Why do we find movies so compelling, given that they're just a series of photographs flashed rapidly?

What does this tell us about the slow speed of human brains?

What percentage of stock market trades are taken care of by algorithms nowadays

at timescales that humans could not even conceive of? And what does it like to have the speed

and power of a computer and be dealing with slow humans.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist, and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.

Music some of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode is about speed, the speed at which we humans operate and the speed at which our machines operate. And the future of this

as the divergence grows even larger. So let's start with this. Imagine an extraterrestrial planet

where they have an active society. These aliens have politics and division of labor and philosophers and actors and

athletes and artists, everything that makes up an active society. Okay. So now imagine a second

planet, planet B. We land on the second planet in the near future and we discover nothing

like a society there. Instead, there are just things like

trees, like these very old growths that don't really do much of anything. And we, the astronauts,

we stay there for a month, we take a lot of measurements, and finally we blast off when we go home.

So two planets, one with an active society, and the other with nothing but tree-like things.

Now imagine that these two descriptions are of the same planet.

What we have stumbled on is a society of creatures that operate at a very different time scale from us.

They move so slowly that we just can't see it.

They have an active society.

It just operates a trillion times slower than hours.

And the question is, would we ever even notice

...