eli5, why does the first second seem to last longer when you being to look at a clock/timer?
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When you quickly look at a clock, your brain plays a little trick to help you not miss anything important. It makes you feel like you’ve been looking at the clock for a longer time than you really have. So the first second seems longer than it really is. It’s like your brain is saying, “Hey, pay attention to this time!”
Imagine your eyes are cameras, and when you look at a different location, the image you see is panning very fast from one side to the other. That is a lot of information that gets to your brain, about stuff that you don’t really have time to process and are not even much interested in to begin with. Your brain just chooses to ignore that information, but it still has to “fill the gap” with something. So it decides to use the new information (what you are now looking at). This means that if you happened to look right when the new second had started, you get an extra fraction of a second of it looking the same.
You feel like the first second you look at on the clock is longer as your brain fills in the “gaps” caused when your eye was moving and your vision was blurred. The information it got after your eyes arrived on the clock was “stationary hand” so your brain back-fills the gap in the “video” with “stationary hand” during the whole duration of the eye movement as well, so you experience “seeing it” not moving for longer than it actually was.
This perceived “longer first second” is a great (and kind of disturbing) reminder and demo of how what we experience is created by our brains and is not a direct or exact representation of the actual physical world. Your body is a bunch of sensors for light, sound, etc. and then your brain takes all of these inputs and creates an experience of the world to match the incoming data as best it can. It’s usually accurate, because brains are amazingly good at their job, but it can be wrong. Even simple optical illusions are more proof of this.
https://www.iflscience.com/when-you-look-at-a-clock-why-does-that-first-second-seem-longer-than-usual-67745
Your brain pays more attention when you start timing something, so it feels longer. It’s like when you stare at a pot, it takes forever to boil.
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