on the play here. And if you're looking at something in the distance, then you have to keep in mind that there's something like atmospheric perspective, which is created by the dust particles and water vapor in the air, which then color the way that you see an object. Something farther away from you is gonna

look a little hazy, a little blurry. Yeah. And we know that damage to the brain can sometimes create gaps in that visual data that comes into play. And we also know that our brain and when it doesn't have that data, will hallucinate an image for you. So again, this hold on reality, this this illusion of continuity is just a very tenuous thing here. Yeah, and it's and again it's also worth remembering that your brain is not

passing on all the information to you. Uh, it's a there's a lot of computation that's going on beneath the surface. One example of this came from a study from the University of Arizona from doctoral degree candidate Jay Sanganetti, publishing the journal Psychological Science. And they took a various subjects and they had them look at these images where you had an abstract dark center of an image and then white on the sides and on some of these that

there was just abstraction they did. There was no actual picture. It's just white and dark. But in there's you had these white seahorse shapes on the sides. So they flash these at everyone's at everyone in the study, and some people got the sea horse, some people got the abstract nonsense. Uh. But they found that that that in the brain when they looked at the brain activity, there was identification of the sea horse going on even when people didn't consciously

see the sea horse. It's like the brain was identifying it and saying sea horse. But then it doesn't pass the information onto your your conscious understanding. It's it's happening into some conscious level, so saying seahorse but not seahorse. Yeah, so it's sometimes you were seeing things but you're not consciously seeing them because it's not important to your to

your immediate understanding of the world around you. But you know, how does that subconsciously color the things that do rise to the top of that froth on the bier right right, which is the whole other thing that we could get into. But we're we're interested in looking at this illusion of continuity and sing how it games us in certain ways

and certainly. One of the ways that we have mentioned before is something that is exploited by magicians, and it's called the retention vanish that very iconic trick in which you see the coin go from one hand to the other. And it happens when there's a lag in the brain's perception of motion, and this is called persistence of vision, and the audience will actually see the coin, say, transfer from the right to the left palm for a split second after the hands separate, and that is because visual

neurons don't stop firing once a given stimulus. Here the coin is no longer present. So even though that coin wasn't necessarily deposited into the left hand, the last image that your brain saw looked like it, and it's not going to stop that process and say, oh wait, hold on, you know, split one of a second here we think that it actually didn't get transferred. It's going to continue to fire and you're gonna have this this false perception

of continuity into the other hand. Yeah, it's crazy. Again. Your brain is filling in the gaps for you in order to give you the complete picture. It's like a reporter has been sent out into the city to get a story finds out certain bits of information, and it's just filling in, uh, the gaps in what happened, and the way they fill in the gaps, it's it's the

way it likely happened, all right. Somebody was seeing a point A and then they were seeing at point B. It stands to reason they walk down the street from point A to point B. But maybe not well, And I was just thinking about this too. Aren't we even getting to the point with metic keywords in the way that we use the internet. Aren't we sort of filling that in? Can't you look at a like a pool of meta keywords for an article and immediately start to

fill in those gaps yourself. Yeah, So if you see something like you know, illusion of continuity, visual visual perception, persistence of vision, you begin to understand the story that's developing there. Yeah. Or look at any movie trailer, especially movie trailers for films that are not that inventive and and that stick, uh, stick rather closely to the accepted tropes. Oftentimes you'll look at at the extended trailer for the film and you say, hey, well, I just saw the film.

There's absolutely no reason to see it because you were given the little points, the little the little important moments along the way, and then your brain just fills in the rest, and based on previous knowledge, you know exactly what's going to happen. Yeah, and movies are the ultimate illusion of continuity. Yes, it turns out that twenty seven point five hurts. This is a sequence of still photograph slides that are displayed at or about this rate of

presentation gives us the illusion of motion. So, like the basic flip book, like a horse running, you flip the page is fast enough, and it looks like a little

horses is running around there, though obviously it is not. Yeah, so motion pictures or those horses that you see are really just a sequence of those still images at twenty four prame, excuse me, twenty four frames per second, and that exceeds something called the temporal resolving properties the human visual system, so it's outside of the zone of detection.

So if you're looking at thirty five millimeter film projection, each still is presented for one of a second, alternating with a black frame for roughly the same duration, and the eye perceives the images as just one fluid scene. But old timey films, we we perceive that gap, right, and then we kind of herky jerky motion that you get this this sort of this unreal uh idea of movement, the kind of unreal movement that is generally retained and

stop motion animation. Yeah, and that's because the frame rate is clocking in at seventeen to eighteen frame rates per second. It's too low. So the brain says, I see something here. There is a discontinuity, and in this respect, this twenty seven point five hurts. It also translates to sound and how sound begins to form a sort of continuity. And this is this is the idea that I'm going Dad.

