Norman Triplett was a pioneer in the psychology of magic, and back in 1900, he published a wonderful scientific paper on magic that, among many other things, discusses an experiment on an intriguing magical illusion. A magician sat at a table in front of a group of schoolchildren and threw a ball up in the air a few times. Before the final throw, his hand secretly went under the table, letting the ball fall onto his lap, after which he proceeded to throw an imaginary ball up in the air.
Described like this, it does not sound like an amazing trick, but what was truly surprising is that more than half of the children claimed to have seen an illusory ball—what Triplett referred to as a “ghost ball”—leave the magician’s hand and disappear somewhere midway between the magician and the ceiling. This was clearly an illusion because on the final throw, no ball had left his hand; the children had perceived an event that never took place.
Triplett carried out several studies using this illusion, and he came to some rather interesting, though not necessarily correct, conclusions. He thought that the illusion resulted from retinal afterimages, or in his own words, “What the audience sees is an image of repetition, which is undoubtedly partly the effect of a residual stimulation in the eye, partly a central excitation.”
More here – Nautilus
PS: As a test go back and look at the trades you have taken and see how many actually have a signal as opposed to something you thought you saw.
The end of that article makes an astonishing point about (visual) awareness: if we don’t live in the future we live in the past, ergo, we never actually experience the present ??? Perhaps it’s true for all our cognition. Smoke and mirrors !!
This reminds me of one of the characters in a book by Oliver Sacks, 10 second Tom. He had suffered brain trauma for some reason, but his memory for past events was limited to a very short time span. He therefore had no past. He could only live in the present. But, maybe, he couldn’t even do that. Maybe he lived his whole life in the future. Project that idea further forward and we have the whole phenomenon of expectations. And then the consequent cognitive dissonance when future expectations do not match our cognitive experience in real time.
But when the disappearing ball is (not) tossed the participants did not even experience reality in real time and the ball “disappears”. They therefore lived that part of their lives entirely in the future, and their past and present disappeared.