The Richness of Time

[Music] thank you tonight's topic is the nature of time and time is one of our most precious commodities perhaps the most precious commodity mean we enter the world we're given a certain allotment of time we don't know how much time we're given after we exhaust that allotment of time it's all over so thank you very much for coming and good night now we have spent countless hours decades centuries pondering the nature of time and as we'll discuss here tonight there is a lot we understand about time but if we even reflect on the starting point where you would imagine that we begin our exploration of time the definition of time we still are hard-pressed to give that definition right time certainly it has to do with change that's how we recognize that time has elapsed but trying to really get at the heart of what time actually is proves extraordinarily difficult John Wheeler I suspect many of you are familiar with that name one of the great physicists of our age who passed away not too long ago he famously said that time is Nature's Way of ensuring that everything doesn't happen all at once and certainly that is a quality of time but trying to get at the heart of what it is is difficult so what we're going to do here tonight is we're going to approach this deep question from three different perspectives we're going to kind of try to triangulate on a deeper appreciation understanding intuition about time so in this first after this first act if you will of the discussion I'm going to focus upon how physics deals with the nature of time and when I conclude I'm then going to bring out a guest neuroscientist is going to give us a way of thinking about time by focusing upon the biological structures that allow us to experience time the passage of time and various other qualities that we will discuss and then in the third part I'm going to bring out a cognitive scientist who will help us think about time from the perspective of language and culture and allow us to put these perspectives together and in part 4 we'll have a joint conversation where we'll try to have some of a free-for-all to try to see where we can find places of coincidence differences and ultimately hopefully give you a richer sense of the nature of time so to begin the physics of time what we have done to try to get a handle on time over the course of many centuries is devise ever better ways of measuring the passage of time now how do we do that how do we measure the passage of time well it's a fairly straightforward procedure we try to find processes out there in the natural world that are cyclical that are repetitive and if the repetition is stable if it's something that is reliable in the sense that cycle after cycle after cycle they're all the same we use those cycles to count how much time has gone by so of course as we're all familiar in the old days we began that process by making use of the cyclical notion of the Earth's spinning and that allowed us to introduce the sundial right so as the Earth spins and the position of the Sun changes the shadow that we see here will move around and in that way we have a means of measuring the passage of time now that is making use of an astronomical phenomenon but we can go further and make use of mechanical phenomena and the step in that direction can be viewed in this picture here we consider a pendulum right so basic physics that we learned in the 16 1700s tells us that if we have a situation like this where we have a mass that is swinging on an arm basic physics tells us that if you know anything about the length of the arm and the nature of the gravitational acceleration you can calculate how this is going to swing and it's regular and you can use that as a clock but then you know we went further from this and we recognize that there are certain materials certain crystals quartz crystals that if you apply a voltage to them they oscillate in a very regular manner and that gives rise to the kinds of watches that were well known and well used in the last 10 20 30 40 years but even this is a technology that we can improve upon and we have improved upon it by making use of atomic clocks in which for instance this is an example where a cesium atom can be excited by bombarding it with laser pulses and then it itself will pulse and in fact we now define the second by counting the number of vibrations of the radiation that comes out of this cesium 133 atomic species so this is a wonderful progression in the history of trying to measure this thing called time because the device that I just showed you atomic clocks they are so accurate they're so reliable in their repetitive process they're cyclical process that some of these devices will lose less than a second in a million or ten million years so that's kind of amazing right when you think about our ability to measure this thing called time and yet we reflect back on the starting point of the discussion where I said we don't actually know what it is that we are measuring so it's a curious tension between our stunning ability to measure it but our lack of full understanding of what it is that we are measuring but even so we've gone for further beyond simply measuring the passage of time we've been able to through certain incredible minds that our species has produced Albert Einstein in particular we've gained insight into qualities of time that our counterintuitive they are not the features of time that we experience so now I want to turn to three qualities of time one having to do with the rate at which time passes and this is where Einsteins ideas will come to the fore and then I'll follow that with a discussion brief discussion of two other qualities of time that are within our intuition the intuition that I think we all have that time flows right I think we all have that sense that time flows and then the third will be our intuition that the future in the past are radically different and I'll give you some insight into what physics has to say about that quality of time and we'll see that actually it is not aligned with our understanding of the basic laws of physics so for the first quality the passage of time I think most of us have an intuition unless you studied physics or you read popular books on these ideas but certainly ingrained in our bones is the sensation that time elapsed is the same regardless of where you are how you're moving the gravitational field that you're experiencing and Einstein was the first individual to come along and establish that that intuition is just not right and one way of quickly getting at this insight is to remember that Einstein's special theory of relativity is based upon the idea experimentally verified that the speed of light is constant speed of light doesn't change we like things that don't change there are the things in which we can anchor our understanding and to make use of that constant nature of the speed of light we can build a very special kind of clock some of you no doubt are familiar with this clock is called a light clock it consists of two mirrors that are facing each other and a ball of light that bounces between the two mirrors so I think I can show you an example of that here so how do you make a clock out of this you simply count the bounces so tick-tock tick-tock and you simply count the ticks and the stalks and in that way this becomes a clock and what I want to do is I want to compare the passage of time on two of these light clocks where I'm going to in just a moment set that second clock on the right in motion when they're sitting side by side of course the passage of time on them is absolutely identical the question that Einstein asked is if you put that second clock in motion what will happen and let me first describe what you'll see in the next little sequence here but just to sort of orient your thinking a match so that I have a light clock right here so this is the bottom mirror this is a top mayor and you see the ball of light bouncing up and down between those two mirrors now as I walk right as I'm walking along imagine following the beam of light the ball of light so it starts down here and as I'm walking it's going to hit the upper mirror from my perspective the clocks not even moving so it's certainly going to hit that upper mirror but the trajectory therefore will be to start down here hit the upper mirror in this location and as I continue to move the ball of light will go on a second diagonal trajectory and hit the bottom mirror over here so as you watch this clock if I darken the theater and the only thing that you could see was the ball of light you would see the tick tocks going tick-tock tick-tock and the beautiful thing about that trajectory is that it's longer than the straight up-and-down trajectory but the speed of the light is unchanged and therefore if the light is traveling a longer distance at the same speed it's going to take it longer to do it so the tick tocks are going to slow down so let me show you that in this sequence over here so now I'm going to put that light clock on the right in motion and watch the trajectory of that photon that ball of light and you'll see it follows the double diagonal trajectory a longer trajectory I look at the tick tocks 9 versus 8 10 versus 9 time is slowing down on the moving clock and Einstein was the first person to realize that time is not something that's universal in the sense that Isaac Newton thought it was time on a clock in motion from our perspective watching it ticks off more slowly and it's not just a light clock that light clock is representative of the passage of time itself so if you had sufficiently good resolution to watch the biological processes inside my body as I'm moving right now they