Causality and the Perception of Time

Causality and the Perception of Time

Eagleman, David M., and Alex O. Holcombe
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 8 (2002): 323–325
https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(02)01945-9

“If you hold out your hand and snap your fingers, you will not notice any difference in the time that you intend to move your fingers and the time that you hear the snap. This is true even though the auditory signals corresponding to the snap were being processed by the nervous system for more than 100 ms before your auditory experience occurred. Humans can easily perceive 20–30 ms differences in timing, so the fact that you did not notice a discrepancy suggests that the brain carried out some temporal sleight of hand. Did the brain actually adjust its temporal estimates of your action and its effect so that they seemed simultaneous?”

— Eagleman & Holcombe