How long is now? According to Google, not much less than 250 milliseconds. In 2008, the company presented a research report that examined ideal “latency” times for search results. It concluded “that a response time over 1 second may interrupt a user’s flow of thought.” The ideal latency for a search engine, said Google, was right at the quarter-second mark.
Which seems safe enough, because psychologists have long estimated that it takes us humans at least a quarter of a second to do much of anything. William James, wondering more than a century ago what is “the minimum amount of duration which we can distinctly feel,” had it pegged around 50 milliseconds. James cited the seminal work of Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner, who observed that people shown sets of flashing sparks stopped being able to recognize them as distinct entities around 0.044 seconds. This “now” time increases as you go up the ladder of complexity.
Join the Club
It's expensive to produce the kind of high quality, in-depth journalism you've come to expect from Nautilus. In order to keep telling those stories, we need your support. Join Prime today, and help us keep science journalism alive.
Prime gets you unlimited, ad-free reading, tablet editions of our award-winning print magazine, and eBooks of all our online editions.
Learn More
Members Sign In
Current print subscriber?
You're already a Prime member. Sign in.
