The Weakley County Examiner

Shannon Taylor

CEO/Publisher

For more than two decades, Dustin McClain worked with signals.

As an audio and video technician, he dealt with sample rates, frame rates, synchronization, processing delays and the tiny fractions of a second that can mean the difference between a system working properly and something sounding or looking noticeably wrong.

Eventually, the Martin resident began wondering whether some of the same questions could be asked about people.

A camera has limits on how quickly it can capture separate images. Digital audio systems have sampling rates. Signals take time to travel and equipment takes time to process them. The human nervous system is also a physical system, McClain reasoned, so what are its limits? How closely together can two events occur before the brain stops experiencing them as two separate events?

That question eventually became what McClain calls C-Field Latency, a theoretical framework examining the relationship between the brain’s processing limitations and the human experience of time.

McClain is quick to make clear that he is not arguing that the human mind changes physical time. A clock continues ticking regardless of who is watching it. Instead, he is asking whether the continuous “now” people experience is partly constructed by a brain that requires time to receive, process and combine information from the outside world.

“Imagine watching a ceiling fan,” McClain said. “When it’s spinning slowly, you can see every individual blade go around. When it speeds up past a certain point, your eyes can’t keep up, and the blades turn into a smooth, continuous blur.”

The blades have not disappeared. The observer has simply reached a point at which the individual events can no longer be resolved.

McClain proposes something similar may happen with the way people experience closely spaced events in time. Under his framework, physical events continue independently, while the brain processes incoming information within biological limits. What a person experiences as the present could therefore represent an integrated window of information rather than an instantaneous copy of the external world.

It is a question that grew directly from McClain’s unconventional background.

McClain is a stay-at-home father of three young daughters, independent researcher, music producer and audio/video technical specialist who has lived in West Tennessee for most of his life. He moved to Martin to raise his family and previously worked for five years as a lead audio/video installation technician for Lowrance Sound Company. He also held a Certified Technology Specialist credential.

His education in the subjects underlying his research has not followed the traditional university route. McClain said his formal background is vocational and technical, while his study of physics, mathematics, logic, cognitive science, philosophy and temporal perception has largely been self-directed.

That fact matters when considering the status of his work. McClain is not a neuroscientist working from an established university laboratory, and C-Field Latency has not been demonstrated through controlled experiments involving human subjects.

McClain does not claim otherwise.

“The entire empirical structure of C-Field Latency, how brain latency maps onto experienced time, is currently a theoretical framework and testable hypothesis, not an established scientific fact,” he said.

He has conducted computational simulations, digital signal modeling and informal psychoacoustic testing, but he has not conducted controlled, large-sample laboratory trials involving human participants. No formal human experiment has therefore been independently replicated.

That leaves McClain’s central scientific claims unproven, but he has attempted to design the framework so they can eventually be tested.

One experiment he proposes would present participants with auditory and visual events separated by extremely small intervals and ask whether they occurred simultaneously. Researchers could then add a cognitive task that requires participants to divide their attention.

McClain predicts that increasing the cognitive workload would affect the window in which separate events are perceived as simultaneous. Measurements could also be paired with EEG data to examine whether changes in neural activity correspond with changes in temporal perception.

Most importantly, McClain says there are results that could prove him wrong.

If temporal resolution and simultaneity judgments remained unchanged despite variations in cognitive load, attention or neural processing delay, he said a central mechanism of the framework would fail. Likewise, if humans could consistently distinguish the order of events occurring at intervals beyond the biological processing limits on which his model depends, the foundation of the hypothesis would be undermined.

“If the data contradicts the mathematical prediction, the model is wrong. Period,” McClain said.

That willingness to define failure is particularly relevant because McClain’s work did not begin strictly as a scientific hypothesis.

C-Field Latency grew from a much broader system of ideas McClain calls Unified-Process Metaphysics. That work attempts to describe relationships among consciousness, identity, information, tension, physical systems and human experience.

Some of McClain’s earlier philosophical writing argued that even rejecting the broader framework could become part of the process described by the framework itself. That creates an obvious problem if the same reasoning is applied to science: a scientific theory that explains every possible result, including results contradicting it, cannot meaningfully be disproven.

McClain now draws a firm boundary between that philosophical reasoning and C-Field Latency.

“Philosophy often looks at overarching patterns in human behavior, but empirical science plays by completely different rules,” he said.

He said his philosophical ideas about human reaction and communication should not be used to protect his scientific hypothesis from contradictory evidence.

“In science, you can’t play games with the numbers,” McClain said. “When we run controlled laboratory tests, the data will either fall within those predicted mathematical lines or it won’t. If the data falls outside those lines, the theory fails. There is no shifting the goalposts.”

Scientists have, of course, studied temporal perception long before McClain began his work. Temporal binding, multisensory integration, flicker fusion and the brain’s ability to determine whether two events occurred simultaneously are established areas of research.

McClain believes his contribution lies in treating those phenomena through a framework derived partly from digital signal processing. Rather than considering them as unrelated perceptual effects, he proposes examining sampling, latency, phase relationships, cognitive load and sensory integration as parts of a larger processing architecture.

Whether that approach represents a genuinely new scientific model, a different way of organizing existing knowledge or an idea that will fail when tested remains unanswered.

