I just finished reading this article, which concerns human perception of the passage of time and the possibility of purposely manipulating it to our advantage. Warning: It’s not a quick read, unless you can already manipulate time.
This subject interests me greatly, as I have long had some theories/ideas about the brain’s internal clock. I will present them here, and then get back to the article:
I think that an animal’s life expectancy or maybe average heartrate plays a role in the speed in which time passes to that animal and its responsiveness; for instance, an hummingbird experiences life in a much smaller span than a giant tortoise, so “time” passes slower for the hummigbird. Think of it as the bird getting more frames per second than the elephant, with linear time being seconds as a constant, but as frames being the measure of time within the animal. And when there are more frames, that would increase the number of decision points (like playing a video game in forced slow motion), which would augment agility.
I also have many experiences where I can tell that my own perception of time is being stretched or compressed from the norm. The most common example is when I am in my elevator at work and I am going through a period of anxiety. I know that the elevator trip (which is only 2 floors…yeah yeah, I’m lazy sometimes) takes less than 20 seconds, but when I am feeling stressed or anxious, the passage of time feels extremely slow because my mind and body are racing but I am contained in a box with nothing to occupy me. In short, I feel I have a variable clock speed, and that speed determines my perception of time passage.
Anyway, the article linked above speaks of some of these things, but the researchers readily admit they’re operating in more of the abstract than they are probably comfortable with. One interesting point to me was their ‘Armageddon’ experiment results. Simply put: 1) At the moment of time passage, an occupied person feels time is passing more quickly than it really is, and the unoccupied person feels time is crawling. They think this is due to “time flies when you’re having fun”, or preoccupation of time taking away from the attention we pay to its passage. 2) Paradoxically , after time passage, the occupied person feels the period lasted longer than it really did, while the unoccupied version thinks it went faster than it did (the opposide of #1). They think this is due to a shift in the measuring stick we use; that after an event, we look back at how much we remember doing or experiencing, as if we think the amount that can accomplished per period of time is not variable.
I find this whole think fascinating, as I’ve long felt that the ability to manipulate the perception of time passage — to increase or decrease framerate — could be of great benefit. If you could overclock yourself (I realize I’m mixing metaphors to some extent), you could “slow time down” and make decisions more nimbly and have more immediate control over your situation. If you could underclock yourself, you could alleviate unavoidable stretches of pain or boredom. I’m sure that’s something a burn victim or an astronaut on a trip to Mars would appreciate.
I have more to say, but the passage of time has caught up with me and I’m late for work!