would also be slowing down at exactly the same rate as the slowing down of the tick-tock on that light clock time in motion slows down now why don't we know about this because we travel at speeds that are very slow compared to the speed of light how fast is the speed of light go around the earth seven times in a single second at the speed of light since our speed is so slow we don't realize this intuitively in our bones Einstein figured this out now he also figured something else out he figured out that gravity has an impact on the passage of time this is his general theory of relativity 1915 he writes down the equations and he realizes that in a sense I'll talk a little metaphorically in order to just get the basic idea across gravity in some sense polls not just unmanned err it also polls on time which means that the stronger the gravitational field that you are in the stronger gravity pulls on time slowing down its passage stronger gravity time slows down it elapses at a slower rate so just to give you an example of that we can't consider say the Empire State Building imagine you have a clock of any variety it doesn't matter that's sitting on the ground over here and it's ticking away at a usual rate but now let's imagine going weights at the top of the Empire State Building where gravity is not quite as strong as on the ground and the stronger gravity on the ground means that the clock on the ground will tick off slower and you can begin to see the time difference between them now again not to scale right the time difference would be tiny right billionth of a second but it's not the size of the time difference that really matters for our attempt to understand the nature of time it's the fact that time is not the same it's not universal it depends not only on how you're moving it depends on the gravitational field that you are experiencing now having said that the reason it's so small is because the gravitational pull of the earth is relatively weak and but if you were to go near the edge of a black hole we're gravity is much stronger than the time-warp associated with being nearer to the black hole versus farther from the black hole could result in a significant time warp time difference between clocks that are ticking at those different locations and of course there have been ingredients there have been examples in popular culture that have made use of that scientific fact right what's the most recent and perhaps most famous film that may use of this fact interstellar right so an interstellar if you recall there's a black hole in some of the astronauts got relatively close to that black hole and that affects their passage of time and just to remind you Kip Thorne who was the science advisor and had the initial idea for this film made sure that everything was as scientific accurate as it could be so this is an example where just a few hours according to you know Matthew McConaughey and half way down by the black hole translates into 23 years up on the mothership because time is elapsing so slow and the powerful gravitational pull of a black hole relative to the rate at which time is elapsing elsewhere and you know i've known about these ideas now I don't know 35 40 years maybe they never ceased to be utterly stunning because they're so different from what our brains intuitively think about the nature of time two other qualities of time that I told you I'd talk about not just the passage of time but also this intuitive sensation that time flows right the time somehow is pulling us from second to second to second in a relentless way that often poetically described as say the flow of a river the flow of time and to get a feel for that here's a sort of rough way of thinking about that we kind of think of motion in the world as in some sense being a series of snapshots I'm showing them discrete but you'd really imagine them being continuous and it's moment after moment after moment and these snapshots just keep on going forward as time elapses toward the future and this often gives us the sense that the only thing that's real right is the present moment all right the present moment is what's real and somehow the past is gone in the future is yet to be and there's something very curious about that way of thinking about time because a moment in time represents a quality of time that is its most basic ingredient change only is observable by comparing one moment to another moment a moment itself can't change by definition it is the ingredient by which we can see change by comparing one moment to the next so if we think about the present moment either in this metaphor of snapshots or an equivalent metaphor that often is used as sort of a projector right so it's as if time is going by and the only thing that's real is the moment that's illuminated illuminated the now is illuminated by the projector of time and all of the frames that are before or after the one that's being projected somehow are gone the ones that have yet to be illuminated future those that have already been illuminated or the past but if you think about this there's strange because this is saying that a moment of time is real by virtue of being illuminated but to be not illuminated in this way of thinking about things would be for that moment to be changed it's as if you're saying that moment exists in two varieties when it's illuminated and when it's not but if a moment can't change then that's a incoherent notion because that suggests that there are two versions of that moment the illuminated one and the not illuminated one and this kind of thinking when really weathered together with Einstein's relativity gives a very different way of thinking about time in which we imagine that every moment is as real as every other moment it's not just that the present is real and the past is gone the futures yet to be every moment is as real as every other past still exists future exists present exists and this is what gave rise to Einstein's own poetic description where he said the difference the distinction between past present and future is only an illusion however persistent and part of what we'll do in the second part of this discussion is try to get a feel for that distinction between our intuition past is gone future yet to be present is real and what science from the point of view of relativity and even just logic seems to be telling us about the reality of all of time all right final quality of time that I will focus upon is our intuitive sense that time has a direction time has what we call an arrow right we are so familiar with the fact that when you look out at physical happenings in the world they seem to always unfold in one temporal orientation right the canonical examples that we'd like to use you know if you drop an egg it splatters but it never unsplash you know if someone dives off a diving board they go into the water but you never see somebody jumping out of the water unn tombliboo and in fact you laugh and that's an important fact because when you see reverse run films the reason you laugh is because it's so ludicrous relative to your understanding your intuition about the nature of time but here's the amazing fact when you look at the laws of physics as currently configured all laws of physics when properly interpreted so I won't go into the nuances of that but all laws of physics have the quality that they treat the future and the past symmetrically identically on equal footing which means when we physicists study the laws of motion any sequence of events that can understand in fact there's an algorithm for ensuring that if you have for instance any physical unfolding if you want to reverse it all you need to do is reverse the motions that the particles that are involved and there's a little clip that I will show you which also has a certain temporal quality to it sort of shows me as as a young man so I'll sort of disappear for this little bit but this illustrates this point about the arrow of time actually being reversible we all know what will happen if I drop this glass of wine [Music] now the idea that this mess could somehow reverse itself and form back into a solid glass filled with wine seems absurd but according to the laws of physics this can happen all I need to do is reverse the velocities of everything every piece of glass every drop of wine every molecule can add a liquid glass table and air just reverse all their velocities and voila [Music] only we could reverse time as easy as that but the point is here is a very basic quality of experience that things seem to only unfold in one orientation we only ever see things unfold in one orientation but that's really an environmental effect it's really the fact that we can traverse all those velocities as I did in the little clip there simply because it's too hard to do but if we could the laws of physics say that things would run in Reverse so this gives some feel of the disjuncture between our intuition both for the passage of time with special relativity moving bodies generality with gravity our sensation that time flows and our sense that time has an arrow our intuition is sort of at loggerheads with these fundamental qualities of time and we're going to explore the tension between what we understand about time from physics and our perception of time with some of the world's experts that can give us some insight into the nature of that dis juncture so to do that let's bring out a neuroscientist from the brain Research Institute and the integrative center for learning and memory at UCLA he's a leading researcher on how the brain tells time and neural computation please welcome to the stage gain Juan Amato okay all right so you saw in that discussion there and you already