That We May Live to See This Time Again Next Year
What we become wrong about time
(Image credit:
Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images
)
Most of us tend to call up of time equally linear, absolute and constantly "running out" – but is that really true? And how can nosotros modify our perceptions to feel better about its passing?
"Time" is the most frequently used noun in the English language. Nosotros all know what it feels similar equally time passes. Our nowadays becomes the past as soon as it's happened; today soon turns into yesterday. If you alive in a temperate climate, each twelvemonth you see the seasons come and go. And equally we reach adulthood and across, we become increasingly aware of the years flashing by.
Although neuroscientists have been unable to locate a single clock in encephalon that is responsible for detecting time passing, humans are surprisingly good at it. If someone tells usa they're arriving in five minutes, nosotros have a rough idea of when to start to wait out for them. We accept a sense of the weeks and months passing by. As a result, near of united states would say that how time functions is fairly obvious: it passes, at a consistent and measurable rate, in a specific direction – from by to time to come.
Of course, the human perspective of fourth dimension may non be exclusively biological, but rather shaped by our culture and era. The Amondawa tribe in the Amazon, for instance, has no word for "time" – which some say means they don't have a notion of fourth dimension equally a framework in which events occur. (In that location are debates over whether this is purely a linguistic argument, or whether they really do perceive time differently.) Meanwhile, it'southward hard to know with scientific precision how people conceived of time in the past, as experiments in time perception have only been conducted for the last 150 years.
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What we do know is that Aristotle viewed the present equally something continually changing and that by the year 160, the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius was describing time as a river of passing events. And in the W, at least, many would still identify with these ideas.
Just physics tells a different story. However much time feels like something that flows in one direction, some scientists beg to differ.
If memories were fixed like videotapes and so imagining a new situation would exist catchy (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images/Alamy)
In the last century, Albert Einstein's discoveries exploded our concepts of time. He showed u.s.a. that time is created by things; information technology wasn't at that place waiting for those things to deed inside it. He demonstrated that time is relative, moving more than slowly if an object is moving fast. Events don't happen in a set order. There isn't a single universal "now", in the sense that Newtonian physics would have information technology.
It is true that many events in the Universe tin can be put into sequential order – but time is not always segmented neatly into the past, the nowadays and the futurity. Some physical equations work in either direction.
A few theoretical physicists, such as the acknowledged writer and physicist Carlo Rovelli accept information technology even further, speculating that time neither flows, nor fifty-fifty exists. It is an illusion.
Of course, although some physicists suggest that fourth dimension does non exist, fourth dimension perception – our sense of time – does. This is why the evidence from physics is at odds with how life feels. Our shared idea of what the concept of "futurity" or "by" mean may non apply to everything everywhere in the Universe, but information technology does reflect the reality of our lives hither on Globe.
Like the Newtonian thought of absolute time, however, our belief in how time works for humans can also be misleading. And there may be a ameliorate arroyo.
False pasts
Ane aspect of fourth dimension perception many of us share is how nosotros remember of our own past: as a kind of behemothic video library, an archive we can dip into to recollect records of events in our lives.
But psychologists have demonstrated that autobiographical memory is not like that at all. About of us forget far more than we remember, sometimes forgetting events happened at all, despite others' insistence that we were there. On occasion even the reminder does goose egg to jog our memories.
Equally we lay down memories, we alter them to brand sense of what's happened. Every fourth dimension we recall a retention, we reconstruct the events in our mind and even modify them to fit in with any new data that might have come to light. And it'south much easier than you might think to convince people that they take had experiences which never happened. The psychologist Elisabeth Loftus has done decades of research on this, persuading people they recollect kissing a giant green frog or that they in one case met Bugs Bunny in Disneyland (as he'southward a Warner Bros character, so this can't have happened). Even recounting an chestnut to our friends can mean our memory of that story goes back into the library slightly contradistinct.
People can be peruaded to "remember" events that never happened to them (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)
Another mistake nosotros brand is to assume that imagining the future is completely unlike from thinking virtually the past. In fact, the two processes are linked. We recruit similar parts of the brain to reminisce or to picture our lives in years to come. It is the possession of our memories that permits us to imagine a future, remixing scenes to preview future events in a window in the mind. This skill allows u.s. to make plans and to try out different hypothetical possibilities before we commit.
These curious sensations occur equally a result of the way our brains deal with time. A baby, with little past way of autobiographical memory, lives constantly in the present. She'southward happy. She'southward crying. She'due south hungry. She'south miserable. A baby experiences all this, but doesn't think back to how cold it was final calendar month or worry that temperature might drop again presently.
Then gradually a toddler volition brainstorm to develop a sense of self. With that development comes an understanding of time, of yesterday as distinct from tomorrow.
Even at that age, though, imagining one'due south cocky in the future remains a challenge. The psychologist Janie Busby Grant found that if yous ask 3-year-olds what they might do the post-obit day, only a third tin can give an answer judged to be plausible. When the psychologist Cristina Atance gave small children some pretzels to eat followed past the pick of more pretzels or some water, it won't surprise you lot to larn that, thirsty after eating the salt, most chose water. Merely when she asked them what they would similar to take when they came back the next day, most notwithstanding opted for water. (Adults chose pretzels, knowing that past tomorrow they volition experience hungry once again.) Very small children are unable to imagine themselves in a future where they might feel differently than they do in this moment.
