Perception of time

I've been thinking a lot lately about time, what it is, how we all perceive it, how I personally perceive it, and what the passage of days felt like years ago compared to right now.

I suppose it could be argued that throughout anyone's life, the perception of time naturally evolves according to one's experience.

But I guess neurons crossed pathways or something earlier today whilst driving and it occurred to me that, along with things like technology and the population, the speed at which we all drive our cars to this point in time has increased exponentially since let's say even the 1950's.

At that point it connected with an idea in my head that I've had since about 4 years ago that time has seemingly 'sped up'. I could go on about why and what I think about that...

So the question in my head right now asks is there a correlation between the way humanity has evolved to expect instantaneousness, and this strange feeling that days and nights are perceptively faster than say 4 years ago.

Anybody feel the same about time as me?

Time goes by faster the older you get. At least that's how I see it.

Also, to debunk your theory here is something I just copy/pasted from Cracked.com

  Quote

The Faster You Go, the Slower Time Moves

 

 

Another thing GPS satellites have to take into account is speed:

The faster you travel, the slower time moves

. Now you almost certainly knew that already, thanks to Einstein -- if you're going the speed of light, time pretty much stops. But it turns out that you don't need an ultra fast spaceship to slow down time -- your shitty car will do.

 

 

Using the extremely precise atomic clocks we just mentioned, scientists have proven that

the same thing happens to you every day, on a much smaller scale

. Making one of the clocks move at only 36 kilometers per hour (around 20 mph) caused it to

slow down its tick by almost 6 x 10^-16

. In numbers we can understand, that translates to "Not a whole lot, but still, holy shit, you guys."

 

So, let's say you're driving to work at around 40 mph -- that right there is apparently enough to cause time to move

0.0000000000000002 percent slower than it would if you were standing still.

 

 

In another experiment, one atomic clock was taken on a plane trip around the world while the other one stayed home (admit it -- if you had an atomic clock, you'd constantly be thinking up shit like this). Even though the clocks were perfectly synchronized at first, the traveling clock came back from its 50-hour, 800-kilometer trip

missing 230 or so nanoseconds

 

 

 

So the clock gained time from being farther from the Earth than the other one, but it lost even more just by going faster. What's even weirder is that from the perspective of the clock on the plane, the clock back home is the one that's running faster than normal. You don't actually feel time slowing down or speeding up: Only someone outside your conditions can tell the difference. And that leads us a little further down this rabbit hole

Time is goin' fast man, i think is Niburu's gravitational force messing up earth's time.

I guess I'm thinking about the effect of our energy upon the earth and also our solar system.

We're multiplying and trying to go faster all the time, the numbers constantly going up and up.

And i feel like thats affecting how we interact with each other on a social/nonsocial, conscious/unconscious level....um, let's say for the worse more so than the better (my opinion of course).

It's like Ghostbusters 2...except instead of new York city getting silly haunted by a demonic force that's thriving off of negative energy, our short attention spans, lack of patience, and not to mention all these unseeable high-speed signals we're continually pooping into the sky might be speeding up time....at the very least our attention of time is waning(?)

  On 5/22/2012 at 12:10 AM, Squee said:

Time goes by faster the older you get. At least that's how I see it.

This is my favourite scientific reasoning and idea. It amazes me, and I think it unknowingly means so much to humanity.

When you're 10 years old, a year is a tenth of your life, a single day is 1/3650 of your life. But when you're 50, a year is a 50th and a day is only 1/18250.

Time will largely feel the same day-to-day, but for third-dimensional sentient lifeforms it becomes accumulative and constantly subject to perception.

Yeah that's understandable, but do you think that after a while you become aware of how days seem, even aware of how it is changing, and yet time seems faster than normal?

Probably. It's probably in the part/process of your brain that turns senile with age. I guess it's possible that even minutes become shorter the more you experience them, but it's also linked to concentration. Watch a clock for a minute and you'll feel it pass slowly, but take a walk, listen to a song or talk to an attractive girl and it'll fly by.

I get your original point about technology and society making so many things in our life faster that it also contributes to our perception of time, but that's only if you're aware of how it was slower in the past anyway... And that's age. It's why old people feel left behind by maddening technology and it's why children can pick-up a computer and intuitively learn how to use it.