Hear each individual beat, but if we were to speed that up enough, it would just be one constant exactly, because the molecules are vibrating at that speed and they're creating that sort of booz that continuity. And Daniel J. Levitton, who wrote the book This Is Your Brain on Music, talks about that and he used this example of putting

a playing card in the spokes of a wheel. He says that slow speeds, you hear the click click, click click click of the car, but at higher speeds the clicks were together and they cease to be perceived as individual noises, but now as a continuous buzz and he says a tone you can actually hum along to a pitch, and that's sort of the magic of this continuity of

sound and motion. Alright, So on that note, let's take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to talk about why Spider Man, you know that gift, why he is such a good groover. Alright, we're back dancing Spider Man. Yes, uh, this is just one of those gifts that's been around forever where the this this little kind of pixelated the Spider Man. Uh, you know, maybe it was a real person dancing in the original footage, but it's just kind of it's kind of a little

artifact on the web that just won't go away. And you see him sort of sashang, I guess is the correct descriptive term, back and forth and kind of this kind of is he snapping his fingers or am I just I don't know. He seems to be doing the Charleston sometimes and then he kind of goes into the disco moves. Um. He's on a white background, and it's just it's a very simple animated gift. But the great thing about it is that you can play nearly any piece of music to it, and Spider Man seems to

keep time. Yes, you can. You can throw classical music on it, and he seems to be uh sash back and forth to Mozart. You can throw there on some dub step and he seems to be really jamming out to that as well, and everything in between. No matter what the genre, what the track, what the what the speed, you know what? What? What are the beats permitted happen to be? He still seems to be dancing to that

particular song. And it's a real insight into the human proclivity for synchronicity, right, because there's nothing magic about the Spider Man gift. It's just this gift of this dude dancing and the Spider Man the costume. But when we look at it, we can't help but find the ways that it matches up. We can't help it but look

at it and say, hey, this fit's perfectly with the music. Yeah. Now, before we get into how this actually happens, or this illusion of synchronozy synchronicity happens, I wanted to mention that when it comes to the visual cortex, it is mapping a visual of how the pitch and tone in a in a song are changing, and in turn, music moves us because we envision movement in it. So we can't help but look at something like this animated gift and start to really synchronize our own um interpretations of the

music and the movements. Yea, with what we're seeing. Yeah, we talked about before when we talked about the way music and art moves this, Uh, that the music that tends to really resonate the most with us, you know, think about the songs that really give you chills or

or just you know, really you captures your imagination. Generally, you're talking about places where whether there's definite movement going on in the song, there's some sort of rising action, or it's descending, or it's there's this sudden drop, you name it, but there's there's something coming together or pulling apart,

and and that's what we lack onto. Yeah, and it's no coincidence that music is really effective um and therapeutic with Parkinson's patients and stroke patients and coordinating their movements again because of the visual cortex in this idea that we're trying to sync up to the thing that we're

listening to and we're seeing. So I wanted to mention that Radio Labs Jody Avrigon has a great explanation of why Spider Man is such a good dancer, and she talked to someone by the name of Devin mcaulay who works in the Timing, Attention and Perception Lab at Michigan State University, and he says that humans are really flexible timekeepers.

He says, we have a tennessee to pay much more attention to events that are synchronous than asynchronous, and so this would bias our attention to time points that provide evidence for Spider Man dancing synchronously with the music. We're ignoring the times that he's out of time with music, you know. And this this ties in really closely with

the episode we just did on Reincarnation. We talked about families looking at like what a child is saying about an imaginary friend or about some phobia that they seem to have, and then how they end up matching that up with someone who was recently deceased and their story. You end up ignoring all the different places where it doesn't come together, and you focus on the one or two places, even then it does come together. Another example of this that that instantly came to mind where you're

doing the research. I give you two rather distinct things on one hand, the Wizard of Oz and then the other hand, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. Yes, because here we have a great example of these two independent artistic works. Right. Yeah, Wizard of Oz did not inspire Dark Side of the Moon. But as your college roommate will will happily tell you, they sync up really

well with each other. You if you mute Wizard of Oz and you play Dark Side of the Moon, they're gonna be all these moments where the lyrics or the or the rise and follow up the music, where all it just comes together perfectly and it seems as if it were meant to be. You also see this with Blade Runner and Dark Side of the Moon. So again to you, completely independent works, but the brain thinks that

there's a collaboration going on. Yeah. I was actually looking at a website called sink movies dot com and they have a number of examples, some of them some of them kind of interesting, Like there's one uh that they call city Kid, which is a kid a the radiohead album the Fabulous Album over the movie Dark City, which is a movie I love. And so those are two things I can see mixing rather well with each other.

