Awareness and the interval of change

Each one of us knows awareness at our own interval of change,

but we change together on many levels, at intervals too fast, too slow for any one to know.

Two starfish sit side by side on the sea floor. 

To our eyes, they are unmoving, unchanging. If we look at them at longer intervals, in time-lapse, we would see them moving rapidly, tracing their communication web on the sea floor. 

If we could observe them from very close up (millimicrons) at very short intervals (nanoseconds), we would be able to see the elements of sea water passing through the starfish.

The starfish are changing at intervals too slow and too fast for our human senses to perceive. We have our own interval of awareness and it is about 1/30th of a second - which is why a series of still images projected on a movie screen at that speed looks, to us, like normal motion.

Our interval of awareness is set by the rate of communications between our cells and our contextual status and how fast we communicate with our memory to observe how our environment changed from the last time we checked. We then project this change into an imagined future and then compare the changes again to see if the prediction was right.

If you look at an electric clock with an analog dial, you can easily see a second hand of a clock moving, but seeing the minute hand move requires patience. 

You can't see the hour hand move, it moves too slowly for us to perceive.

To us humans the blades of a fan, spinning at high speed, look like a circular, translucent disk. 

Other creatures, like bats, perceive at faster intervals of awareness than we do and they see fan blades as individual blades slowly turning. They can even fly between the blades to get into and out of ventilated buildings.

Cells, like the rod and cone photoreceptor cells in the retina of our eyes, perceive changes in the frequency of light, and have an interval of awareness measured in nanoseconds, thousands of times faster than the interval of awareness of our collective being.

Other cells of our body detect changes in microwaves, also measured in frequencies of changes far beyond our conscious interval of awareness.

Cellular communications require time for the nerve signal to propagate along the axons of our neurons and time for the molecular neuro transmitters to go between one nerve cell and the next and more time to assemble all the cellular perceptions and integrate these into a perception of the whole environment.

Individuals within a society have a faster intervals of awareness than the whole group.

A single fish in a school might detect a predator in 1/50th of a second. 

It transmits this knowledge to other fish around it by signals generated by its body movements. 

The other fish sense this news and respond.

Over a few seconds, the whole school modifies its behavior to the presence of the predator, even though many of the individual fish are not in a position to actually perceive the predator themselves.

On a human society time scale, a particular discovery may appear in a scientist's mind in a second. 

It may take the scientist months to test the idea and put this discovery into words others can understand.

The perception is then considered by other scientists and related to information coming in from other sources. 

The information is either ignored or passed along to the whole community of scientists, and perhaps to the public as well.

Not long ago, this process required months to spread throughout a particular language system and years to spread through civilization, even if everyone thought it was an important concept.

Today, the interval of awareness of civilization is greatly accelerated. 

The planet is entirely covered with an electronic web of communication. Information flows through it at the speed of light. 

A new and important discovery becomes known to civilization within days, or even minutes, if the news is of sufficient interest.