Hey smart people , Joe here. Every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds, our
planet makes one rotation on its axis. Time is always passing… for all of us, all the…time,
at a constant rate of one second per second, in this constantly evolving instant called
“now”, between a past that we can remember and a future which we can not. But if time is this unchanging thing, flowing
constantly in one direction then why does it feel like time
is happening SO… SLOW sometimes?! Like come on already.
And other times, WHOOSH… time passes out of our grasp so fast. Hey now! Whoa! What’s
happening here? How can the same sum total of solar orbits,
lunar phases, terrestrial rotations, or transitions of a cesium-133 atom remain constant, but
feel so different in our minds? I mean, these days people are having a hard
time just remembering what day it is. If you're not at work today, or you're working from home, you maybe be wondering, what day is it? It's Monday. What is it about COVID-19 that makes March feel like it was approximately 4.7 years ago?!
What makes time feel fast and slow? [OPEN] This is a stopwatch. And when you hear a bell,
it’s going to start. I want you to close your eyes, count off 7 seconds in your head,
NOW… DING!
Open your eyes. How close were you? Some of you probably cheated and didn’t do it, but
those of you who DID, you… you probably weren’t that far off… WHICH IS AMAZING!! Unlike touch, taste, or smell,
our bodies don’t have a sensory organ for time. We DO have an internal biological clock. But
your body’s timekeeping is tuned to the broad patterns of day and night, – circadian
rhythms. And like other animals, we also rely on astronomical cues and biological hormones
to notice the passage of months, seasons, and years. But you have no internal timekeeping
device that can accurately sense the passage of seconds, minutes, or hours. Which still doesn’t explain the constant,
ever-present ticking sound… which I’m sure is a totally nOrMaL THING, right?! Heh.
Hehe.you hear that too right? Although there is no actual clock inside your
brain, we now know that how we perceive the speed of time passing really can be stretched or slowed. And scientists once tested this by dropping people off a 15 story building.
Let me explain… Have you ever heard someone say that a car
accident, or some other life or death situation felt like it happened in slow motion? It makes
you wonder if our brains are able to suddenly reach in and stretch out a second, to give
us conscious access to smaller windows or slices of time, like milliseconds, when we’re
super freaked out? Experiencing bullet time like in The Matrix
when we’re scared might let us react better or stay safe… So, to test this, scientists dropped people
from 150 feet up. They had harnesses. And a safety net. Doesn’t seem very realistic
to me but gotta be “safe” I guess. During the freefall, each person was asked
to look at a display with flashing numbers. Only, these numbers were flashing by too quickly
to be read under normal circumstances. If a state of fright actually altered their time
perception, they should be able to read the numbers while falling. So what happened when they were dropped? No
one could read the numbers. In scary times, our brains do not literally
stretch time itself and allow us to perceive smaller moments. But still, the study subjects
reported that their own fall lasted longer than when they simply observed others falling.
Their memory of the fall was slowed down. So, why does this happen? One theory suggests
it has something to do with a specific region of our brain. During stressful or negative
situations, this region kicks into high gear, and some scientists think this causes more
of the brain’s resources to be directed at making memories of that moment. These memories
are richer in detail, and when they are replayed in our minds, give us the sensation that they
lasted longer than other low-resolution memories. This is even true in cases like PTSD, where
people would rather the memories aren’t so strong. Our emotions can also influence our perception
of time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people who said they felt nervous or stressed reported
that time seemed to pass more slowly in any given moment, while those who felt happy…
… tended to experience moments passing more quickly. So yeah, that vacation really did go by fast
– at least in your mind. (what is a vacation again?) But something interesting happens when we
look back on these memories later. “How is it September already? March feels like
yesterday.” We’ve all experienced that in some way, right? Even though time feels
like it’s passing more slowly in the moment, day after day of routines, where nothing new
is happening, our memory of that time period seems to fly by. We can see this in action, with something
called the Oddball Effect. When you’re exposed to the same image over
and over and over, a new or different image seems to last longer, even though it’s displayed
for the same period of time. This might also explain why time seems to
pass slower when we’re young. When we’re kids, everything is new. Creating memories
of this never-before-seen information makes our brain work harder and makes time seem
slower. But as we age, we have more routines, and fewer new experiences filling our days.
So time seems to flow by more quickly. It’s almost like memories are the landmarks along
the river of time, and the fewer we have, the faster it feels like we are going. So what’s the conclusion? Thanks to COVID,
many of us are bored, forced into routines where we experience less newness. AND we’re
stressed, unhappy, or even frightened. So time is going by really slow in the moment,
and really fast in the long run. These emotional connections to the perception
of time seems to be universal among humans, but the way we think about our physical place
in time is not. We all experience time and space together… "I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson"
"As you travel faster, or if you find yourself in the vicinity of a higher source of gravity,
time ticks more slowly for you than it does for other peop…" Not now, Neil deGrasse Tyson! We all live on Earth, and none of us are near
a black hole, or approaching the speed of light so I’m not talking about the effects
of relativity on whether time actually passes fast or slow sometimes… ok? Thank you. Now where was I? Take your finger and point to the past. If
you’re from a culture anything like mine, you pointed back there. Or did you point somewhere
else? All human cultures seem to interpret time through spatial metaphors. As if there
is a you, “standing” in a physical location in time, with you either moving through it,
or it flowing past you. But have you ever really thought about how your daily perception
of time is influenced by things like culture, history, and language? For me, a person who lives in the United States
and grew up speaking English, the past is behind me. That’s why we say things like
“closing a door to the past,” or “the week flew by me” or “knowing something
ahead of time” And when I think about the timeline, the literal
line of time, it goes this way. How would you arrange these images? Speakers
of languages written left to right will order them like this, while speakers of languages
written right to left, like Hebrew, often arrange chronological events in space like
this. And people who speak Mandarin, typically written
top to bottom, often refer to the past as above, and the future as below. In Vietnamese and some South American cultures,
the past – the “before time” which is known to us and seen clearly in our memories
– is in front of, not behind us. And the future – obscured and unknown – is what
is behind. The Yupno people of Papua New Guinea orient their place in time with the contours
of the land. The future is uphill, and the past, downhill. Other cultures align time
with cardinal directions, mimicking the path of the sun. Look at these dots. (flash three). The length
of time between the flashes is actually the same, but this larger space makes it seem
like the third dot takes more time to show up. No matter how we do it, or even if we realize it, we all make some sort of link between space and time, and that can vary based on where we’re
from. There’s still a lot we don’t know about
how and why this connection between time passing in the physical world and time passing in
the brain. But we are all living through a massive, global human experiment right now,
in this pandemic, about how our perception of time can change based on how we experience
the world. In the eyes of physics, the difference between the past, present, and future might just be an illusion. But for us, a conscious animal with a mind, this journey through
the past, the present, and the future is remembered and experienced in ways that even Einstein
would find mysterious. Stay curious.
