Antropology, Anarchism by Graeber, mailing list on the Dawn of Everything, and I am on “beyond the Monastic Self” where Graeber talks about the 7-second conscience span and send the reader to Maurice Bloch for more neurological basis to this. SO it’s the paragrpah “A theory of Mind” on chapter 7 of Bloch’s book “In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social” – Fake belef task experiment
7 seconds consciousness, Graeber quotes geographer Nigel Thrift, who quotes philosopher Mervin Donald
Looking for sources in Google I found this https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2021/2/niab011/6224347 “Decades of timing research supports a “minimally sufficient” duration for time consciousness somewhere in the seconds’ range (Fraisse 1984; Pöppel 1989, 1997; Varela 1999; Wittmann 2011; Kent 2019), but most theories and methodologies in consciousness science only focus on the hundreds-of-milliseconds’ range (Northoff and Lamme 2020)” but I do not know this is the same thing Graebr mentions
UPDATE June 2022: reading one book review on Astral Codex Ten, precisely a book on consciousness, there is something at the end of the review which points to something similiar to Graeber’s 7 seconds of consciousness
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
“I think this is precisely where our concept of “my mind” comes from. Remember that our episodic memory might be exclusively formed from conscious moments, and also implicit learning gets a strong boost from consciousness. So when “we” (our brain, or the actors in the Cartesian theater) learn a “mind schema”, then this is based on the conscious moments, not on the activities in between. On this basis, it makes sense to merge all our neural activity into a single unit, which we call “I” or “my mind”. Just as we form the concept of “my body”, but even stronger, since we never “observe” different parts of our mind to be incoherent or even independent.”