When Does Consciousness Happen?

How do you catch a ball without it hitting you in the face?

If you are new here, welcome!

If you’ve been around for a while, you know I love exploring the fascinating intersection of neuroscience, consciousness, and AI. Typically, I do this by writing in-depth essays. But for the start of 2025, I thought we could try something different — a series of shorter pieces to spark our curiosity.

Lately, six questions have been rattling around in my head. This mini-series of mini-essays is designed to introduce those questions. Throughout 2025, I’ll return to these questions and explore them in more depth.

This is our last question… Question 6!

Have you ever played catch? The ball flies toward you — fast — and you snatch it out of the air without a second thought. Catch seems like a simple, almost effortless game. A way to relax, even. But there’s something strange about this seemingly easy pastime.

It’s common to think that we perceive the world like a camera — our senses passively receive signals from out there and relay them to our brains.

This common view (which philosopher John Locke also held) suggests that our perceptual experience is built directly from incoming sensory signals. We feel like we’re simply seeing what’s out there.

But if this is true — if our conscious experience is simply a simulation of the world built from the signals coming from our senses — then we have a problem.

Let’s say you’re playing catch with your nephew. He throws you the ball. Photoreceptors in your eyes register the movement and send those signals to your brain.

But that takes time.

At least 100 milliseconds.

Even longer if you count the time it takes to process those signals into a coherent perception.

The problem is that the brain is too slow.

You’ve probably heard about this problem before — you may have been told that because it takes time for sensory information to be processed by the brain, we’re always living in the past. But if that were true, in the way it’s often described, it would create some strange effects.

To state the obvious, if we want to catch a ball, we must track the movement of that ball. If our experience were simply a delayed simulation of what happened 100 ms or more ago, by the time we consciously experienced the ball’s location, that ball would already be somewhere else.

If we had to wait for our brain to fully process the visual signals before we act, we’d always be moving too late — we’d move our hands to where we perceive the ball is rather than where it actually is. And, as a consequence, we’d probably get hit in the face — a lot.

But, typically, we don’t get hit in the face when playing catch. Somehow, we can catch balls in real-time. This suggests that our brain is doing something else — perhaps something more sophisticated than simply trying to simulate the world.

This has led to a radical alternative theory: conscious experience is not a simulation of what is happening now — it’s a prediction of what is happening now.

This is an extraordinary claim. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

It’s early days. But yes, this is an active area of investigation, and yes, there is evidence to back it up.

Here’s what we know so far.

When we track a moving object (like a ball in midair) that follows a predictable path, our visual system responds as if it’s seeing it in real-time.

Think about that for a second.

Before the sensory signals even arrive, the brain acts as if those signals already have.

But this only works for movements that follow familiar patterns — like a ball travelling in a straight line at a steady speed. In these cases, the brain doesn’t simply react to incoming signals; it anticipates them, accurately predicting what it expects to see next.

That’s why practice helps us catch a ball. Over time, we learn how objects typically move, picking up on the basic rules of motion.

But if the ball suddenly zigzags or comes at us from an unexpected angle, the brain’s prediction fails. It expected something else. And when the brain’s guess is wrong, we’re caught off guard — and much more likely to miss the catch.

The idea that our conscious experience is a prediction rather than a real-time simulation raises some pretty wild questions about consciousness.

What, exactly, are we experiencing?

If consciousness isn’t a direct simulation of the present but a prediction of what’s about to happen, then…

When exactly does conscious experience happen?

Perception isn’t passive; it’s an active construction. We don’t simply see the world as it is — we see what the brain expects to be there. Most of the time, these expectations align with reality well enough that we don’t notice. But when they don’t — when a ball moves unpredictably or an illusion deceives us — we catch a rare glimpse of how much our experience is built on inference rather than direct awareness.

So, if consciousness is a prediction, perhaps we aren’t living in the past. Perhaps we’re living in the brain’s best guess of now.

And if that’s true — if our experience is always a step ahead — then when, exactly, are we?

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If you’re interested in exploring this research further, I recommend these papers by my friend and former colleague, Hinze Hogendoorn:

• Johnson, P. A., Blom, T., van Gaal, S., Feuerriegel, D., Bode, S., & Hogendoorn, H. (2023). Position representations of moving objects align with real-time position in the early visual response. eLife, 12, Article e82424. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82424

• Blom, T., Feuerriegel, D., Johnson, P., Bode, S., & Hogendoorn, H. (2020). Predictions drive neural representations of visual events ahead of incoming sensory information. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(13), 7510-7515. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1917777117

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Next Week…

Over the past six weeks, we’ve explored six big questions in six mini-essays. These were just introductions — throughout 2025, these questions will keep coming up in the topics I want to explore.

The six questions were:

1. What is information, and where does it come from?

2. How do simple, deterministic rules lead to unpredictable complexity?

3. As we try to understand complex phenomena — like how brains work, how to build intelligent systems, or even how consciousness happens — what details can we safely ignore? And what essential insights might be lost when we do?

4. Can general intelligence be built, or does it need to grow?

5. What (the heck) is physical?

6. When does conscious experience happen?

I’ll be taking a short break next week, but I’ll be back on February 25th with the first essay in our first series.

Thank you so much for your support — I appreciate this little corner of the internet more than I can put into words. And all of you make that possible. So, thank you!

I’m really excited about the year ahead, and I can’t wait to explore these ideas and learn from all of you.

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