Tag: Time

Boredom makes time “drag,” but time “flies by” when we having fun. Time flies only in retrospect when you weren’t consciously “tracking” in the moment. You have a sense of change in your mind or in the objects around you during your “passage through things.” That’s how you can “lose track of time” driving home. Keele University psychologist John Wearden says your time perception is indirect: You perceive light when photons strike your eyes’ retinal cells; your sense of time depends on the light you see.

In experiments with timed rewards, dogs and rats show eerie time-span-learning abilities. “Scalar Timing in Memory,” a seminal 1984 paper, proposed what is known now as a pacemaker-accumulator or information-processing model which effectively a neural “clock with a memory.” Stimulants boost the clock’s speed, causing overestimated duration; depressants do the opposite. Separately, when Wearden primed people’s internal clocks with audio clicks, he found humans could react faster. Emotional state affects time perception; for example, curse words seem to flit by faster than non-expletives.

Arousal is the physiological preparation for action which is connected with strong emotions like anger. It appears to speed up the pacemaker-accelerator model, compressing more ticks into a given moment. Arousal also occurs when you unconsciously mimic someone else’s facial expression. An empathetic time perception connects you, creating a shared social distortion in how you both experience time. Parkinson’s disease causes time-interval misjudgments. Faulty interval timing also may prove to be a factor in autism. The “neuroscience of time” highlights its subjectivity. For example, take the common notion that time seems to pass more quickly for people as they age. Early “ratio theories” suggested this phenomenon relies on subjective judgment of a given duration -say, a year as a percentage of total life lived. Recent studies show this idea is folk wisdom, possibly instilled by the power of suggestion. At any age, time seems to pass more quickly when you’re busy and content.

Being There

Everyone struggles to focus on the present. With his Dasein (German for “one’s being” or “to be there”) concept, Heidegger suggested that you can’t really evaluate a life until it’s over. As in Augustine’s “tension of consciousness,” Heidegger said time is inextricably linked to the pull of the future. Newly aware of time’s passage, children start to ask about death at about the same time their sense of self coheres. In many ways, your attitude toward inevitable decay – like the dissolution of a sand castle – defines your “relationship to time” and to how you live your unique, time-constrained life.

Greek philosophers including Zeno, Plato and Aristotle always pondered about time. Augustine first expressed an internalized view of time as words and actions, and questioned the existence of “past” and “future.” Radically for his era, he saw time as a purely mental phenomenon. In 1860, zoologist Karl Ernst Von Baer pondered the duration of “now” and challenged prevalent notions of persistence. He told the Russian Entomological Society that “nothing lasts” not even mountains.

A massive 1890 treatise, Principles of Psychology, by US philosopher, psychologist and insomniac William James had an influential chapter on time perception. Skeptical of time as something concrete, he perceived only a “series of duration”: Empty moments don’t exist; your thoughts fill them. He quotes E.R. Clay, saying that people live in an illusory “specious present.” Later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), embraced a similarly subjective view of time.

The microscope and telescope instilled appreciation of the “relativity of scales.” Laser experiments now probe down to the “attosecond” (10-18 of a second); University of Ottawa physicist Paul Corkum calls this “newfound slice of time…the real timescale of matter.”

Swiss astronomer Adolph Hirsch (1830-1901), founder of the Neuchâtel Observatory, noted errors in observations of star transit times and discussed what he called “physiological time.”

Brain-related terminology like “signals” and “transmit” hail the invention of the telegraph. To mitigate railroad chaos, the United States reduced its dozens of time zones from somewhere between 60 and 100 to only four on “the Day of Two Noons” at precisely noon on November 18, 1883. The world followed, establishing 24 global times zones. This cemented the idea of time as a social “convention”, one that furthered industrialization overturning Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time as universally “homogeneous.” The brain expects a coherent story of “this moment,” but “neural latency”, asynchronous delays in sensory signals which precludes “real time” perception. Your brain buffers these signals, always building a patchwork at least 80 milliseconds out of date. Blinking your eyes may act as a regular reset of the brain’s sense of now.

All language depends on timing and temporal order. Translators don’t translate simultaneously; they pause long enough to understand incoming phrases, but not so long that they forget them. In his wide-ranging, influential 1963 book, The Psychology of Time, psychologist Paul Fraisse interpreted this inherent past-future tension as a “frustration” in human consciousness. People feel frustrated because something hasn’t happened yet or because they anticipate that something good is going to end. “The feeling of duration thus arises from a comparison of what is and what will be.”

Differences in the “coding efficiencies” of different neuron groups may explain why stronger, emotionally intense stimuli seem to last longer than weak ones. In an experiment, volunteers free-falling on a thrill-ride wore what neuroscientist David Eagleman called a wrist-mounted “perceptual chronometer.” No volunteer could read the dial, showing that time doesn’t really slow down during distortions in duration-perception.

