It’s not uncommon for me to spend many a late hour pondering the nature of existence and death instead of sleeping, tonight being more of the former than the latter. This often results in me sleeping late and being groggy all day, with breif spots of caffeinated clarity.

The main topic of discussion I have had with myself in tonight’s session is how we percieve time.

Think about how long it has been since your last meal. How do you assertain that distance of time (if distance is the appropriate word… )? You can look at your watch and do the math to come with a more precise answer, but generally one can “feel” how long it has been.

You might say it “feels” like a few hours or it “feels” like a few minutes, but that gut-feeling might sometimes be off. You might look at the actual amount of time passed and be surprised to find “time has flown” or “time is dragging”.

It all got me thinking about how the concept of how long a stretch of time “feels”. Is it almost innate and inborn like a sense, like sight? Is it a perceptual construct learned through experience, like learning a language or how to walk?

It may have something to do with memory. When your mind stores in information about your experiences, does it also attach some kind of “time stamp” that is used for knowing when something occured, is it stored in some sequential pattern that can be used to deduce when something happened, or is the sense of when something happened just a random blurb of information we store away, like the colors and smells we encounter.

In the end, memory seems to me to be the key to our perception of time. When time seems to fly, perhaps it is because less memories were stored than normal, due to the brain focusing on thought and perception than internal processing and storage. This thought reminded me about an old mind stretcher I had come up with during my more avante garde days: What if time is not sequential, or what if time takes a 1000 year break between every second? We would never know, because our brains would only be recording new experiences when time was actually moving and that information would be stored sequentially, making us oblivous to time doing anything unusual.

When we sleep it may seem like dreams only last a few minutes or seconds, but brain scans of sleeping people show that we may actually dream for hours; we just do not form memories of those experiences, making it seem like only a brief bit of time had passed.

Time could be flowing backwards and we would never know. Our memories would still be recorded in the current fashion. In the end, how do we know time did not actually start a few seconds ago, the universe actaully starting in this current state along with our memories of past experiences.

Well, enough about memory and time, for it is time for me to get some sleep. Sweet dreams, night watchers, and keep watching the stars.

Share