The moment that made this problem real Scroll through your social media feed for ten minutes and you'll encounter it dozens of times: a clip of a hummingbird frozen mid-wingbeat, its feathers splayed like a tiny green hand; a basketball player's dunk stretched into four elastic seconds; a car crash replayed at a tenth of normal speed so that steel buckles like wet cardboard. Then, thirty seconds later, a time-lapse of a flower blooming, a city waking up, a storm rolling across a plain — all the world compressed into a dreamy, accelerated rush. You have no difficulty perceiving any of this. Your brain adjusts instantly, contextualizing speed changes by the look of motion blur, the tempo of ambient sound, the rhythm of cause and effect playing out in front of you. You know, instinctively, that the hummingbird clip is slow-motion because wings don't look like that in real life. You know the city time-lapse is sped up because people don't move like flickers of light.…