The feel of time is actively created past our minds. Various factors are crucial to this construction of the perception of time – memory, concentration, emotion and the sense we have that time is somehow located in infinite. Our time perception roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the centre of the way we organise life, simply the way we feel it.
Of course, you could argue that it doesn't actually affair whether we perceive fourth dimension accurately according to the laws of physics. On a daily basis, we can comport on walking without needing to remember that, still flat the world feels while you're on the basis, it is spherical. We still talk of the Sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, fifty-fifty though we know that it is the Globe and not that the Sunday that is moving. Our perceptions don't keep upwards with the science – and nosotros tin only create our everyday experience of the world using the senses we possess.
If someone asked you to imagine floating to work on a lilo, most of us would have no problem imagining it (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld / Getty Images)
Too, our perception of time is not something we can cull to ignore. Notwithstanding much you learn about four-dimensional space-time, waiting for that delayed train is still going to feel longer than having lunch with your friend.
Simply fifty-fifty if we can't modify our perceptions of time, nosotros can change the way nosotros recall about it – and peradventure feel better about its passing, and ourselves, every bit a result.
Time for modify
Instead of because the past, present and future to be in a straight line, we can wait on our memories as a resource to let u.s.a. to recollect of the time to come.
This is crucial. Humans' ability to time travel mentally, forrard and back, is why we're able to exercise so many of the things that set united states of america apart – such as plan for the future or create a piece of work of art. And the important part that memory has to play within that isn't a new idea: Aristotle, for example, described memories non equally archives of our lives, but every bit tools for imagining the future.
This means that what may have seemed like a flaw before – our difficulty to recollect the past accurately – is actually an reward. If memories were fixed similar videotapes and so imagining a new situation would exist tricky. If I asked you to picture yourself arriving at your workplace next Tuesday morning not via your usual road, but instead floating on a lilo on a turquoise culvert lined with tropical flowers, past familiar buildings right upwardly to the front door of your office where your former school friends will greet you lot with a cocktail, in an instant nearly of you volition be able to do it. (An exception is people with an unusual condition called severely deficient autobiographical memory.)
Your memory is and so flexible that in an instant you tin summon upward your personally-recorded memories of the street where you work, what it's similar to prevarication on a lilo, the faces of your school friends, images of tropical flowers and cocktails. You not only locate all these memories which might exist decades autonomously, but you then splice them together to invent a scene you have never witnessed or even heard of before.
We withal talk of the Sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, even though we know it is the Earth moving (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images)
Cognitively, information technology sounds like hard work. In fact, the flexibility of our memories makes it fairly easy to exercise.
So we shouldn't expletive our memories when they permit us down. They're fabricated to be changeable, in order that we tin can take millions of fragments of memories from different times of our lives and recombine them to give us countless imaginative possibilities for the future.
In fact, when our memory for the past is damaged, so is our ability to think about the time to come. The neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire asked people to describe an imaginary futurity scenario in which they were continuing in a museum. Some said it had a domed ceiling. Others a marble floor. But people with amnesia were unable to suggest what information technology might look like due to our reliance on memory to allow usa to think about the futurity.
Instead of thinking of our memories equally a handy video archive, we can bear in heed that our retention of an upshot might not be perfect – and accept that others might have very unlike memories of the aforementioned event.
Slowing down
There's one other thing we tin do. The single question I have been near often asked later on writing a book on time perception is, how can we slow fourth dimension down?
But I wonder whether we should be careful what we wish for. In center historic period, the weeks and the years can experience every bit though they flash past. But role of our sense of time passing is dictated past the number of new memories we have made. When y'all await dorsum on a decorated holiday, fifty-fifty though it went chop-chop at the time, in retrospect it can feel as though yous were away for ages. This is because of all those new memories you fabricated by spending a calendar week outside your usual routine. If life feels as though it's going fast, this could be a sign of a life that is full.
Meanwhile, time does feel as though it's going more than slowly if you are bored or depressed or feeling solitary or feeling rejected, none of which we would want to seek out. Every bit Pliny the Younger wrote in 105, "The happier the fourth dimension, the shorter information technology seems."
But if you do want to shed that unsettling feeling on a Sunday evening that the weekend has whizzed by, at that place is something y'all can do: constantly seek out new experiences. Take upward new activities at weekends and visit new places, rather than heading for the same pub or picture palace. All this fun means the time volition wing in the moment – but considering you will lay down more memories, when you lot get to Monday morn, the weekend volition take felt long.
Equally Pliny the Younger wrote in AD 105, "the happier the fourth dimension, the shorter it seems" (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)
Some routine, of course, is unavoidable. But if you tin create a life which feels both novel and entertaining in the nowadays, the weeks and years will experience long in retrospect. Even varying your route to work tin can make a difference. The more memories you tin create for yourself in everyday life, the longer your life will feel when you lot look back.
The fashion nosotros experience time in our minds is never going to match up with the latest discoveries in physics. We all know what the passing of time feels like. Although we tin't change the way our brains perceive fourth dimension, there are better ways we tin can get-go to remember about it. But even then, the fashion it warps in certain situations will continue to surprise and unsettle us. In the end, perhaps, St Augustine put it best when he asked: "What then is time? If no one asks me, and then I know. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know it not."
Claudia Hammond is the author of Time Warped: Unlocking The Secrets Of Time Perception.
This article is the starting time in our new series How to Think About X, which looks at the concepts and ideas many of us tend to take for granted, how they evolved – and whether at that place'southward a better style.
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Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191203-what-we-get-wrong-about-time
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