know from your own knowledge of the physics side of this discussion that there is this tension between what physics has found and our intuition about how the world works and I gather part of the explanation there must lie in the fact that our brains evolved in order to survive and to survive you don't have to know about these curiosities about the nature of time but can you take us into your understanding of how the brain processes time how it keeps time so I think there's a big difference here between physicists and neuroscientists in that neuroscience tend to be implicitly accept the notion that only the present is real and the future is not yet real in the past there's no longer real that's because the brain is an inherently temple organ in many ways if we can say that the brain has a main function its main function is to store information about the past in order to predict and prepare for the future by acting on the present so the fact that we talk about memory and future means that we're sort of assuming that we have the ability to change the future and that's that's the currency of evolution the degree to which I can anticipate what's going to happen sure gives me a powerful company Lucian area advantage so so starting from that distinction then the question is okay how does the brain do them right and then the brain learns we have we form memories we store information of the past and the implicit idea there is that that past no longer exists except within our neural circuits and then we predict the future and to predict future you need to tell time it's not sufficient for your weatherman to say it's going to rain it's helpful if they tell you it's going to rain tomorrow or the day after so the question of how the brain tells time is key and Brian is there a structure in the brain that's specifically oriented toward keeping time so that was one theory decades ago that maybe you have some central clock in your brain sort of like a computer has a clock chip that sort of controls all the temporal processing undone by the computer so that was one theory but the point is is really that because timing is so important for everything we do right now you are paying attention to the timing in my speech but you're also paying attention to the time on that clock over there oh you saw me glance over there to to to time the pace of this so yeah so the brain is attempting to predict what's going back happen by telling time and let me give you so for example right now your brain is unconsciously attempting to predict what is about to happen and by pausing my speech I created a temporal prediction error in your brain because you were unconsciously attempting to predict what was going to happen it didn't happen so then you became consciously aware of and Brian started thinking oh he forgot what he was going to say or the audience said man this guy's boring but and another thing happens there Brian is because it was sort of an awkward silence you probably became more aware of the passage of time and this is the fundamental point you know you just approached right which is the flow of time the notion that time is not a static frame in the movie but flowing and that's where as you alluded to the clash comes between physics and neuroscience and neuroscientists tend to blame physicists for not understanding time and the neuroscientists and the physicists hope that the neuroscientists will explain where this illusion comes from and I think that that will be an issue that maybe we can talk about shortly but regarding how the brain tells time and you mentioned that throughout human civilization we've been inventing more and more powerful ways to tell time and to we don't measure anything as well as we tell measure time so indeed we measure space by telling time the meter is defined by how far light goes in a specific period of time so and all these man-made clocks tend to rely on a fairly simple conceptual concept right which Brian mentioned which is just the counting of these oscillations whether the oscillation of a pendulum of oscillation of a quartz crystal or oscillation of the vibrations of a caesium atom the brain that the timers or the clocks created by the brain are fundamentally different from those that are within the brain so the brain does not tell time by counting the ticks of an oscillator yes there are oscillators for example your circadian clock is an oscillator that tells you when to get up and when to eat but the neurons in your brain that are oscillating they have no idea of how much time how many times they have oscillated so as something that Brian didn't quite mention was that a key feature of using a quartz crystal is something has to count the ticks yeah and the same thing with a tonic clock so while the circadian clock neurons are oscillating they haven't a clue if they've isolated a thousand times or ten thousand times or a hundred thousand times so the other thing amazing about man-made clocks is the same atomic clock can count picoseconds microseconds milliseconds seconds days years and so forth so the brain is also able to tell time across vast scales but they're fundamentally different mechanisms so your circadian clock does not have a second hand the time the timer's are the circuits in your brain that allow you to pick up the pause in my speech have a second hand but don't have an hour hand so brain has many many clocks so to answer to your question is is no there's not a centralized clock that tells time across scales and solves all our temporal problems and I mean from a from an evolutionary perspective it's clear that having the capacity to keep track of various temporal durations has survival value right I mean internal processes that need to coordinate the production of proteins and different processes have to happen in a certain rhythm you know we have to know to get up you know if you didn't get up that would be the end of it all so with this being the case is it true that say across all animals they keep track of time in the same way or are we different from other members of the animal kingdom we inherited a lot of the clocks of our of our mammalian ancestors so the ability to tell time the circadian clock is very similar you don't even have to have a brain to have a circadian clock so bacteria and plants have circadian clocks Indian by the way is something you mentioned is a very good point is that we call it a circadian clock but even the circadian clock is really a prediction mechanism because as you said it's not about necessarily waking up it's about preparing the body to engage the correct proteins and hormones so it's more of a prediction device than an actual clock and animals have ways to tell time on the millisecond scale too so that's very very similar across species what's different is our ability to conceptualize time so humans and animals different so if you look at human evolution all animals try to predict what's about to happen you know the simple act of throwing something towards you is it's a prediction act that you're going to catch it or something so you have to look into the future or or or a cat that's jumping up in the air to catch a bird right it's predicting the future humans did this amazing thing that they went from predicting the future to making the future so the simple act of planting a seed to say okay instead of searching for food I'm gonna make the food and that food will come to me so this is what we call mental time travel so somewhere along the lines ancestors became able to engage in the ability to travel short or long periods of time in the past and in the future and this totally in their heads totally in our head so so the fact of the matter is as physicists I don't know what your position on time travel is but you probably agree that it's not a practical matter so the best time machine we have is our brain and our ability to simulate you and I simulated on our brain being here to prepare for tonight it might not look that way but we did and so so that Billy did gauge in mental time travel to plant the seed and reap the the products of that is beyond the cognitive ability of as far as we know of all other animals and what about the phenomenon that I mentioned that is probably the most familiar quality intuitive quality of time that sensation that all these moments are somehow stitching together is there evidence that we have a minimal amount of time that will constitute something that we're aware of and I'm assuming that there is for that and given that can you tell us anything about the process in the brain stitches together all of those moments into something that feels continuous no so there's two aspects to that question so first there's what's happening unconsciously so unconsciously our ability to pick up differences in small amounts of time it's actually quite astounding given that neurons are so slow for example sound localization from there my right ear to my left ear takes maybe a hundred microseconds and you can easily pick that up but that's unconscious now at the conscious level the question of if there's a quantal time the exactly is is a bit different and there's not really but it's very flexible so I think you're referring to the question of our conscious perception at the time and that's a that's a much deeper question so first place of course there's a delay so when we process each other's speech we're in the sense living in the past a bit because it takes any computational device with its computer the brain some finite amount of time to process that information but then that's natural so that's just a consequence of physics now there's a deeper question here which is when do we become conscious of something and our although you