Earlier this year, however, McClain received an opportunity to put at least part of the idea before researchers who study consciousness professionally.

He submitted an abstract titled “Consciousness Latency of Experienced Time” to the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness for its 2026 conference in Santiago, Chile.

The abstract was accepted for poster presentation.

For McClain, an independent researcher working from his Martin home without a university affiliation, the email announcing the acceptance carried considerable weight.

“It was a deeply validating moment,” he said. “Knowing that an international committee of neuroscientists and philosophers reviewed my abstract and found it worthy of presentation at a major scientific conference was huge.”

The acceptance should not be confused with proof of McClain’s theory or publication of the complete work in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. McClain said the conference notification did not provide detailed reviewer comments or scores, and the full C-Field Latency framework has not yet undergone journal peer review.

McClain ultimately did not make it to Chile.

He initially believed remote participation might be possible, but later learned the presentation would require him to attend in person. Without a university paying the bill or an institutional travel grant, he estimated flights, lodging, registration and other expenses would have cost between $3,000 and $4,000.

“I was thrilled to receive it,” he said, but the financial requirements placed the trip beyond his reach.

That experience illustrates one of the practical problems McClain faces in trying to move the work beyond his computer.

He lives only a few miles from the University of Tennessee at Martin, but said his attempts to establish contact with potential academic collaborators there have not yet resulted in a partnership. He has called and emailed professors and would like to work with researchers in psychology, biology, computer science or related fields to conduct a pilot experiment locally.

What he needs most now, he said, is not an audience willing to believe him. It is an audience willing and equipped to test him.

“Test it and challenge it,” McClain said. “I don’t want blind belief.”

A pilot study involving approximately 30 to 50 participants could potentially be conducted using an existing university laboratory, he estimates, although his projected cost of $10,000 to $25,000 has not been independently verified. The experiment would require precise auditory and visual stimulus equipment, response-measurement systems and ideally EEG equipment capable of recording brain activity while participants complete the tasks.

McClain’s larger body of work remains publicly available through GitHub, Zenodo and Academia.edu. Those repositories allow others to inspect his equations, code and papers, but posting material publicly is not the same as having it validated through independent peer review.

McClain said that scrutiny is exactly what he wants next.

“If peer reviewers concluded that the theory is not supported by the evidence,” he said, “I would accept the verdict, examine their critiques, adjust or discard the untenable parts of the model, and go back to the drawing board.”

His objective, he added, is not “to be right” but to determine what can actually be supported.

That attitude sits alongside an extraordinary level of confidence in the potential importance of his ideas. McClain previously described his broader work as potentially the most important scientific and philosophical discovery in 2,000 years, and when asked directly whether he still stands by that statement, he said he does.

“If C-Field Latency is empirically validated, it isn’t just an incremental tweak to neuroscience,” McClain said. “It is a fundamental paradigm shift in how we understand the relationship between mind, time and physical reality.”

Then he added the qualification upon which the entire project ultimately rests.

“Confidence isn’t proof.”

McClain said the evidence necessary to justify claims of that magnitude would require independent, replicated and peer-reviewed experiments from established neuroscience laboratories showing that his model predicts human temporal perception better than existing explanations.

For now, that evidence does not exist.

What does exist is an unusual research effort unfolding from a home in Martin, where McClain balances raising three daughters with music production, technical work, coding, mathematics and research.

He admits there have been times when he nearly abandoned it.

“I quit three or four times,” he said.

Without academic colleagues down the hall, McClain turned partly to artificial intelligence models as tools for challenging his equations and arguments. He said that process also created problems because models sometimes produced incorrect information or simply agreed with him. He eventually began deliberately pitting different models against one another, using one to support an argument, another to attack it and others to evaluate where the competing analyses overlapped.

Those exercises may help an independent researcher think through an argument, but they cannot replace laboratory evidence or independent scientific review. McClain appears to understand that the next stage of the project requires people, equipment and data.

The personal motivation behind all those hours is considerably less technical.

McClain said he wants his daughters, and other children growing up in Weakley County, to understand that intellectual curiosity is not reserved for people living near major universities or working inside elite research institutions.

“You don’t need to sit in an ivory tower or live in a massive metropolis to ask big questions about the universe,” he said.

As a child, McClain wanted to become a zoologist. He remembers dreaming of traveling the world to study animals but said paths like that did not always seem visible or encouraged where he grew up.

Now he wants his daughters to see something different.

“You can build high-level science right here at home,” he said. “With technical discipline, curiosity and persistence, anyone from a small West Tennessee town can contribute meaningfully to global scientific conversations and leave something lasting behind.”

Whether C-Field Latency becomes one of those contributions cannot yet be answered.

McClain has moved his idea far enough to formulate predictions, write computer models, publicly release his work and earn acceptance of an abstract for presentation at an international consciousness conference. He has not yet crossed the much higher threshold required to establish that the hypothesis accurately describes something new about the human brain.

That will require controlled experiments, independent researchers, replication and researchers willing to compare his predictions against existing explanations of temporal perception.

McClain says he is ready for that part.

After years of asking what limits exist inside the human observer, his next question is considerably more concrete.

Who is willing to help him test it? You may contact McClain at dustin.b.mcclain@gmail.com.