ABSTRACT
When we say that something is “as fast as the blink of an eye,” we imply that it happened with a speed that goes beyond ordinary thought. Intuitive psychology is immersed in conscious awareness, and conscious mental activity is slow. Hence, it takes more than a “blink of an eye” consciously to perceive, attend, memorize, remember, think, decide, and act. But humans have evolved in a natural environment that could select for the complex behavioral control system we call consciousness only after systems able to deal with contingencies at a much more compressed time scale were already at hand. When a predator strikes, it strikes fast, and conscious deliberation before defensive action is likely to leave the genes of the prey unrepresented in the next generation. Thus, the evolution of human consciousness requires another, more basic level of mental functioning, where “the blink of an eye” provides a more convenient temporal unit of information processing. It is at this level that evolutionary facilitations and constraints on psychological events are likely to show up most clearly, uncontaminated by the culturally conditioned whims of consciousness.