might think that you're perceiving my speech as one continuous flow of the river it's really not that's a bit of a meta lucien or a mental construct and that your brain processes things in chunks and then stitches them together but that amount of that stitch is actually variable it's not fixed let me try to give you an example by saying two sentences here the mousepad and computer are new gets second sentence the mouse was eaten by the cat okay so I think hopefully you understood both sentences had the word Mouse and they had different meanings but you only knew the meaning by the word that kind of after right yeah okay so if I say the mouse pad and computer are new you don't know what I was going to say until it comes after but most of you I'm guessing didn't edit in time backwards to readjust your interpretation of the mouse because assuming you didn't so clearly your brain is chunking things yeah in time so the way to think about this is your unconscious brain is continuously processing information and more or less linear in manner but consciousness which is really a small fraction of what goes on in our brain is generated once the unconscious brain arrived at some reasonable narrative some reasonable story of what's happening in the external world and generates too consciousness sometimes that most of time fortunately that story is correlated with its in the real world sometimes it's not and that's an illusion or hallucination now speaking of illusions or hallucination you know I've had friends tell me about psychoactive drugs and these friends have described their experiences so vividly that I almost feel like I've had those experiences [Music] so I'm wondering um they describe situations in in which the effect of the psychoactive drug was to radically change their perception of time in a variety of different ways so clearly you know a chemical flowing through the brain can radically change everything that you're describing is the normal neurological functioning and you'll be glad to know that you can feel this without having to do as your friends do take those drugs just by engaging in something that's really boring or an exciting near-death experiment or experience or jumping from a plane if you don't want to do the drugs and then you're using your own drugs literally the neuromodulators that do that so so there's again two levels to this question what's happening at this unconscious circuitry level and neuromodulators and the chemistry in your brain whether they're altered by pharmacological compounds or not modulate the neural circuits within our brain so they can accelerate the processing of the neural dynamics or not changing our perception of time so if we accelerate the neural dynamics through some pharmacological means then our internal clock is going faster and the external which means that in relatively speaking the external clock is going slower so we left with the perception that time is slowing down now that doesn't really explain the consciousness which i think is what your your your friends were referring to the conscious perception there and that is a much deeper question because it's tied to consciousness and in a way I think it's it's the wrong question and let me if you give me some leeway here I'm going to make an analogy so there's an illusion about body awareness and the illusion is phantom limbs or phantom pain right so people who don't have an arm often feel that arm as as it still there and this is very paradoxical and strange for us forever never felt it how can you feel something that's not there and the reason you can is we know that the feeling of the body is not happening in the body it's happening in the brain so if I'm to hurt my finger my brain is projecting that pain out here so the mystery of phantom limbs is not the phantom limb it's our normal lens so it's miss a leading to ask what causes phantom limbs the correct question is what causes our normal body perception my point is is that the same is true in time so looking at the distortions of time is really the least of the mysterious questions the the more mysterious question is what are normal perception of time is and and that's inextricably linked with consciousness and it's a difficult question so given that you know a thought that's always in the back of my mind somewhat disturbing thought actually is that we as physicists have spent a lot of energy and effort trying to work out the qualities of time and I described some of them in in part one of the the program here tonight of course everything that we figure out we figure out with the same gloppy gray structure inside of our heads which perhaps for evolutionary reasons gives us a certain kind of temporal experience of reality would it be the case that a different architecture might have led to a radically different way of experiencing time and a different way of thinking about time out there in the real world absolutely and I think but here's as you said so the brain involved under to survive in a world governed by the laws of physics right so this is a pretty stringent yes but the laws of physics acting out in a very limited domain of experience so our intuitions about quantum mechanics are horrible and our intuitions about general activity are horrible because those domains aren't particularly important for survival time is though right so time is not a property that's limited quantum mechanics or general activity it's very mesoscopic so I would argue that we have to take very seriously our intuitions about the past not being real the present being real in the future also not being real yet so cuz I struggled to see but why I don't mean to interrupt but but that's a key yeah white right there between the physics and the biological perspective because when I think about biology in the brain I always think hey so this thing had one goal which was to survive long enough so that the bearer would reach reproductive maturity and pass on the genes to the next generation and my view has long been that that's radically different goal than figuring out the true nature of reality in fact moreover my view has long been that those of our forebears who may have been prescient and knew about the strangeness of time that came safe from Einstein when they were out there on the plains thinking about time dilation and general activity they got eaten they weren't focused on the goal which was survival and and so when you say we have to take seriously that sort of the past has gone on in the futures yet to be I wonder why you say that so I say that because unlike the our forbearers that were thinking about quantum mechanics they would be and fortunately and same with general relativity fortunately Einstein was not Ian but with time it is critical for survival because as I said the brain is a device that stores information about the past that's memory in order to predict the future and that's what you're doing so I think the question that we have to try to resolve is whether the temple component of our conscious experience is real or not let me try to you an analogy another one in terms of color okay we know that in physics caller doesn't really exist what we have is wavelength of electromagnetic radiation the brain the color is evolutions hack to build a spectrometer and and it's imperfect but it's pretty damn good right so Newton used his perception of color to make very valid influences about the physics of light now I think by the same reason color is adaptive because it tells us about its correlated with the real world I think our feeling of the flow of time wouldn't have evolved if it weren't correlated with the real world from an evolutionary perspective now my question to you Brian is the following if an emissions being came down and to you personally and assured you that the past present and future are different that the present is in some sense more real than the future or past obviously we know that absolute present doesn't exist because that's been well tested because we know clocks change at different speeds but that doesn't really say that the present is different from is not fundamentally different from the past of future so if that being came to you and said that would you have to go in there and rewrite any of the laws of physics or could you still use the same laws oh it's a good question and actually it's a relevant one because I have been visited by this omniscient being with was this with your friends no no so so so here's my view my view is that much of what we're talking about tonight is absolutely vital from a human-scale perspective because we're beings that live in the world and we want to have a deeper understanding of this quality that is with us every moment of every day there's barely a sentence that I can utter that doesn't have a temporal quality in it so it's so vital to everything that we do that we want to understand it more deeply from the standpoint of fundamental physics much of what we're talking about just doesn't matter if you look at the equations of relativity or quantum mechanics you can use those equations to make predictions about what will happen in various experiments without having to commit to whether the past is gone or the future is yet to be so so it's an interesting state of affairs where I don't think that I would need to rewrite the laws of physics at all given this information assuming that it was true because ultimately this is a layer of human interpretation that's sitting upon the more fundamental understanding now that's not to say that our current understanding down here is the final story I don't think that it is my guess is that there will come a point and it's starting to bubble up right now in fundamental physics