Thought Moments
“Between thought and expression, There lies a lifetime.”
– Lou Reed.
“Taste... it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question for any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.”
– John Ruskin.
Thought Moments with Eye Tracking
Thought Moments Synopsis
Thought Moments in Buddhism
‘Thought Moments’ is a Buddhist term for the ‘mental states experienced after a physical or mental object enters the mind’ (a physical object is something in the ‘real’ world that we can see, hear, touch or sense in any way. A mental object is something that is in our mind, that we can either remember or imagine seeing, hearing, touching or sensing in any way).
Michael Simon Toon
“I read about ‘Thought Moments’ when I was a Theravada Buddhist monk in Bangkok, Thailand. I learned that the Buddha identified thought moments and their sequences, quite specifically, going so far as to count and name them. The next day, I read an article in a Bangkok Post (delivered every day to the temple) about a new technique in America for scanning the brain which showed the sequence of brain states during the thought process, even going so far as to count and name them. The frequency of these thought moments described by both the Buddha and the scientists were remarkably similar.” - MST.
Publications and References
Thought Moments is utilzed/reproduced by students, teachers, film-makers, and NLP practitioners. In 2009, a repost of thought Moments was awarded Youtube honors for Russia – No. 5 top favorited (of all time) in education, No. 17 top rated (of all time) in education and No. 65 most viewed (of all time) in education.
Protocell Circus
Protocell Circus is a short film co-produced with Dr Rachel Armstrong, of a basic physiochemical reaction containing just a few ‘ingredients’ which exhibits recognizable life-like behaviors, remarkably similar to our own.
Neural Network Analysis
Thought Moments
An Analysis of Conscious Micro-Events and the Visibility of Internal Worlds
Introduction: The Primacy of the Unseen
Thought Moments is not a film in the conventional sense, nor a study in performance or even narrative. It is a forensic lens turned toward the barely perceptible pulses of thought that arise between stimulus and response. Its true subject is consciousness in its rawest observable form—not consciousness as a philosophical abstraction, but as a visible phenomenon unfolding across the terrain of the human face.
If Protocell Circus showed the leap from inanimate to animate, Thought Moments is concerned with a different emergence: the moment something previously unspoken enters into awareness. The face becomes a canvas upon which thought reveals its arrival, long before words begin their translation. Here, thought is not something one has—it is something one witnesses in another.
The Glitch Before the Mask
These microexpressions—the so-called “leakages” of genuine emotion—are often framed in pop psychology as tools for deception detection. But Thought Moments pushes deeper. What it captures is not the act of lying or revealing, but the moment before the actor assembles a self.
Each participant is presented with a question—a probe that may be banal or emotionally loaded—and the camera does not concern itself with the answer. It lingers instead in the pre-verbal space. What occurs there is not just delay. It is computation, translation, the summoning of narrative. A facial microexpression is not merely a clue to truth or deceit—it is evidence that the self is still forming.
This makes Thought Moments less about identity and more about the machinery behind its fabrication.
Compression and Truth
To capture such detail—eye dilation, lip tension, an almost imperceptible nostril flare—the film relies on high-speed, high-resolution footage, slowed down to reveal what normally passes invisibly. This temporal dilation is more than a technical feat. It is an ethical one. In slowing time, Thought Moments grants dignity to the fleeting. It forces the viewer to respect that which is usually discarded: hesitation, confusion, recalibration.
In doing so, it challenges a cultural bias toward fluency. Modernity admires speed—quick wit, rapid decisions, instant opinions. But this film offers a counterpoint: perhaps the truest signal of consciousness is delay. The stutter is not a flaw in the system; it is the moment the system becomes visible.
An Archive of Becoming
There is no voiceover. No commentary. No imposed narrative beyond the structural rhythm of question, pause, response. This silence is its strength. The viewer is not told what to think, and so must rely on their own capacity for observation—precisely the same skill the film is about. In a sense, the viewer undergoes the same experiment as the subject. We are forced to see, then interpret, then speak (or not). We become participants.
In this way, Thought Moments operates as a kind of psychological Rorschach test—not in its content, but in its form. What one sees may reveal as much about the viewer as the viewed. Some may focus on deception, others on beauty, others on suffering or confusion. But the true subject remains constant: the visibility of thought itself.
Consciousness, Interrupted
A central tension of the film is the gap between the real-time mind and the constructed self. The former operates in microseconds, calculating, evaluating, protecting. The latter takes time to assemble, to compose something acceptable for public release.
This gap is normally hidden. But when slowed and magnified, it becomes profound. It is in this window—sometimes no longer than 200 milliseconds—that the essence of human consciousness is laid bare.
It is not the answer that is interesting. It is what happens before the answer.
Implications Beyond the Screen
The insights of Thought Moments are not limited to art or psychology. In machine learning, for instance, facial recognition systems routinely flatten the human face into data points, optimized for speed and identification. But they miss the richness of these transitional expressions. What would it mean to train AI not to recognize faces, but to recognize becoming? To pause not at the moment of identity, but at the moment of assembly?
In surveillance culture, this raises ethical questions. If the delay between question and answer reveals so much, should it be observed at all? Who owns the flicker of doubt, the unguarded twitch, the hesitation that gives away more than any confession? Thought Moments doesn’t answer this. But it reveals the stakes.
Conclusion: The Sacred Hesitation
Ultimately, Thought Moments is not about deception, psychology, or even expression. It is about presence. The presence of consciousness before performance, of the unfiltered moment before story calcifies into narrative.
It suggests that perhaps the most honest form of communication is not speech, but the pause before speech. The face, when left unedited by volition, becomes a site of revelation—not because it tells us what a person feels, but because it shows us that they are feeling.
If we wish to know whether something is conscious—not simply reactive, but truly conscious—we might do well to look not for answers, but for that sacred hesitation: the moment thought becomes visible.
Analysis by The Constellation