I'm less into the idea of, say, Toy Story in the Attic, where they take Aerosmith's Toys in the Attic and sync it with Pixar's Toy Story. But again, they have something like twenty one different examples of an album and a movie. When sync together, they seem to make sense magically, all of a sudden, they are synchronous. Now. In the case of Spider Man, Abergann says that there's

something called periodosities. These are movements of various different but related rhythms nestled inside the rhythms of Spider Man's gyrations. And there are also these nested rhythmic patterns within any given song. So she says that when we are watching Spider Man, we were listening to a song, our brains pick out two items to match, one from the column of Spider Man's rhythms and one from the column of

the song rhythms, and then matches those up together. Huh yeah, Because definitely it is a very fluid movement that of this dancing Spider Man. There are no um, you know, sharp points. It's not just him like bonking his pelvis back and forth. Like that's the kind of thing which would match up with many songs, but not but certainly not have this universal um uh connectedness to music. Yeah, he doesn't do the sprinkler or anything, so there's no

jerky movements. Um. But yeah, they're smooth, they're continuous, and their short and duration, which help our brains again to sync up those two different columns. If they were a little bit longer, if his movements went on for a while, then we would have too many beats that might have been skipped, and that would put some red flags up

there in our brains. Interesting, you know, I wonder if anyone has really applied this thinking to the sinking of movies and music, because certainly I'm thinking of Flapstick and Wizard of Oz, you know, and just you know, the Cowardly Lion and then all this, and there's not a lot of this kind of fluid movement that would match

with any kind of music. So I wonder if anyone out there has, like has has looked at something that is very fluid, some sort of like performance piece with a lot of dance in it um or or or

something kind of avant gare. Like, I'm thinking maybe of the what's the the gentleman that you're yeah, Philip Glass, but also on the film side of things, the gentleman that your husband's rather fond of makes the really strange art films Matthew Barney, Matthew Barney, and what is that series call though it's Master Ye, Yeah, Like I wonder if that's the sort of property that would that would pair well with just about any kind of movement music,

because there's kind of a performance, uh, dance quality to it well. And Philip Glass does have a lot of um pieces that he has done with dance before, and it's very interesting. But there's his Generally, his music does not lend itself to sort of any sort of smooth, continuous or short burst there. It's usually pretty long and drawn out um and then you know the sort of

jarring changes in the pitch and the tempo. And next one wonder about the sort of media they consume and the pacing of it all and the ways that our brain likes to say, ah, yes, I like this idea of continuity. Please let me try to create it wherever and whenever I can around me, and indeed we we do look for it all around us. And we see this time and time again in our attempts to understand not only how the world works, but the meaning behind

why it works. Right when we start trying to to answer those big questions in life, why is this happening to me? Why did this happen to the world, and we start looking for these different different patterns. Uh, in the world around us. You could all you could even say that it's a synchro destiny here. That's a word that Depoxia Chopra has termed has coined. And uh, he's

suggesting that synchronicity can quote accelerate you towards your destiny. Oh, I mean you're going to be excelled towards your destiny no matter what. Yeah, that's that's generally gonna happen. You can just sett in your your house doing nothing and uh, it's like the old proverb by doing nothing, all all problems are solved right there you go. Um, but but that does not sell books, my friend. No. One final

thought on on a synchro destiny. I found this is not a depox writings, but someone had written about it on a blog and they said, Uh, when you live your life with an appreciation of coincidences and their meaning, coincidences and their meaning, that's that's kind of that that that has all the answers in it right there, because a coincidence, by its very nature, it's just a coincidence.

There is no meaning behind the coincidence. If you're finding meaning and your coincidences, then uh, then that's the problem, potentially the problem. You might find some beauty in those coincidences by aspiring reason to them, but if there's reason behind the coincidence, it's not a coincidence, right Or am

I crazy? Um? Well, no, I mean I think that if you take that line of reasoning, you might find yourself in front of the new paper trying to pick out secret codes and articles and covering the walls around you and as well as the tinfoiled windows. It can be problematic, right if you take that logic too far. Yeah, it's And that's ultimately the point. You know, use a little balance in your pattern recognition. Don't let your software get two out of whack, because finding finding beauty in

the world is one thing. Uh, covering your your walls of your house with newspaper clippings is quite another. For example, my daughter has the Frozen Castle set. The other day, I was looking at it and the throne looked like a lion's face to me. It was mean, it was very cool. It's just pattern recognition, uh, And I did not run from it. I just saw it for for

what it was a plastic chair, all right. So there you have it a little insight into continuity and how we observe it and to what extended it is an illusion and uh, you know, there's a whole deep end of the pool out there in terms of union, uh synchronicity that either we'll come back and talk about later

or you can explore on your own time. But it's uh, it's one of those areas that gets really deep, really fast, and it's just a little bit, uh, a little bit more than we're looking to, uh to cover in this particular episode. In the meantime, though, we'd love to hear your take on this episode. What kind of music have you tried to pair with Spider Man. We'll make sure that we put that Spider Man up on the blogs when this episode publishes, and we'll have a link in

the description for the podcast it so you can find it. Uh, let us know how your your pairings went there. Also, is there a particular movie and album pairing that you think is rather magical, that you think comes together perfectly? I myself have in the past when when I did entertaining that was for somebody other than a toddler. I would love to take like really bad be movies and put him on mute and then play funk music over it.

And I found that there were often those magical points where it's like the dude in the in the rubber monster suit looks like he's dancing to the funk music and it's perfect, and it's it's like it was meant to be. But I see now that that was just an illusion of my brain. Yeah, but I mean artistic synchronicity is something entirely into itself. Yeah, So give us your examples of artistic synchronicity, and you can do so by findings that steppable your mind dot com. That's the

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