Why do they use a gun at the Olympics to start sprinters?

Why not use a flash of light?

And by the way, how can a sprinter come off the blocks after the starting gun,

but still get disqualified for jumping the gun?

Or here's another question. If you watch someone

dribbling a basketball, it looks like when the ball hits the ground, the sight and the sound

are synchronized. And if you back up a ways, it still looks synchronized. But when you get to a very

particular distance, 110 feet, it suddenly goes out of sync.

Why?

And what does any of this have to do with Robert Oppenheimer or television broadcasting or the emperor

or the emperor Kubla Khan or schizophrenia?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about time perception, which is an area that I've studied in my lab for years.

For example, my first episode was on what happens when an event seems to go into slow motion

when you're in fear for your life.

But today, we're going to talk about a different aspect of time. And specifically, what we're

going to talk about is that you have a three-pound mission control center that sits in darkness

and silence and has to figure out the timing of events in the outside world.

But this is a massive challenge because signals stream in through different senses

...