The spotlight of attention is more like a strobe, say researchers

Different parts of the brain can work semi-independently, while other parts are strictly single-use. And 'resetting' one's mental machinery after this kind of interference takes a measurable amount of time, much like the triggering of garbage collection.

The Stroop Effect is a good demonstration of this kind of cognitive collision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGpzftQf8oI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

I've also been trying to think how this can be used to design AGI, the goal being a machine that is able to recursively reason about it reasoning about itself etc... it would be logical if this was in discrete blocks that contained some representation of the previous state so as to avoid just going in circles. Maybe this is part of the reason why we so easily get distracted when observing ourselves observing ourselves - without some noise the mind would just endlessly go meta without any insight.

> A bit disorienting, actually. Though that could just be a function of it's current novelty for me. It has aspects of feeling like waking up, or remembering something crucial, or turning a corner and finally finding your keys.

Ok, that's definitely what I experience too. I have also described it as "disorienting" and "like waking up". I like your name, CartesianSelfAssertion. I might steal that.

The weird bit is that I experience this much less frequently. Like on the order of minutes or hours instead of ms. And typically after but not during meditation. During meditation I'm busy catching my mind wandering off.

> And completely independent of all that, I also feel like I'm spinning clockwise

Ok that bit's a little weird :-).

> but modulo doing weird stuff, my gut feeling is to say somewhere on the order of 100ms---40ms definitely doesn't clash with my experience.

One idea I had for measuring this (because I can't read about something without jumping to how to measure it) is to try to compare the spacing of the moments against the peaks of an auditory sine (or similar) wave:

http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

    ---------------------------------

A change in perspective. Before:

       past    present    future
    --------->--------->--------->

    # - concrete (senses)
    @ - abstract (memories; hypotheticals)

    past present future
      @  ←  #  →  @      past
            ↓
      @  ←  #  →  @      present
            ↓
      @  ←  #  →  @      future

    It's a chain of links, but you're only ever one link at a time.
    There's a lack of sense of self, probably due to the isolation of the links.

Like being in a silent room eventually relaxes your ear muscles and lack of other stimulation will bring out whatever birdies, tones, noise in your hearing, no movement and concentration can bring out same in your inner ear.

As we age, these artifacts tend to accumulate.

Happens in eyes too, but manifests a bit differently. What happens there is we need more photons to register the same sensory brightness levels. When we are in the dark for a while, the retinal noise floor can be more easily seen, like when star gazing.

Secondly, blood flow, other things can be seen in that noise floor. That happens better in consistent, lower light, but not dark environments, in my experience.

All of these are normally filtered in much the same way we filter our nose out of our visual field, unless we concentrate awareness there.

How do I know?

Well, we know nothing. But, my experiences come from three things:

I have a very good sensory recall. I know what it used to sound, hear, feel like with high fidelity.

My own meditative activities.

Some built in degree of self awareness. When I relax a bit, those filters come down fairly easily for me. Have always been that way and was confused by it more than once growing up.