How the Brain Experiences Time | Hacker News Reader

How the Brain Experiences Time

neurosciencenews.com

150 pointsrichardhod30 comments

> Professor Moser says the study shows that by changing the activities you engage in, the content of your experience, you can actually change the course of the time-signal in LEC and thus the way you perceive time.

Huh, After a year driving through West Africa I had come to this same conclusion, and am writing about it now for my next book. I liken it to how video compression works - your brain doesn't bother storing every single event, only those it hasn't seen before.

Bored sitting at your desk at 2pm on Tuesday? Done that before, don't bother remembering.

Stuck in traffic? Done that before, don't both remembering

In those scenarios time tends to "fly" becuase you don't remember much.

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Watch a guy catch, skin and eat a money? WOAH! Never had that memory before. Remember.

Get Malaria? Remember

Chat to military with AK47s trying to bribe me in Nigeria? Remember.

Now time goes slower, and that one year in West Africa feels longer than the 4 years of sitting at a desk job that came before it.

Curious as to why the Nigerian soldiers would want to bribe you. Do you mean they tried to get you to offer them a bribe?

Right, they were trying to get money out of me.

Here's a hidden cam video of it happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RTlDa2cg0o

In countries like Guinea in happened every single day. I never paid.

This correlates with anecdotal experience. A 'routine' day goes by much faster as opposed to a day with new experiences (travel to previously unseen places for instance).

I still find odd how sometimes good times can feel dense and long even though you feel time flies.

Say my brain is used to processing one emotional state change per hour on a typical, slow day.

Then a gauntlet of events happens that incur several state changes per hour for several hours, whether those emotions are all positive or all negative.

I think I would feel as though more time had passed than the equivalent amount of time on a slow day due to the denser tempo of psychological excitation.

I'm incredibly interested in how the brain experiences time during events of stress or high action. (The skier tripping/falling is used as a visual example in this article.)

On a much smaller scale, I wonder how time experience is changed among individuals who consume media at different speeds? For example, I watch all video media (Youtube, Netflix, various movies) at 2x speed. It could be intriguing to compare my experience of a movie versus someone who watched it regularly. Does the constant 2x-ing affect my evaluation of time in regular life?

I'd be happy to read any and all articles/papers you may have on the topic.

> I'm incredibly interested in how the brain experiences time during events of stress or high action.

Read the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed.

There's a couple of sad examples. One is some doctors who lose track of time while trying to intubate a patient. Another is an airline pilot losing track of the fuel level while trying to figure out whether the landing gear has come down. Both preventable issues where people's focus narrows so much they lose sight of the critical variables.

Consuming significant amounts of content at enhanced speeds leads me to be impatient with typical human interactions.

That’s problematic enough where I’ve given pause to the practice.

That's definitely something I've experienced as well! I've learned to take the time to absorb what people are saying/meaning with a greater degree of detail. (That's at least how I believe I'm behaving, though it's tough to self-analyze.)

Moving from this state, to a state where typical human interactions seem rapid, is like a context shift. Difficult to do without a change in location/scenery.

The super fascinating thing is the difference between how the brain experiences time and how the brain remembers itself experiencing time. It seems possible that intense experiences cement more details in your memory, which your brain interprets as having taken longer, without actually affecting the "in the moment" realtime experience.

Psychedelics (e.g. LSD) can also give you a hands-on and interesting view on the subjectivity of time. Probably because you are overclocking/unfiltering your mind and get flooded with inputs and thoughts, confusing this internal timestamping.

you are confusing LSd with speed here. A case of beer helps, too. And if that's too fast just wind it down with Marijuana. When your heart stops, that will give you a unique view on time, too.

try it, psychedelics will alter your perception of time in a fundamental way. not just in terms of being relaxed or focused.

Maybe it alters my perception of time so much I don't know whether I already tried it. So, I'll have to assume I already did. What were you trying to say? I don't think you know what "fundamental" means. Most people get along fundamentally well without having tried ...

Technically, humans experience time through recurrence (analogous to recurrent neural nets). A signal is passed through a computation block, including new external signals, then the output is looped back to the input. So it is a structure with internal memory that is changing based on input signals. We use this to process vision in time, speech and movement. The thing is, even cells can experience time, they have internal clocks based on chemical processes.

> The thing is, ...

No that's not the thing. Perception of time is tied to external stimuli. Time keeping is a conscious effort.

Umm. I hope I'm not misinterpreting your comment, but time keeping is innate to the body. It does not need any "conscious effort". And almost all multicellular life on earth does it. Most unicellular organisms also have (I think) some equivalent of a circadian rhythm. [1] There's a large body of evidence that the circadian rhythm is self generated, starting from this classic self experiment in 1938 [2].

Sure, you need external cues to synchronise / entrain it, but the body does keep its own time. As do animals, plants, insects..

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm

[2] https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/www.the-scientist.com/foundat...

Will "the brain", which is in question here, not loose the attained rhythm once the stimuli are removed?

Even if making a stronger claim not focused on the brain specifically, plants especially need light for like everything.

That's not really true. Take a look at the experiments performed all the way back in the 18th century [1], where mimosa plants followed a rhythm even when they were kept in an absolutely dark room.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_d%27Ortous_de_Mai...

More work since then extends this idea. Pubmed has a ton of good papers.

I think the prime example where uncouncious rhythm is concerned would be the period, the menstruation cycle. The correlation with the moon phase is probably no coincidence I guess, and I somewhat doubt it's magnetic, but suppose it's gravitational - which is an external factor. Anyhow that's not experienced time keeping. Rather it may be used for time keeping, or rather other externals like hair growth for example or feeling tired. "I'm tired, it must be late huh" is what I was talking about more than "It's late, I must be tired" though the later should be imperative for me, right now (here near the Greenwich Line).

And for the 1930s exp you posted, i suppose its just the energy reserves of whichever crucial part for the older were either fine tuned or not extendable, whereas a 20 year old (risk inclined) college student can still pull allnighters twice a weak and other endurance exercises. Physical fitness peaks before the 30s. And a prof is someone working with the mind so the experiment itself without intense physical strain is taxing enough. They self tested, that alone is probably a huge warningsign.

But i was mainly refering to plants that can be brought to flower by light cycle manipulation. Now I kind of wonder how mimosa reacts circadian anyway ... and I guess it's due to relative changes in the air humidity.

I read in Von Bertalanffy GST book that different species have a different perception frame rate. Some birds or reptiles wouldn't perceive visual change until some specific fps. Very disturbing.

That doesn't make sense the way you put it. Movement isn't measured in fps. But yeah, same for flies. Move very slowly and they won't react to an approach. Then, whack!

I think he used Hertz in his book, so yeah not fps but still frequency.

I thought it was known to be the superchiasmatic nucleus?

The SCN is responsible for the circadian rhythm and thus a component of the neuroendocrine system. The article is about a possible neurological basis for the subjective perception of time.

Perception of time and circadian rhythm are very related.

TLDR; Animals would make terrible Drummers.

But many drummers are infamous animals.

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