where we'll recognize that time is not as basic to the laws as we once thought there is there's evidence to suggest and this is things coming from quantum gravity and string theory which are certainly on the edge of speculation but there is reason to suspect that time is something that emerges from a more fundamental starting point the analogy that I'd like to use is temperature so we all know what it means when something's hot or something's cold right totally intuitive we learned many decades ago that there's more fundamental underpinning to that which is when something's hot it's molecules are moving fast when it's cold as molecules are moving slow and temperature simply is a measure of that average kinetic motion so that says the temperature emerges from a more basic starting point having to do with the motion of atoms no I my beliefs this is not iconic to me there are many in my field who feel the same way that there is an analogous notion of atoms but not for matter but for time that there's some more basic fundamental ingredient that when it be is in the right configuration time emerges but when it's not in that configuration there isn't even a conception of time and that's why these ideas are sort of very high level however much they matter to us as human beings I don't think they matter to the fundamental laws of physics so to me your answer in which you won't have to rewrite the current laws of physics it's very interesting and that maybe that gives us room for the present being different from the future in the past and saying that it's an interpretation let me just say one thing so in the end humans and this might be a good transition to bring in Alera and then humans are literally just unusually smart apes we really have no right to think that we should understand the laws of the universe what's surprising is that we've gotten as far as we can given that the brain has many glitches many limitations many bugs like the most powerful debugging tool that we have I think is is mathematics yes and once once some genius conjures up these sets of equations the rest of us can put in numbers to those equations and predict what's happening in the external world now once you're able to do that you have the power of the science underlying it but once we start interpreting you then the word interpret means it's being filtered through your brain so I would pose to you the possibility that given how the brain was built evolved we have the onion we have a bias to interpret those equations in the context of the specialization of time because that's the best way to make sense of those equations given the very ephemeral very limited computational device we have at our disposal to interpret those equations yes yeah and I would agree with that and that is a great point for us to transition to the language interpretive quality that we humans impose on time so from 1:00 until Jan 8 to another I thank you for the conversation we'll bring you out in just a moment after Dean bonamana all right let's now bring out the cognitive scientists at the University of California San Diego whose research focuses on the relationship between mind world and language named one of 25 visionaries changing the world by the Utne reader please welcome Lera orad it's key so we just finished that discussion on the note of mathematics and language well we didn't quite solve it all that's why you're here so so we think about mathematics as a language but one that perhaps gives us deeper insight into the nature of reality than natural language which is our attempt to describe in a way that we can make intuitive sense of the world around us so when it comes to to language and the language that we use to describe everything not just time itself where do we stand in understanding where language came from the origin of language we know a lot you know about the origin of the universe I can tell you all sorts of details about that how have you guys done I'm figuring out the origin of language well we're still waiting for the time machine that you were supposed to deliver that work out what that would really help yeah the reason I say that is that language is a soft historical artifact it doesn't leave a trace in the fossil record so it's actually very very hard to know a lot of solid facts about the history of language after you go back more than say 10,000 years right so the start of written language of course helps but we only have written records for a small handful and only a few thousand years and then beyond that we can make some inferences by the patterns of interrelatedness between languages but once you get past a few thousand years we're really making a lot of conjectures right so the time machine would be very handy okay we'll keep that in mind my order my order is in it's in absolutely you'll be the first to get one so so when when we think about language though I think many of us maybe I speak for myself languages this means of abstracting our experience I mean when I think about you know I've got a couple dogs at home smart dogs but they they more or less live in the moment I mean they do know certain things about you know when it's mealtime and they know to behave in certain ways when they want to go out and so forth but for the most part the the way that they live is in the moment yet I am everybody else through the power of language seem to be able to rise above the moment and that's when we can begin to think about the past and imagine the future so in that sense is language the rubric within which our intuition of time happens or is it the reverse is that our experience of time that guides the language that we use to articulate it but certainly humans are able to entertain ideas about the deep past and the deep future that are unlikely to happen in other creatures but lots of creatures can predict things that will happen can maybe even reminisce or replay experience reminisce well certainly if you make a rap run amaze yeah for example and then measure the activity in the hippocampus of that rat as it's running the maze and then measure it while the rat is sweeping some of the very same patterns of activity that are specific to that geometric pattern of the maze will be being replayed so if you want to interpret that as a reminiscence or a dreaming about right and do you think that's stretching our usual notion of reminisce a little bit or do seriously think that the rats there wow that was fun that last run through the maze I'd love to do that again well I think all all of these words that we use for mental processes are slightly metaphor all right the brain is not necessarily broken down into words we have in English for things like reminisce or predict there are going to be lots and lots of different neural processes that won't necessarily be exactly the set of words we happen to have in English right now so how does language impact our our the way that we mentalize time I mean has this been been studied to figure out the interrelationship between the two yeah so well let's start with the simple observation is that there are about 7,000 different languages in the world and each one of them offers a different perspective not just on time but on all other aspects of our experience of reality and with things like time there's a particularly interesting conundrum to solve because on the one hand time does form the very fabric of our experience we can't experience anything outside of time so it's fundamental its core but on the other hand we don't have any sensors for time directly right so we can't smell time we can't touch time we can't see time we can't hear time and yet we construct this notion of time that we all then agreed to live with so how do we create this abstract entity in our minds and worse how do we create ideas that go beyond what's physically possible or experienceable like how do we come up with a notion like time travel that's a very crazy thing for humans to come up with because as we walk around the world we have physical sensors in our skin we get photons in our eyeballs we get pressure waves in our ears we you know squeeze our toes and bend our knees just in the right amount to defy gravity and then we end up with ideas about quantum mechanics and time travel when the goals and love and principles all of these fancy ideas that how do they come from that physical experience so this is where I think we can turn to language because language is a wonderful way of taking some of the more basic experiences that we have things that come from the senses things that come from what we can observe about the physical world and then building on those things so in language you can recombine things endlessly and you can make lots of analogies and build on those analogies and so the fact that language allows us to endlessly recombine and create new ideas new thoughts just by taking old elements and putting them together in these different forms allows us then to go beyond what we can experience but different languages which have different I mean there's a lot of similarity between those 7,000 languages but there are of course distinctions significant distinctions do those differences show up in the way that different cultures approach time or think about time yeah there actually are huge fascinating differences in how people think about time and it's a I'll give you a couple of examples but let me start with this a very simple difference is the direction in which you read and write changes in which direction you think time flows so for a normal English speaker time flows from left to right where the past is laid out on the left the futures on the right if you see someone gesturing for example you'll see this if you read from