Infant Time

Psychologist Jean Piaget’s 1969 book, A Child’s Conception of Time, reports on studies showing that what he calls an adult’s “sense of time” emerges gradually in a child’s mind. Initially, children conflate time with space. They understand the idea of past tense at about age two, and their sense of the order of time starts to settle in at around three or four.

In eye-tracker studies, developmental psychologist David Lewkowicz found that babies don’t notice asynchrony between lip motion and word sounds nearly as much as adults do. The sense of face/sound synchrony develops via a phenomenon known as “perceptual narrowing” as the child grows. Lacking neural myelin, a baby’s brain transmits signals relatively slowly, so its window of now yawns wider than an adult’s does.

Temporal orientation is what psychologists call happens when you wake up during the night and know the time without looking at the clock or when you know “where you are” in the week. Planets tick; atoms tick, your two main “circadian-clock genes” also tick as they switch off and on with the cycle of time.

Time perception

Your inner, complex sense of “duration, temporal order, tense” and “nowness” doesn’t arise from one organ in your body. Instead, adult awareness of the “arrow of time” a constant and subjective perception develops gradually from early childhood. Almost all languages have tenses. People think and speak in terms of time.

“Circadian Clock”

The circadian clock, affects nearly all animals. Human body temperature, resting heartbeat, blood pressure, facial hair growth and hormone levels follow a circadian cycle. Night-shift workers defy these rhythms but suffer low alertness, risking accidents. Shift-workers’ “metabolic disorder” may arise from constantly mistimed meals. By around 20 weeks old, the human fetus shows circadian activity, regulated by chemicals such as melatonin flowing through the placenta. The fetus synchronizes with its mother’s rhythm. Cycled electric lighting in neonatal units helps babies adjust to natural night and day. Babies who drink breast milk, which has melatonin synthesizing tryptophan, appear to adjust more quickly.

Daylight is a zeitgeber (a rhythmically occurring natural phenomenon which acts as a cue in the regulation of the body’s circadian rhythms) which is a biological “time-giver” in many organisms. Constant summer daylight disorientates new residents at the Toolik Field Station on Alaska’s North Slope. Some adopt a by-the-clock sleep pattern; others ignore the sun and follow their own patterns. Polar animals show various circadian adaptations. The non-circadian Arctic reindeer wakes and sleeps in direct response to light. Driven by biology, human light sensitivity peaks in the mornings. “Homeostatic pressure” the accumulation of drowsiness-inducing adenosine in the body builds when you’re awake. When enough builds up, you sleep. You can fight the buildup by napping or drinking caffeine, but you can’t fight the predawn circadian increase in body temperature that wakes you up. Therefore, controlling your waking and sleeping cycle.

Special Relativity & Time

As per Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, the faster you move, the more time slows. Astronauts in orbit and jet plane passengers age fractionally more slowly than people on the ground. The 24 time zones with “time zero” at Greenwich offer a clear definition of noon, the sun in its zenith everywhere on this rotating planet. With jet lag, your body’s internal clocks de-synchronize. Eating in-flight meals on your destination’s timetable may help. Humans who go to Mars will find the days 39 minutes longer than on Earth. One study says human circadian rhythms can’t adapt, but others show acclimatization via gradual exposure to sun-equivalent light on a Mars schedule.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (the Bureau), near Paris, is headquarters to global scientists who calibrate the world’s units of measure that includes meter, kilogram and second. World’s timepieces including those on GPS satellites keep in step by syncing with the Bureau’s Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Historically, people used Earth’s rotation as their master clock, tracked with sundials and early water clocks. In 1656, Christiaan Huygens invented the gravity-driven pendulum clock. In 1670, William Clement’s clock was the first to tick-tock the seconds – like hours and minutes, a human-devised division of the day. Up to the early 20th century, Britain led the way in time standardization with “Greenwich Mean Time” set by the clock of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The quartz clock, measuring the second as a set number of times a quartz crystal vibrates “in an oscillating electric field” (in most applications 215 Hz which is 32,768 cycles per second), arrived in the 20th century. Using an electric field instead of gravity can make time-keeping more precise.

In the 1960s, atomic clocks redefined the second “based on the cesium atom” which undergoes 9,192,631,770 quantum vibrations each second and revealed the gradual slowing of Earth’s spin, necessitating the addition of nearly half a minute’s worth of “leap seconds” since 1972 to keep atomic time in sync with rotation-based time. America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides the official time through servers synced to computers and GPS devices. Gathering readings from NIST’s atomic clock and others worldwide, the Bureau averages the differences.