How far in the past do you live?

Why are live television shows not actually live?

And what does any of this have to do with nuclear bombs or car accidents

or the Boeing Airlines crash in Ethiopia or volcanoes or the last episode of the Sopranos.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford

University and I've always been obsessed with how we perceive time. In this episode, I'm going to

dive into an issue about time perception that's always intrigued me,

which is how long do we have to wait before we have a conscious perception of something that just happened in the world?

And that leads to a very wild question.

Will you perceive the event that kills you?

So imagine that you're walking down the sidewalk and you're enjoying the sunshine and you're

sipping your coffee from a paper

cup and watching two dogs wrestling around and having fun in the distance. And suddenly,

from a crane perched 10 stories in the air, a piano falls and lands right on top of you.

The question we want to dive into today is, will you be aware of that final moment?

Or, while you feel you're happily watching the dogs and sipping the coffee, will the footage

just end?

Now, this is not an idle question. It's one that allows us to dig deep into

what happens in the brain. And it's one that sometimes gets wrestled with in courts of law.

So let's start this story in 2017, when the United States approved a new generation of the Boeing 737 airplane.

This was called the Boeing 737 Max, and it was a great evolution for this leading airliner company,

and it immediately produced hundreds of orders that came pouring in from around the world.

...