right to left then time goes in the opposite direction so if you ask Hebrew speakers to lay out pictures or Arabic speakers they'll lay them out in the opposite direction and this is such a pervasive experience for us that we imagine things unfolding in our minds in a particular direction if you just ask people suppose I tell you bill is giving flowers to Mary draw me a picture that shows that people who read from left to right like English speakers will draw bill on the left and Mary on the right wears people who read from right to left will draw the lung on on the right Mary on the left going the other direction and not not only is that just that we imagine these things but it's so deeply built into our brain that if you damage the part of the brain that represents for example the left side of space yeah it also disrupts the imagined left side of time of course time doesn't have a left side you're a physicist do you know that so there's no there's no such thing as a left side of time but in our minds there is and it is you mean that if I'm an English speaker and the left for me represents the past and I suspect for many others you're saying if there's damage to my brain which impacts that side it'll be the past that's impacted whereas if I am you know Hebrew is my native language it would be the future yes exactly so there's a very common kind of stroke that you can have in the right parietal lobe that causes left neglect so patients of this kind of stroke might only be able to read words on the right side of a page they might only eat food on the right side of their plate complain they're still hungry and we can turn the plate for them they might only put makeup on one side of their face or shave one side of their face so they're they've lost the ability to pay attention to the left side of their world or their visual world and if you tell them about events that are associated with the past like 10 years ago dean liked eating strawberries but in ten years he will like eating cherries and then later i test your memory for these events patients who read from left to right will have a hard time remembering things that were associated with the past but ones who read in the other direction will have a harder time remembering things associated with the future so this is an example implicitly in which space is being used to represent time and you know as a physicist in the in the mold of Einstein's insights that warms my heart because we learned that space and time are really knitted together into the fabric of space-time so this is a resonant idea but is it the case that every culture every language uses a spatial metaphor to describe time or are there other ways of doing it there are there are a few languages people have described that don't heavily rely they don't want but don't heavily rely on spatial metaphor and then sometimes you get into semantics about what really is spatial so like if you say the future is in the heart and the past is in the head is that still spatial because those are actually two different locations or is it a different kind of organization and it feels different at first what but going back to your to your thought about how space and time seem to be intricately linked in the mind they may be more linked in the mind and they should be in human minds let me give you an example suppose I ask you next Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days what day is the meeting not that it's been rescheduled it's either Friday or Monday who thinks Friday okay who thinks Monday okay well that's about normal you guys can discuss later so that is it I mean it's sort of a 50/50 split when in for English speakers it's about 50/50 depends on a lot of the variables but here's why people have this disagreement yeah we have two different ways of talking about time in English in one way we talk about ourselves as moving forward in time so we say we're approaching the deadline we're coming up on the holidays yes and the other one time is moving towards us and we're stationary so the deadline is approaching the holidays are coming up now if you think of yourself as moving forward in time then moving the meeting forward is in your direction of motion from Wednesday to Friday but if you think of time as moving then the meeting should move forward in the direction of time from Wednesday to Monday so if you have a really overinflated ego is it Friday is that you know because it's your everything is that roughly the we haven't done that experiment but we can and and they are all our participants are very helpful right and but what you can do is you can get people to think of themselves moving in space so if I get you to imagine moving towards a target or I get you to imagine something physically coming towards you your answer to the next Wednesday's meeting question will change so if you think if you kind of prime my thinking by suggesting something yes if I say imagine yourself scooting in an office chair towards a goal or imagine using a rope to bring that office chair to you if you've just been imagining yourself scooting you're more likely to say Friday if you've been drawing the chair towards you you're more likely to say Monday now here's why I say the space and time might be too related in the mind for this because if I'm approaching the deadline or the deadline is approaching meeting those really should be the same thing those shouldn't physically be different and yet our brains are treating them as different they're in space they're different because there's a fixed ground against which we're moving so if I'm approaching you or you're approaching me we can tell the difference between those because there's something else you're staying fixed this is relativity but anyway go ahead but then in time if it's really one-dimensional it shouldn't you shouldn't have this quality but people seem to be treating time as if it's actually more dimensional than that so they're treating these two scenarios of me approaching a deadline is supposed to the deadline approaching me as being actually different psychologically is it the case that that effectively all language is if they do invoke a spatial metaphor for time is it always a straight line I mean that's again Einstein's insight was to loosen that up significantly are there any cultures that have loosened it up for whatever reason yeah so there there are lots of variations so of course we have circles the time travels in both in American culture but also other languages use the circle circles much more of course when you're studying how people think about time if you find what looks like a linear representation you don't know if that's just a small part of a circle that you're looking at right so it's possible that there are even larger circles that are that you're not seeing but some people actually have broken the idea that there should be a straight line at all that you could just have a bent line let me set this up there are some places where time doesn't travel with respect to the body so I've given you examples where time can go from left to right or right to left but there's some places that people don't use words like left and right at all and instead everything happens in north south east west or some kind of cardinal direction space I mean so a fixed orientation relative to the earth as opposed to relative the orientation human body yes and so in languages do well in that civilization you would learn I guess in fact kids in these cultures go through really awesome training where their parents will say oh do you know where grandmother's house is and the kid might say yes it's over there and the parent will say no no it's over there and you get this kind of micro correction so that you can you can get quite precise because that's what's expected of you in fact in some languages like this even your body parts would be described using cardinal directions so you might say oh there's a little speck on your Southwest shoe and so if you are serious yes and then if you swivel like in this chair like you're not supposed to then of course it would no longer be your Southwest you would change imagine doing the hokey-pokey in a language like that there may be a lot of mental gymnastics and so for folks who think of themselves in space that way instead of thinking in terms of left and right instead thinking in terms of cardinal directions all the time what we found is they organized time also in cardinal directions so for example one group that I studied the coop tire this is an aboriginal group in Australia instead of making time go left to right or right to left they make a go from east to west so if you said someone facing south they'll organize things for left to right and obviously this is related to rise in setting of Sun or that must be oh yeah this the Sun is a really good organizing principle but it's not the only one that people use so other places you might live on a hill and so then time might a pill other places I mean there are cultures in which yes there's a culture in Mexico that's all tall where time goes up hill there's a culture in Papua New Guinea where time goes down river and there's one that we know of in Papua New Guinea this is worked by Rafael Nunez where time this is the iewk note time flows into the village at one angle and then it takes a turn and flows out of the village at another angle and this has to do with the location of the source and the mouth of the you've know River so these are important locations for them and so time there follows the exact topography of the region rather than going in a straight line or following some kind of other fundamental and how does it manifest I mean like an everyday conversation if