Science Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Bernal is trying to drag something we treat as ghostly - the lived “now” - back into the lab, then show it’s made of machinery. In a single, dense sentence, he treats anticipation not as a poetic hunch but as a physiological forecast: muscles are already being “innervated” for what’s about to happen, and the brain’s stored traces of past signals (“nerve impulse images”) are actively shaping the next moment. The present, in this view, isn’t a razor-thin instant. It’s a small, sliding window, padded by prediction.

The intent is characteristically Bernal: to demystify mind by marrying perception to physical process, and to do it with the confidence of a scientist who believes consciousness is an engineered phenomenon. The subtext is slightly deflationary, even ideological. If your sense of immediacy can be explained by motor preparation and memory, then “free” experience starts to look like a negotiated truce between biology and environment. Agency becomes less a sovereign decision than a well-trained reflex with a timetable.

Context matters: Bernal wrote and worked in a mid-century climate intoxicated with mechanism - cybernetics, neurophysiology, behaviorism, industrial modernity. His phrasing feels like that era’s optimism and bluntness: humans as systems, time as an output you can measure. The punch is the final limit: “a second or so.” That small number does big cultural work, shrinking the metaphysical present into something clockable, bodily, and profoundly fallible.