
Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain - ColinWright
http://eagleman.com/blog/item/6-brain-time
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SixSigma
> This may be why time seems to speed up as you age: you develop more
> compressed representations of events, and the memories to be read out are
> correspondingly impoverished. When you are a child, and everything is novel,
> the richness of the memory gives the impression of increased time
> passage—for example, when looking back at the end of a childhood summer.

With no proof or otherwise, I had always conjectured that this was because
time is compared proportionally. When I was 6, the three months of summer were
approx 3 / 72 of my life = 1 / 24\. When I am 60, those three months will
occupy 1 / 240 of my life.

~~~
josephagoss
This is a little depressing isn't it? I wonder if there is any mechanism to
counter this?

~~~
westoncb
That's not necessarily the case. Another possibility is that when it seems
like time is passing more rapidly, it's because the events occurring have a
lot of similarity to previously experienced events—so the brain compresses
them. It fits the data in the same way: more things are novel when you're
younger, less can be compressed. And, it fits exceptions to this rule that
occur later in life (in my own experience anyway).

To get around it, I think having less abstract experiences would be a good
approach. If you're thinking in a highly abstract manner, maybe all your
mornings might be identical and can be compressed into the unit 'morning.' In
particular, I mean mindfulness, through meditation. Or you could just throw
yourself into something new.

~~~
digi_owl
Had similar thoughts about the brain and memories after getting in deep with
de-duplication.

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bambax
> _At bottom, causality requires a temporal order judgment: did my motor act
> come before or after that sensory signal?_

The problem is, the brain is a causality-building machine; it loves to find
causality where there is none.

If you tell a room of 100 people the following story: "A person fell, there
was a sound of a gunshot, and another person was seen running", and then ask
each member of the audience to retell the story and explain what happened, a
majority of the audience will reconstruct the story by placing the gun shot
first, and explain that what happened is the person was killed by the gun.

In this example, no perception-lag is involved; if a story doesn't make sense
the way it's told, but makes sense with a few "minor" alterations, then the
brain automatically makes those alterations in order to generate meaning.

Hence: superstition, unreliability of witnesses, etc.

~~~
Terr_
There's another layer of pattern-finding involved: "Why the hell is a person
telling me these facts? If they're being told this way the other person must
also believe they are related."

It's like conditional probability: Knowing that they're being communicated to
me, it's very likely these facts are related.

~~~
pwr22
Indeed, we process relative to context which is usually what you want to do

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kordless
I've recently been playing Minecraft on 2b2t.org. The server has a regular lag
which can be very annoying when you are starting out. In chat the other day, a
player commented that he loved the lag saying it was 'part of the experience'.
I started thinking about that and realized that the lag, if you assume it is
always present, can be used as a tool. If you know lag is coming, you can do
things that you know will be 'unwound' over the next X many seconds. That
means you could fall into a hole and see what's in there, then when you lag
warp back to where you were, decide not to go into the hole because there was
nothing in it of interest.

Imagine if we had that ability here.

~~~
adam12
That sounds like the movie Next.

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harshbhasin
John Dobson (, the creator of the dobsonian telescope) in a very interesting
interview on "Tonights show" says as follows:

[http://www.mystacki.com/#!/post/126/john-dobson:-on-the-
toni...](http://www.mystacki.com/#!/post/126/john-dobson:-on-the-tonight-show-
part-1)

We see a universe of matter and energy in space and time. Matter and energy
are the same thing-- Einstein put that together with E=MC2; Space and time are
the same thing. Einstein put those two together also with his theory of
General Relativity and gravitation. Now whatever you look at you see it in the
past (the light that carries the information has to reflect from an objects
surface to your eye and that takes time.) You can't see anything when it
happens. If you look at it from the point of view from Einstein's equations,
the separation between you and what you see is always zero. You see things
away from you in space by a trick of seeing backwards in time. You see the sun
8.5 light mins away by seeing it 8.5 light minutes ago. This what Indian
philosophy calls Maya or illusion and maintains that space and time are mental
concepts. Dobson terms Einstein's equations as the "Equations of Maya or
Illusion" [http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/41/john-
dobson](http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/41/john-dobson)

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jfmercer
Immanuel Kant argued--some say proved--this very thing two centuries ago in
his Critique of Pure Reason.

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dschiptsov
Ancient "mystics" knew this for ages. Using modern slang, it is an
"environmental conditioning" and "habituation". Newly born babies presumably
have no notion of time, except, perhaps, some bodily rithms, like states of
sleep and being awake, but sleep too, has evolved the way it is partly due to
day/night circle in our shared environment. Other creatures, notably deep
water fish and mammals, have different mechanisms for "doing maintenance",
like "switching between hemispheres", so they are never asleep (I am
oversimplifying, of course). But it is clear that us and them have very
different notion of time.

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cap10morgan
Does anyone know if there is an implementation of the key-press-light-flash-
delay temporal illusion anywhere online? I'd love to try that out and
experience the light flash "before" the key press after conditioning my brain
to integrate the 200ms delay.

If there isn't one, I may have to write it. It sounds really trippy.

~~~
leo_mck
Do it, please. Send us the link ;)

~~~
lgas
I tried to hack something together here:

[http://jsfiddle.net/eh64edgk/](http://jsfiddle.net/eh64edgk/)

I got a bit of a sense of the effect. Maybe someone can improve upon it.

