What is the present? Smart people have been racking their brains about this for thousands of years. If you imagine time as an endless straight line, then the present is a dimensionless point with no duration. Conversely, one can argue that all of our experiences are present – we cannot perceive the past and future directly, but can only remember them now or anticipate them.
But the idea that we perceive time like a film strip – a series of “still images” that we then assemble into a continuous experience – is false. From a purely physiological perspective, we cannot capture all sensory impressions synchronously in a tiny amount of time; we need a while to process them and combine them into an overall impression. In fact, since the 1980s, there has been a lot of evidence that we summarize our experiences in units that last about two to three seconds.
