In the previous post in this series the question of realism in photographing moving objects has been lightly touched upon. I think the question is worth a second thought. Immediately, when we use a word like “realism” a question pops up. Do we mean “real” as we see it, or real as in objective reality. Is there a difference? Well, yes there might be.
In the famous article “Brain Time” by neuroscientist David Eagleman we learn about some curious facts and conclusions on how our brain constructs reality from the stimuli perceived from its sensors (eyes, ears, touch etc). To name a few of his conclusions: what we perceive is the integration of stimuli within a time window. In philosophy this has been called the “specious present”, the duration of the present. Strangely though, everything we perceive as present is in the (recent) past; that is because signals from our senses take time to reach our brain and the brain seems to wait for the slowest signal to arrive before it constructs reality from all sensor input.
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