While sitting in the shadow of an electrical pylon I decided to see if I could observe the earths rotation in the movement of the shadow.
I looked down the length of the shadow at a prominent stick and watched for the movement of the shadow.
What I was suprised to see was that the shadow would remain still for a period of time and then "jump" to the next position. It was like a very subtle strobeoscopic effect.
I believe what I was seeing was the perception lag created by my brain attempting to "predict the future".
If you're unfamiliar with this, here's how it works: Because our brains operate slower than the speed of light, our ability to track moving objects is dependent on our brains showing us the world 1/10th of a second ahead of the most recent light information to enter our eyes. If this were not the case, and we saw an "un-edited" view of the world it would be impossible for us to interact with anything that wasn't moving very slowly because when we tried to take hold of it it would no longer be where we were looking.
The thing is, as I understand it, our brains don't come pre-loaded with vision software, but rather we build up the software as we grow and learn to interact with our environment. Because I don't spend much time sitting still and watching shadows move I believe that the model my brain has to handle movement isn't yet fine tuned enough to handle very slow moving objects. the distance the shadow taveled in 1/10th of a second was below my threshold of observation so my brain updated my view of the world without any change in the shadows position. This presumably repeated until the difference in position was large enough for my brain to register at which point the shadow appeared to "jump" to a new position.
My plan is now to spend more time observing shadows moving in sunlight to see whether I can decrease the threshold of my perception to the point that the shadow moves smoothly and continuously. After that, perhaps I'll try to watch brambles grow.
