The BBC has produced a wonderful series called Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds. It’s visually stunning and it’ll wow you with a lot of cool science. The first episode is called Speed Limits. Because I study speed limits on perception, I was very excited.  To introduce the topic, Richard Hammond explains that vision is too slow to see many interesting things, things which can be revealed by high-speed imaging techniques.

Below is a draft of a chapter I’m writing for Subjective Time, an upcoming book from MIT Press edited by Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd. In a bowling alley, a professional player launches his ball down the lane. As the ball rolls toward the pins, our visual experience of it is smooth and seamless. The ball shifts in position continuously, and this seems to be represented with high fidelity by our brain.