you're like referring to the past you're like going you know and the few I mean are you actually making use of these oblique angles in the in your articulation in fact that's exactly that's exactly how he measured it he asked people to tell stories about things that happened in the past or things that they're planning to do in the future and he could measure the spontaneous gestures that people made as they were talking about their plans though very often if you speak a language that has absolute directions like this you're unlikely to gesture for things that are not space because your spatial gestures actually mean those things so when I gesture in English if I say oh I used to live in San Francisco or I'm going to my grandmother's house these gestures don't go anywhere like you can't you can't follow these gestures and get to any location where's in these cultures you can follow those gestures in fact I had one conversation with a fellow in Punk Perot where asked on what he was doing the next day and he said oh I'm going fishing and as soon as he said that he realized he'd just given away the location of a secret fishing spot and so then he started saying Noah fishing we have to kind of blur blur the location a little bit so in in these cultures when one goes indoors you're keeping track of your bodily orientation relative to the the grid the east-west north-south grid yes so in these particular can these people keep track of it when they're indoors also when they're on in unfamiliar locations it's just a matter of keeping a map it's a usually a top-down kind of bird's-eye view map and keeping it rotating in your mind and this actually had this experience I was there for a little while and I was really trying to stay oriented because people treat you like you're a little bit stupid if you're if you're not oriented rightfully so right and then one day I was walking along it was a hot day and I was frustrated about something and I just noticed this window pop up in my mind that was the landscape seen from above and I was a little red dot traversing this landscape and then as I turned the thing rotated in my mind's eye so that it would stay fixed on the landscape and as soon as I saw that and it just happened automatically as soon as I saw that I thought now that makes it trivial now I have this extra little widget in my mind that I can just read off sort of a mental compass that that's that's there with you and I then confess this to someone kind of shyly there and said you know this weird thing happened I saw this and they just kind of said well of course how else would you do it so I I've no idea whether any of these studies have been done but if you take a child who's grown up in this environment where they're thinking about time growth rather different from from the way do different spatial metaphor and so on when they go and learn you know Newtonian physics or relativistic physics does this impact the way that they absorb these ideas or do they just sort of leave that behind and you know become the way you know start to think the way that that someone in this culture would think about time well I feel like relativistic physics has zero relationship to how people in this culture think about time I mean you teach undergrads do they come in with intuitions it seemed to align with relativistic system well it's a good point they I feel like I feel like everything that physics tells us about the structure of the world is completely like physics tells me that this almost all empty space and yet that would be extremely inconvenient for me to believe if I wanted to not walk into it right absolutely just about everything you could tell me about breathing it's all captor intuitive which is in many ways the appeal to somebody like me because you know I'm thrilled by having my preconceptions of the world smacked around I mean there's nothing to me that's more exciting than to learn that everything that I long thought about the world is wrong that's a glorious moment for me but what does happen is you acclimate your intuition to bring it as close as it can be to these strange ideas for instance the ideas that we started the discussion this evening with the time dilation and motion and gravity and so forth and my intuition about time is now sort of grafted on to this deeper understanding so this is interplay between intuition and mathematical understanding so there is a deep connection between them so it does raise the question if my starting point was radically different because of a different cultural perspective a different linguistic orientation would I think about these strange ideas differently I think you you would be coming from a different starting point and I think there are many different ways to come from a different starting point and so it may be it may be that it would take you longer it may be that you would arrive at a somewhat different understanding I'm not sure that we could know that any two western physicists have actually the same understanding of relativity probably a lot of differ a lot of different representations and schemas and ways of framing and formulating happen in the mind where someone might have a more visual representation someone else might really be more symbolic or formulaic and so that's maybe part of the reason that some people come to insight sooner or or later yeah so but you're bringing up this really wonderful point about the diversity of human thought just how many different ways we have of conceiving of even our basic physical facts around us and then how we use starting from that incredible diversity how we then use to try to rise up higher and higher right so one final question before we bring Dean back on a lot of our conversation has focused on language as a rubric for understanding and organization and you know I wonder I mean Vic and sign had this view that language sort of set the limits I forget the exact quote but it's something like you know you know you know the limits of my language set the limits of my world something something close to that now there's an alternate view which is closer to my own perspective which is that there's a whole body of understanding that goes beyond language I feel like I know certain qualities of the world that I don't articulate that I don't put into linguistic form do you share that or someone who sort of lives in this world of language as the architects the rubric do you feel that that that is the limit of the world or that the world far transcends this one little way of describing things well let me say two things one is there's certainly some things that are more effable than others right and vikram stein gives this example of if i ask you how tall is Mount Kilimanjaro if you happen to know the answer that's an easy answer to given language language is good for that sort of thing but if I ask you what is the sound of a clarinet like it's a lot harder to give that answer in language and so the question is is that inherently a property of language or could we somehow F the ineffable maybe develop a better vocabulary and the other thing you said is you know are the limits of our world the limits of this small thing called language language to me is not a small thing it's an infinite thing right so because from a finite set of elements you're able to recombine and make combinations infinite combinations so because it has this compositional quality it actually allows us to constantly go beyond what we can imagine so coming back to this idea of time travel how did these physical soup of bones and meat that we are inside a skin show how do we come up with an idea like time travel well here's a simple way that language could help if you talk about time as a path that you can travel so if you can say things like for approaching the deadline in as soon as you have that emit that metaphor that analogy in place time is a path I can travel and say we'll wait a second perhaps I can travel in any direction whatever speed I want so why can't I think about myself now traveling in time right and it just takes that little that little analogy to set you off to now have a thought that goes far beyond what you can physically experience in your lifetime so hold on to that thought because that's exactly where I'd like to go but let's bring Dean back out for a final three-way conversation here so you know it's an idea that of course is a trope of science fiction but it's something that I think we all have a deep emotional connection to so from the physics standpoint maybe it wasn't completely clear but it's perhaps worth being completely straightforward about it the qualities of time that I described at the outset do allow for time travel time travel is part and parcel of the laws of physics as we understand it now I should qualify that by saying time travel to the future is what we fully understand so if I wanted to travel a million years into the future there are two ways that Einstein told me I can do it go hang out near a black hole sufficiently long time come back perhaps a year goes by for me a million years go by on planet Earth or get into rocket ship head out into space for six months and an appropriate speed near the speed of light turn around back get off of that ship I will have aged one year a million years will have gone by and planet Earth so this is part and parcel of how the world is constructed now when it comes to the intuition that this type of meandering through time would be possible because after all as you say it's just a pass and pass you can meander in any direction is this something which effectively all cultures have come to as something that matters that's important that they would focus attention on or are there cultures