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Strilanc
I wonder if the reason we find slow motion in movies interesting (e.g. makes
things more salient) is related to the time-perception-slows-during-startles
thing.

(Assuming the startle slow-down is a side effect of the brain kicking up
retention, based on the current experience having valuable information, we
might learn to implicitly associate side-effects like time dilation with "this
is valuable experience information". But mostly I have no idea what I'm
talking about; I'm not even sure it's a well-formed testable idea.)

~~~
pwr22
I think we find slo-mo interesting because it lets us experience the very
passage of present time and events slowly, rather than just perceived passage
which is after the fact.So we get to see things in a way we haven't before,
which would presumably be more memorable and also would slow down perception
of time passing....

~~~
soylentcola
I think of it like zooming in on an image so that it's easier to process
information in a higher resolution. Slow motion is like zooming in so that you
can interpret things on a higher resolution as well (just on a different
axis). Scrubbing back and forth across video is like interactive zoom where
you can gather more precise information about a particular subset of the total
data and compare to the whole.

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madaxe_again
Excellent article.

Thinking about it, 24fps (good old fashioned film), even though laughably low
by the standards of modern displays, manages >1 frame per perceptual time-
quanta, which is enough to give the illusion of motion. Any lower than that,
and you start getting "frames" where there's no change in the film frame, and
the motion illusion breaks down.

~~~
apl
That's not quite correct.

a) 24FPS are easily detected as flickering; our true flicker fusion frequency
is found around 60-80Hz.

b) Perceptual time discretisation heavily depends on the modality and even the
task in question. For motion extraction, this "limit" may be much lower or
higher than for olfactory tasks or memory retrieval. Overall, it's really hard
to put a time delta on neural processes -- after all, biological systems _are_
more or less continuous.

~~~
imaginenore
> _24FPS are easily detected as flickering; our true flicker fusion frequency
> is found around 60-80Hz._

Shooter player here. This is a laughable statement. Pretty much anybody can
tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz - even the mouse cursor moves
smoother. Good players try to play at higher than 120hz rates, because it does
make the difference.

~~~
digi_owl
Likely because of how the various parts of a game engine interacts.

~~~
imaginenore
No. I'm telling you, get yourself a true 120hz or 144hz monitor, and you will
see the difference for yourself.

~~~
digi_owl
Or turn of vsync...

~~~
mytochar
I imagine they both do something VSync, however, does not change the refresh
rate of the pixels on the screen. It changes the refresh rate of pixels in the
buffer. Monitors can only update each pixel at a given rate and that's
determined in hardware first, software second.

~~~
pwr22
I think that's why they said 60Hz to 120Hz. If you take a factor you
essentially change the true frequency

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jonsen
So that is what consciousness is, the ability to construct a structured model
of the world from disorganized unstructured signals.

Well, consciousness is more than that. It is also self awareness.

But to make a useful world model the brain has to constantly recalibrate model
construction in reference to what you could call, well, what else but, the
self.

~~~
cristianpascu
It's not possible to define something by it's ability to do something else. A
smoker is not smoking cigarettes, nor inhaling smoke. Whatever is responsible
for consciousness (and there's plenty evidence, more than to the contrary,
that is not the brain), it can not be defined by what it does. Consciousness
is not my reading the words I'm writing here, not me thinking the words before
writing them in a foreign language.

It's trivial to say that consciousness gives us the ability to do many things,
still it escapes a definition mainly for the very fact that it does something,
as opposed to everything else that falls under the umbrella of science(s),
where description by attributes (e.g. the charge of the electron) sort of says
what an objects says. It still escapes an ontological knowledge (we don't have
the eye of God, as Putnam put it), but the electron doesn't really do
anything, so we're not forced to explain something else than its properties,
intrinsic or extrinsic.

~~~
smtddr
Ya know... at the end of the book "War and Piece", they really get into this
stuff for quite a few pages.
[http://books.google.com/books?id=5ftPAQAAIAAJ&printsec=front...](http://books.google.com/books?id=5ftPAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Page 330, Search for the sentence _" What is the force that moves a people?"_
and read from there to be taken on some kinda existential journey.

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somberi
We are meaning making machines.

The longer we live, the more the "meaning-making" and hence it reflects as
compressed time.

However, meditation does "stretch" time back to how it felt like when I was a
kid (in my memory at least).

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icodestuff
Huh, I thought they did the falling/time dilation experiment on Mythbusters
and found that the subjects _could_ read the digits that were previously
flashing too fast.

~~~
rasz_pl
gee wonder who got it right, bunch of entertainers on TV or scientist in a
peer reviewed study?

~~~
mytochar
You mean the entertainers whose show, at the very basest level, is a show
about doing (often) high-budget, high school science fair projects?

In many of their more sciency, less blowy-up-y experiments, they're actually
quite good about following the scientific method.

If they had a large enough sample size, which when they bring in people for
experiments is very easy to make large enough, then they are very likely
measuring a real effect. The question is what are they measuring?

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imaginenore
Any perception, by definition, is a construction of the brain.

~~~
pwr22
Was going to post this, the title isn't great

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blago
I would love to see an Inception style movie script inspired by temporal
integration.

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naturalethic
No shit

