The Elasticity of Time (Part 2).

Warning: This entry contains no math.

It seems that I touched on something so much larger than I had given much thought to when I wrote that last blog about what I called the elasticity of time. I was talking about just one aspect of how humans perceive time and one particular phenomenon that may be useful to consider when gauging the long term perception of the passage of time (ie. when are you really halfway through your career?). But when you start talking about time and how we perceive it, man it gets really interesting really fast.

Years ago I read what remains one of my favorite nonfiction books, Phantoms in the Brain, by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (with a forward by neurologist superstar Oliver Sacks). The book sets about explaining the various things that we have learned about the brain and specific regions in it as a result of tiny malfunctions in those regions. One area that I found particularly interesting had to do with vision and all of the things that can go wrong with our eyesight. There are literally dozens of different pathways and channels having to do with what we think of as vision and each one controls a different aspect. Some parts are concerned with motion and if they don't work properly you may experience the world in a strobe like pattern instead of fluid. Some parts are responsible for attaching emotion to what we see, others are responsible for recognizing faces. Some parts are responsible for processing colors while others are responsible for processing shades. It's possible to go blind in only one hemisphere, meaning that both of your eyes can only see to the right, or to the left. It's even possible to be consciously blind while subconsciously sighted. The point that I'm trying to make is that we may sometimes think of vision as one sense, as one thing. But the reality is that it's so complex and there are so many things that we "see." It's hard to imagine what a miracle is happening in all of our brains when we are sighted, how many different systems are working together to create an image that makes sense to us.

The perception of time is very much like this. There are so many processes involved in understanding what time means to us. One friend pointed me in the direction of the telescoping effect, which is the feeling that things that occurred long ago did not occur as long ago, and that things that happened relatively recently can feel like they happened much further in the past. There are also numerous interesting studies (like this one) on the effect of deprivation on our circadian rhythm.

It turns out that it doesn't take much to drastically alter our short term perception of time passing. This does beg the question on what being permanently blind does to a person's natural rhythm. I imagine that over time their brains figure it out and adjust accordingly, using other methods of tracking the passage of time (such as clocks).

Then there is the oddball effect, the feeling that time slows down for certain dramatic or dangerous events. I still remember a car accident I had more than 18 years ago that seemed to happen entirely in bullet time. Again, I fall back to radiolab to brilliantly explain this phenomenon and one particular experiment designed to describe it.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that time is crazy. Our perception of time is crazier. I only meant to address the tiniest facet of it originally, but I thank everyone for making me take a much bigger look at it. Science is pretty cool.