The Fascinating Question of Time - Quareness Series (12th "Lecture").
A Chairde Dhílis / Dear Friends,
This month on 26th I'll hit the official 63 years on the planet mark and the other day the thought hit me - "how did I get here so quickly?". And then I thought - "hold on a minute......time isn't really a straight line at all.....rather it's a sorta multi-layered yoke curving and folding in on itself and changing direction and perspective". And that last word in particular struck home.
The linear perspective gives rise to a sorta confusion of direction which comes with time - the sense of moving forwards as we pass through our days and weeks into the future, and at the same time moving backwards through remembering. It's something like an arrow that moves from the past through the present to the future with the present flashing for an instant and being swallowed up by the past straight away, where it stays forever. This perspective tinges our lives with sadness and an "awareness" that time is running away from us. Thus time is perceived as a destructive yoke taking away without really giving anything in return e.g. youth, good looks, health, friends, relatives and eventually it takes us away too. As the Bard hisself indicated in Macbeth....."all our tomorrows are but brief candles that light the way to dusty death".
But what if this linear view is a kind of illusion and in reality the dividing lines between past, present and future are not so solid and can easily dissolve?
Modern physics tells us that the idea of time flowing in only one direction doesn't make any sense and that really the whole of the past and the future exists in the "here and now", side by side with the present. As the physicist Robert Penrose put it "the way in which time is treated in physics is not essentially different from the way in which space is treated....we just have a static-looking fixed space-time in which the events of our universe are laid out." In effect the reality may be a static realm universe where all past, present and future events co-exist.
With the reasonable(?) working assumption that physics describes the fundamental reality of our universe, if indeed linear time is an illusion then it's hardly surprising that we can experience "altered perceptions of time". These could be of the "precognition" type in which we glimpse the future before it's happened or predict events before they occur with an accuracy which goes beyond coincidence, or a "retrocognition" type in which we step into the past. Occasionally the past becomes so vividly real to us that we have the sense that it's still there e.g. you might hear a song on the radio which you haven't heard for years and which you associate with a particular previous period in your life and as you listen you're taken right back to the situation you were in when you heard it before, where you can sense the atmosphere and experience the same feelings and thoughts you had then....it seems much more than just memory....you have a real
sense that these past events and scenes still exist. One of the great services poetry provides for us is to capture and frame bygone scenes and situations in the present, so that they'll never be able to slip into the fog of the past again.....it shows us that just outside the parameters of our normal consciousness, the past is indeed still with us.
"Are we nearly there yet?"
Most parents in our part of the world are very familiar with this oft repeated question from the small fry. Come to think of it, however, there's a lot more to this ceist than may be obvious e.g. maybe it suggests a possible biological basis for our differing perceptions of time.....what happened to all the time two hours contained when I was six years old?
Most of us feel that time moved very slowly when we were children (kinda like when we check the clock every few minutes or so and less time has gone by than we expected) and is gradually speeding up as we grow older. Consider the common remarking on how Christmas seems to come round quicker every year or how your children are about to finish school when it doesn't seem that long since you were labouring in nappyhood. We usually become conscious of this speeding up around the time we "settle down" with steady jobs and marriages and homes and our lives become ordered into routines. After a few years of this we start to realise that we seem to have less and less time to run through these routines.
This speeding up of time as we get older may explain our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. When we look back at significant events we're often surprised that they happened so long ago e.g. finding that it's already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a youngster is already ten years old when it only seems like three or four years since they were born. In this perspective the intervening time has been speeding up without our realising such, in effect making every month and year shorter than the one before.
Indeed the speeding up of time we experience may well be linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older. Because children's hearts beat faster and they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly, their body clocks "cover" more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. In effect they live through more time simply because they're moving through time faster. On the other hand older folk may be like clocks running slower than normal and so we lag behind covering less than 24 hours' time against a normal clock.
In addition we know from experiments that body temperature can cause different perceptions of time - the higher the temperature, the more time seemed to slow down and the longer each time period experienced. The results suggested that raising a person's body temperature can slow down their sense of time passing by up to 20%. In this connection we know that children have a higher body temperature than adults, which may mean that time is "expanded" for them. And our body temperature becomes gradually lower as we grow older, which could explain our perception of a gradual "constriction" of time.
Another explanation may lie in the "proportional" theory suggesting that, as you get older, each time period constitutes a smaller fraction of your life as a whole. However, the assumption here is that we continually experience our lives as a whole perceiving each day, week, month or year as becoming more insignificant in relation to the whole. But we don't really live like this. Rather we tend to live from hour to hour and day to day, dealing with each time period on its own merits and independently of all that has gone before.
