touching
In her latest book "Of This World", Stella Pierides, writer and poet, includes a Haibun titled Touching, which was written in response to one of our recent research studies: Watching a real moving object expands tactile duration: the role of task-irrelevant action context for subjective time (Jia, Shi, Zang, & Müller, 2015). This is a new perspective on our scientific research. We reprint her haibun with her kind permission. Enjoy! Touching Imagine your left hand is being made to feel a brief vibration and you're being asked to estimate how long this vibration lasts. In one version of this scenario, you are holding a small ball in both hands; in another, your right hand is free. And in both versions, you see a safely suspended, potentially catchable ball moving towards you. Would…