If you think about it, we only ever perceive one moment at once: this one. Everything else is imaginary, collective or no.

  On 5/22/2012 at 12:10 AM, Squee said:

Time goes by faster the older you get. At least that's how I see it.

Also, to debunk your theory here is something I just copy/pasted from Cracked.com

 

  Quote

The Faster You Go, the Slower Time Moves

 

 

Another thing GPS satellites have to take into account is speed:

The faster you travel, the slower time moves

 

. Now you almost certainly knew that already, thanks to Einstein -- if you're going the speed of light, time pretty much stops. But it turns out that you don't need an ultra fast spaceship to slow down time -- your shitty car will do.

 

 

Using the extremely precise atomic clocks we just mentioned, scientists have proven that

the same thing happens to you every day, on a much smaller scale

 

. Making one of the clocks move at only 36 kilometers per hour (around 20 mph) caused it to

slow down its tick by almost 6 x 10^-16

 

. In numbers we can understand, that translates to "Not a whole lot, but still, holy shit, you guys."

 

So, let's say you're driving to work at around 40 mph -- that right there is apparently enough to cause time to move

0.0000000000000002 percent slower than it would if you were standing still.

 

 

In another experiment, one atomic clock was taken on a plane trip around the world while the other one stayed home (admit it -- if you had an atomic clock, you'd constantly be thinking up shit like this). Even though the clocks were perfectly synchronized at first, the traveling clock came back from its 50-hour, 800-kilometer trip

missing 230 or so nanoseconds

 

 

 

So the clock gained time from being farther from the Earth than the other one, but it lost even more just by going faster. What's even weirder is that from the perspective of the clock on the plane, the clock back home is the one that's running faster than normal. You don't actually feel time slowing down or speeding up: Only someone outside your conditions can tell the difference. And that leads us a little further down this rabbit hole

aha, but that time is moving relatively to you

so, everyone ELSE is moving .00~2 percent slower

your perception of time does not change.

so that fits right into this, sort of. at least relatively to people who don't drive a lot.

My first slow motion experience was falling off a playground set when I was a little kid, it was my first tumble from a height and probably was what popped my instinctual mortality cherry, on my way down everything was clicking by in frames one by one and things were going slow enough that the memory of free falling stuck with me forever, everything felt like a fuzzy puddle. Fortunately it was only about a 4 feet fall and I landed right in a soft pile of wood chips and to my friends it probably looked like nothing but it was the craziest weirdest thing.

Ayo, I think time is going a lot faster as well, but get this:

When I travel and experience new things time slows the fuck down again. Three days in a new city suddenly seems to last as long as a week and a half of routine.

So here is my theory: Seek out new stuff/people/places/experiences, but NOT through your computer/television and slow time down. Beat that fucker by interacting with real things to feed your brain. You win. Time loses.

*posts on internet*

I can't even comprehend how fast time seems to be going now. shit, 2012 is but half over already. things like high school are so far away, I have to do the math 2 or 3 times because it doesn't make sense to me.

  On 5/22/2012 at 8:21 AM, Gocab said:

Ayo, I think time is going a lot faster as well, but get this:

When I travel and experience new things time slows the fuck down again. Three days in a new city suddenly seems to last as long as a week and a half of routine.

So here is my theory: Seek out new stuff/people/places/experiences, but NOT through your computer/television and slow time down. Beat that fucker by interacting with real things to feed your brain. You win. Time loses.

 

*posts on internet*

Good point, I think. I love all the science about time going slower or faster depending on conditions, but you wouldn't notice that from your own perspective. It's more about how you perceive time on different ages. I don't know anything about it, but if I had to guess I'd say you ignore a lot of time during your day when you're older. Things you do regularly tend to pass unnoticed. Children experience most things more intensely and will probably get more (time) out of a day, simply by being more 'aware'.

Personally I feel frustrated by the lack of time I experience. Being 30 I feel I don't have any time to spare, whilst I'm not at all that busy...

I used to get the best 'slow motions' when connecting sweetly with a football. 1 second turns into 10 and you find that in the swing of a leg you can judge power and create more accurate curl. Unfortunately I would rarely connect that sweetly with the balls.

Sweetly with the balls.