All in all it's probably reasonable to speculate that the speeding up of time we experience is related to our perception of the world around us and of our own experiences, and to how this perception changes as we grow older. And the speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process i.e. the more information we take in, the slower time goes. Children's heightened perception means that they're constantly taking in all kinds of detail which passes by adults. And if more information slows down time, perhaps part of the reason why time goes so slowly for children is because of the massive amount of "perceptual information" that they take in from the world around them.
All of this information then probably stretches out time for children. However, as we get older, we lose the kid's intensity of perception, and the world tends to become a "dreary" and familiar place - so dreary and familiar that we stop paying attention to it. As Wordsworth put it in his "Intimations of Immortality"....."the childhood vision which enabled to all things apparelled in celestial light, begins to fade into the light of common day".
Is this really why time speeds up for us? As we become adults, we begin to 'switch off' to the wonder of the world and gradually stop paying conscious attention to our surroundings and experience. As a result we take in less information and time passes more quickly. Time is less "stretched" with information.
Once we become adults, a process of progressive "familiarisation" kicks in which continues throughout our lives. The longer we're alive, the more familiar the world becomes, so that the amount of perceptual information we absorb decreases with every year, and time seems to pass faster every year.
By the time we reach say 40, the world contains much less unfamiliarity than in our early days. Our life probably consists mainly of the repetition of experiences we've had hundreds or thousands of times before e.g. we may work at the same job we've had for many years, go home to the same house we've lived in for a good while, devote our free time to the same hobbies and interests we discovered when we were a youthful 20, go away to the same foreign country every year, and so on. All of this gives the de-sensitising mechanism a greater hold over us. We're hardly ever free of it, meaning that we absorb much less perceptual information.
Most of us use up almost all of our 'stock' of new experience by the time we reach middle-age. As we get older all the experiences we've already had become more familiar to us. Not only do we have fewer new experiences, but the experiences which are already familiar to us become progressively less "real".
With new experiences we adults can break free of the de-sensitising mechanism and perceive the "raw experience" of the world, and process a large amount of perceptual information. As well as experiencing lots of new things, we can regain our earlier state of being "quite fresh" to the phenomenal world around us and avoid looking at the same street scenes and the same sky and the same trees many many times over in the same familiar way whereby more and more of their realness fades away.
Time does seem to slow down when we're exposed to new environments and experiences. And this is because the unfamiliarity of new experiences allows us to take in much more information.
Time goes quickly in states of absorption. This is because in states of absorption our attention narrows to one small focus and we block out information from our surroundings. At the same time there is relativey little "cognitive information" in our heads, since the concentration has quietened the normal "thought chatter" of the mind.
On the other hand, time appears to move slowly in states of boredom and discomfort because in these situations our attention isn't occupied and a massive amount of "thought chatter" flows through.
When we realise that the speeding up of time as we get older is caused by familiarity, we can if we want to make an effort to expose ourselves to as much newness in our lives as possible - new environments through travel, new challenges, new situations, new information, ideas, hobbies and skills. When we go to foreign countries, newness and unfamiliarity seem to stretch time. If we regularly expose ourselves to unfamiliarity, we can experience more time in our lives and effectively "live for longer".
If you spend all of your adult years doing the same job, living in the same house in the same area and doing the same things with the same people in your free time, it's inevitable that you will experience time passing swiftly. But if you change jobs regularly, travel regularly to new places, keep investigating new ideas and giving yourself new challenges, time will pass more slowly for you.
Another way in which we can slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be "mindful" of our experience. Some people seem to be less "inhibited" by the familiarity syndrome and able to see the world with something of the fresh, first-time vision of children all through their lives. They may tend to begin sentences with phrases like "isn't it strange that...?" or "have you ever wondered...?" They're the kind of people who might stop in the street to gaze up at the sun breaking through clouds or a silver moon surfing the night sky, or they might stare intently at the sea, at flowers or at animals, as if they've never noticed them before. They are sometimes seen as eccentrics by those around them. However, poets and artists often have this kind of "child-like" vision - in fact it's this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which most of us take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions. Such people will tend to be less affected by psychological time than others i.e. time may well speed up for them but perhaps not to the same degree.
In a sense, we can ourselves cultivate this attitude simply by making a conscious effort to be "mindful". Instead of focusing our attention on the "thought chatter" in our heads or on tasks or distractions (such as TV or computer games) we could try living in the present through giving our attention to the experiences we're having and to our surroundings.
Such mindfulness means to stop thinking and start being aware, to live in the "here and now" of your experience instead of the "there and then" of your thoughts. And this will stretch time in exactly the same way that new experience does because as we give more attention to our experience, we take in more information from it.
What all this appears to come down to is that to some extent we can control time. It doesn't have to speed up so much as get older. We may try to extend our lives by keeping fit and eating healthy food, but it's also possible for us to expand time from the inside by changing the way we experience the moment to moment reality of our lives. We can indeed live for longer, not just in terms of years but also in terms of perception.
Is mise le meas / I am with respect,
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
October 2011.