for whom it's just so irrelevant that it would never even come up because it's just not something they would care about well some people argue that the idea of time travel as you describe it or the way that it happens in science fiction is actually a relatively new idea that it happens with the Machine age with the Industrial Age and true examples of really going to another place and time don't start happening in narratives around the world until then I mean because we couldn't travel far is that sort of what it comes down to what people have various arguments there's certainly lots of time interesting time distortions that happen in traditional narratives so for example in the Ramayana story you can have all the roosters start crowing earlier than normal to make the day come sooner because you don't want the Prince to finish all of the castles that you've assigned him to build because otherwise you will have to marry him things like that you know so there is a time distortion you can create through more traditional means right and so you can think of that as a kind of time travel it's not maybe strictly the same kind of ideas we're talking about but but are there I mean either cultures or perhaps even neurological maladies that focus on the present in a manner that just sort of makes the past in the future not something that's vital to that individual's existence there's this fascinating book by Daniel Everett about don't sleep to our snakes and he studies a population of indigenous to the Amazon in which he claims that they're very present biased so that they don't have good words for long-term future deep time deep future deep past so but nobody would call that a neurological bias but the interesting part there is so they use tools but they don't for example often and would frustrate him because he would lend them their tools they wouldn't store them so they wouldn't say okay I'm gonna need this yeah tomorrow and when you think about one of the biggest technological achievements we've had we talk about okay carving a zillion blade carving a knife out of an obsidian blade that's part of the story right the other part of story is saying I'm going to use this blade I'm going to store this blade because I'm going to use it for this so that requires the time-travel now in release but that it was strange and this is what Lyra was referring to true time travel in the sense of going to the past and jumping back and forth only emerged apparently in the literature mostly in the late 1800s with there was a couple stories about time distortion but true time-travel of jumping back and forth I'll have a time machine why did it take so long in a way so you you know you look at Shakespeare you look at the Bible and you look at all these stories we look at so many so many very creative mythologies which talking about languages capacity to mix and match there are so many entities that are not in the real world but are some linguistic mashup of things that are in the real world it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to put time into the mix in a way that would yield all sorts of time-travel stories going all the way back why didn't we yeah why didn't we there are ideas about time and cultures around the world that are hard to express in English and and also hard to understand when you're not from those cultures yeah and so I can try to tell you about one and it'll probably make as much sense as it does to me if I do it so I'll try and some Aboriginal cultures in Australia there's a belief that things don't really change that time isn't really passing in a sense that when you're born you are really a new version of an ancestor that you had and so that ancestors getting to relive their life but also there's this other realm that is the ancestor realm or that it's called dream time sometimes and so everything continues in that dream time outside of time now I don't know what I just said right I can't tell you that I have a real that I can take the words that I just used and put it into my understanding of how time works but I believe that the people there have some representation that has that makes sense and I haven't reached it yet right and so I think we don't fully know the range of possibilities for thinking about time because it's hard to go in and really get wrap your mind around someone else's understanding in the same way that you have to intensively trained your undergrads to get them to wrap their mind around relativity for example yeah it takes a lot of Yin training into that system so speaking of time we're starting to run a little low on time but you do jump in if you had another thought cuz I had one final question but go first I was just going to say in terms of what it does it is still strange about why it took us so long for time travel to appear in fiction but as you know the end of the 18th century was a very dynamic period both scientifically and in literature and it was sort of the time where people like Einstein and Poincare rad were beginning to think about time more deeply but some people have made the maybe what would the critical event that set the stage or planted the seed for time travel was actually the emergence of photography and Billy to store something that was the first time you could have faithful reproductions of something in the past in the sense that made it still exist and maybe that allowed us to start creating stories of going back and visiting that but it is a mystery and it's strange that there's so much stories in in literature where things are the same themes are hit upon time and time again but time travel is really slow to emerge so so one final question that sort of relates to that as well you know we often I think look at ourselves as blessed by the capacity to think about the past and imagine the future I mean it opens up our world and in a way that makes us human right if there's like I mean language certainly makes us human but this capacity to be able to freely roam the timeline in our minds is something that is really iconic to our species as far as we can tell at the same time it also creates a great deal of anxiety a great deal of pain and suffering I mean mindfulness teachers throughout the ages have focused us on living in the moment as opposed to this capacity so do you find that that's curious tension to me how does one deal with that tension I mean from the from the neurological standpoint and from the cognitive science standpoint any advice on how to deal with that tension between those two capacities I think in general being reminded of how small you are relative to the scale of universe whether it's in size or in age is useful when you're concerned about small things maybe someone said something annoying and the meeting that you had and a staff meeting just think about how many millions of years the earth has existed and it'll it'll seem like a small speck I gotta tell you in 2016 the the most hopeful thought I had was four years to 2020 and 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang so everything's gonna be just fine any kind of any kind of perspective yeah I I think that the part of that answered that question is is our ability to to think about time is is itself dynamic and it's true that our ability to think about the future and think about the stresses that are arising or what we should have done differently in the past is a major source of anxiety the alternative is just to be oh like like your dog and I think is like my dog is very focused on the present so the thing is is that in this amazonian I'm trying that doesn't think much about the future the author of the book is pointing out yes they seem to have less anxiety but they also have less time to live their their mortality their life span is shorter because they don't think about the future so there's a bit of a catch-22 here right and then it's our ability to think about the future which causes anxiety which sort of assured that we have a future soso but clearly we have to have a middle ground right in which and part of this is there's nothing wrong with being present in the moment while you think about the future right so and a scientist you have to do this where you focusing on a problem that you want to resolve sometime in the future so I think it doesn't take away anything from the notion of living in the moment or mindfulness I think that's incredibly valid approach but that lesson isn't that we should ignore the future and this is a problem that we're all struggling with is we want to ensure that our relatives and our offspring have a future and so we still have to worry about it absolutely when you asked earlier if there any neurological conditions of groups of people who are very present focus probably the most present focused are crack addicts yes I didn't think that's really but that it that that is a group of people who have a very very narrow time horizon that they're focused on so you can see they're also downfalls of extreme present focus so at the balance I think ultimately it's a way of going about it well thank you both very much for joining joining me in thanking [Applause] you you [Music]

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Keywords: The Richness of Time, science of time, Brian Greene, Lera Boroditsky, deep enigmas of time, does time flow?, does time have a direction?, time travel, perception of time, how does human language impact our ability to think about time, linear continuum, Newtonian time, space-time, asymmetry of time, best science talks, New York City, World, Science, Festival, 2019, Dean Buonomono, The Joe Rogan Experience

Id: 1FJWvEbeBps

Length: 89min 38sec (5378 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020