I'm going back to bed.

don't measure time as a distance, and your all fine, brothers

  On 5/22/2012 at 10:41 AM, schlucharski said:

don't measure time as a distance, and your all fine, brothers

Yes. We should all try and see time as the Tralfamadorians do. :)

Poo-tee-weet?

ah Immanuel that old cunt is way more wasted than Kurt, me say go for teh sources jah bless

  On 5/22/2012 at 12:04 AM, soma said:

I've been thinking a lot lately about time, what it is, how we all perceive it, how I personally perceive it, and what the passage of days felt like years ago compared to right now.

 

I suppose it could be argued that throughout anyone's life, the perception of time naturally evolves according to one's experience.

 

But I guess neurons crossed pathways or something earlier today whilst driving and it occurred to me that, along with things like technology and the population, the speed at which we all drive our cars to this point in time has increased exponentially since let's say even the 1950's.

 

At that point it connected with an idea in my head that I've had since about 4 years ago that time has seemingly 'sped up'. I could go on about why and what I think about that...

 

So the question in my head right now asks is there a correlation between the way humanity has evolved to expect instantaneousness, and this strange feeling that days and nights are perceptively faster than say 4 years ago.

 

Anybody feel the same about time as me?

There's a subjective experience of time. Depending on what you're doing, and how interesting it is to you, you have a different feeling of the speed of time passing. I remember specifically when I was going through some rougher events in my life how time seemed to go slower, and it was particularly with events that were more emotional/intense for me than the "average" ones. Again, this is a subjective experience of time which is the result of what you're doing at the moment, how important/emotionally intense it is to you, how stressful it is to you, how interesting it is you to, etc. The other thing is a physical/biological aspect of time which (shouldn't) be affected by your subjective aspect. This is of course where relativity comes in, and as a result the time goes slower if you're moving, this difference being so small with the "everyday" speeds that your calculator will probably simply say that the time dilation is 0, because the numbers are so small.

I've heard that if you want to live as long a life as possible, at least when it comes to your own perception of that, you should do as many new things as you can as often as possible. It's the routines that we get stuck in that make time speed up, much in the same that the journey back from a destination you've visited for the first time seems shorter than the time it took to get there - there's a familiar neural pathway that has formed from a dynamic experience.

I feel time is getting a lot quicker as I get older, and i can see a lot of truth in 'life is but dream'. I can look back on my childhood memories and in a strange kind of way, it almost seems as if I dreamed some of it.

Interesting ideas in here. Time really fucking feels like it's going way too fucking fast these days, makes sense that the older you get, the more you repeat the same stuff the more it seems like the same old, I guess moving to a new city or some other big change in my life probably would offset that? New things are probably in need for me regardless.

Oh you can slow time down. You just need to take a bit of soma. Three tablets is enough for an eternity.

During my years at uni a wrote a paper on Varela's research to temporal awareness. Here's a link to his research:

http://www.franzreic...s_Article02.htm

As a follow up to freak of the Week: he made a distinction between three types of time. The psychological (subjective) sense of time, the neurological sense of time (the amount of time it takes for your brain to create a psychological instance of time) and the physical aspect of time (dependent on the natural laws).

And on another sidenote, there was some research where it was shown the people with a depression are affected in their temporal awareness. Depressed people tend to perceive everything as being slower/taking more time. Can't remember which article though...

I feel like I've heard this so many times, and I feel it myself. I wonder if it can have something to do with memory, as someone else said 'familiar neuron patterns' or something. I have to really focus to even just remember a little bit of the day. Mostly it's just 'visions' that stood out, like a beautiful sky, a certain lighting in the room, that i remember on any given day. But I wonder... Even if I have a really eventful day, that day still passes pretty quickly. When I was a kid it felt like a huge thing. Maybe the brain is kind of wired to take it easy after aging a little, idk.

  On 5/25/2012 at 10:00 PM, goDel said:

During my years at uni a wrote a paper on Varela's research to temporal awareness. Here's a link to his research:

http://www.franzreic...s_Article02.htm

um. i like this but i disagree with a lot of stances/perspectives and i don't feel like discussing them right here right now.

:wub :

just posting in this thread so i can come back to this point.

very interesting, deep, subject...

could talk about it all night.

but won't...

will instead come back with a surmised an concise thing to say about it.