[barrkel]

If you were sitting in a dark room, you would notice a flash of bright light a lot shorter than 1/100 of a second. You might find this interesting:

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

Of course, for audio, the brain is very sensitive to the lag between left ear and right ear hearing the same sound, as that's part of how sound direction is determined.

[cma]

>If you were sitting in a dark room, you would notice a flash of bright light a lot shorter than 1/100 of a second.

You can see cosmic rays that last a lot shorter than even that. The real test isn't a single flash of light, but how quickly we can distinguish two separate flashes covering more or less the same spot on the retina. i.e. how high do you have to turn up a strobe light before it starts being perceived like an ordinary light? Since old school fluorescent lights (in good working order) had only slight visible flicker at the edges of peripheral vision, I'd say it is around 120hz.

[stcredzero]

But measuring the duration of a tone or a light coming on for an interval -- this is of interest to me as a musician. And 1/100th of a second is way too short to notice reliably.

[cma]

doh, meant 60hz, mixed up the grid's voltage/freq.

[lmkg]

You can notice a single frame of light at faster than 200FPS, but it's a lot harder to notice a frame of darkness at 100FPS. That has more to do with signal response and nerves taking longer to drop down after a lot of stimulus than vice-versa. Appearance of fluidity has to do with a succession of similar frames, not the interjection of a vastly dissimilar one.