Transcript

Okay, there are ways to really live in the present moment. What's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. Now. This may sound trite. This may sound perilously close to what Dan called deepity in his talk, but it's the truth. It's not quite true as a matter of physics. In fact, there's, there is no now that encompasses the entire universe. You can't talk about an event being simultaneously occurring here and one at the same moment occurring in Andromeda.

The truth is, now is not even well defined as a matter of neurology, because we know that inputs to the brain come at different moments, and that consciousness is built upon layers of inputs whose timings have to be different. Just consider the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. It seems simultaneous as a matter of conscious experience, but we know that the input from the finger to sensory cortex must take longer than the input from your nose, and this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. So the brain buffers these inputs in some way in memory and then promotes the seeming simultaneity to consciousness.