Saccades

"We cannot consciously control the speed of movement between stops & during each saccade, the eyes move as fast as they can."

That's from here.

The more we learn about ourselves, the more we discover we are less & less the overt controllers of our lives & thoughts.

This reminds me of a conversation I had over twenty years ago with a girlfriend & one of her girlfriends & that girlfriend's boyfriend. I'll call them Betty, Veronica & Reggie. I am as always Jughead.

Reggie was going on & on about something something Ayn Rand something. He was a bit of a self-important douche & I had had little or no experience with Randianism at the time so when he praised "logic" & "rationality," I thought he was more or less on my side. At least he didn't go on & on about the virtues of being selfish. He was talking & he made some comment about emotions being chemical.

The two women with us gasped. "Do you really believe that?" Betty said. (Yes, my Betty.) Reggie said sure, probably glad to have the chance to debate something, since none of us really cared to interrupt his monologue. She then turned to me & said, "Jughead, do you believe our emotions are chemicals?"

I was put in a difficult situation. I am pretty much a materialist & have rarely, if ever, seriously entertained supernatural explanations for anything. But I was being stared at a woman I loved who was asking a loaded question: DID I REALLY BELIEVE THIS CODSWALLOP? DO I DARE TO LOVE SOMEONE WHO THINKS SO LITTLE OF EMOTIONS?

Interestingly, I don't remember how I responded. It didn't end the relationship at that time. When I remember it, I curse myself for not asking the more serious question in response, which is this: "If our emotions are not chemical, what are they?"

There's some irony in getting emotional about being confronted with the material nature of emotions. As a species, we're the only living things on this planet that use the results of material processes - like thinking thoughts - to convince ourselves that the things that are produced by these processes are not & cannot be material. They seem more than that. To a lot of people. Like the feeling of love seeming like more than a chemical process.

& meanwhile, "Saccades are the fastest movements produced by the human body."