The Secret Pulse of Time

Introduction

The discovery of inner time

Magical moments when the laws of time don’t seem to apply.

Why is that some people are in high spirits all day when others groan and complain about a relatively light agenda?

What Happens When Nothing Happens

Michel Siffre’s experiment to find out ‘what happens when nothing happens for weeks on end’.

The results were fascinating. He lost his orientation of time and his diary entry indicated that he lost 25 days!

Twenty-five Hours

Michel Siffre and others repeated the experiment several times.

Another study was done at Munich where

the students from Max Planck Institute participated.

Important finding: A hidden clock inside our body guides us through day and night. Even though the biological clock modulates every aspect of our lives, our consciousness produces its own time. Everything we see, think and feel is measured against it.

A Hidden Clock

The biological clock and consciousness measure time in a different manner.

Body clock determines time automatically. After staying awake for 16 hours, we grow tired, whether we like it or not.

Consciousness measures time against memories. We rely on our memories of hours spent at bus stops, doctor’s office, airport to form a picture of those time intervals. If our memory fails, we lose sense of inner time.

How long does an hour last?

Our biological clock in instills a personal rhythm in each of us.

It even affects the firmness of our handshakes, the degree of our patience and whether an alcoholic drink leaves us with a hangover.

If you try to work counter to your personal rhythm, you will expend more time and energy on the things you need to get done.

Even flowers are aware of time!

French astronomer Jean-Jacques de Marian’s experiment with mimosa plants was published in Paris Academy of Sciences.

Owls and Larks

Carolus Linnaeus Conducted a similar experiment by planting flowers that open and close at different time to create a flower clock. The clock was accurate to half an hour of the correct time.

Each cell in the body has its own clock. E.g., the liver has sensors that enable it to exchange information about time with the other organs.

The central clock in the body is reset every morning. The first rays of the sun act to help the body to reset its time.

In teenagers, the sleep inducing hormone, Melatonin is secreted at about 11PM. Hence they feel sleepy much later.

Since the schools start early in the morning, the teenagers are mostly

in a half asleep state during the morning classes.

The government after recognizing the problems faced by the students and schools and students has announced monetary rewards to schools that push their starting time back an hour or so.

The schools that adopted the suggestion has seen a considerable decrease in absenteeism and the grades of the students have improved.

Why teenagers are night owls?

A minimum amount of the sun’s rays has to reach the eye in the course of a day for the body clock to function reliably.

The biological clock cannot be reset properly in the absence of sufficient sunlight.

Insomnia, decrease in work performance and depression are among the known consequences.

This is most common for people who work in closed rooms all day.

Twilight Gloom

The Chinese have long recognized the connection between time perception and bodily movement.

Most sequences of movement last no more than 3 seconds.

When the world begins to race: Case study in Dusseldorf

A sense of Seconds

Two minutes on a hot oven:

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes, but when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. ``That’s relativity,’’ Einstein said.

Time can fly like a bird or crawl like a snail and we seem happiest when we are not noticing its rate of passing.

The longest hour

How long does the present last?

Future and past adjoin within a given moment and meet at the fine line we call the present.

The Now is an illusion.

The brain can juggle time. The brain can delay the present by up to a half-second.

Atoms of Time

Working memory: two to three seconds. E.g., memorizing a phone number.

Forgetting a new number just told to you.

Two women image used in an advertisement in 1890.

The longest moment

Neglecting the Now

Neglecting the Now

Only when we live for the moment do we live for the future. - Heinrich von Kleist

PHILOSOPHERS AROUND THE world have been encouraging us to focus our attention on the moment since time immemorial.

More than 2,500 years ago, Buddha stated that dwelling entirely in the present constitutes the penultimate step on the Noble Eightfold Path to enlightenment.

The great thinkers of history have acknowledged that achieving this focus is easier said than done.

Neglecting the Now

Try making a mental note of what goes through your head in the course of a few minutes.

Neglecting the Now

Neglecting the Now

But the things that are unfolding right before your eyes just flash on and off between all these feelings and thoughts. We register the here and now with our senses, but remain detached from it. We find it much easier to experience the past and future that we reconstruct in our heads.

Things to Ponder

Why is it so difficult simply to listen to the sound ofrain for a few minutes?

Neglecting the Now

If you train your perception to be more thoroughly aware of the present, you will reap substantial benefits.

By giving more life to our time, we give more time to our life.

When you are situated firmly in the here and now, you will gain a fuller sense of the moments that make up your life and derive more pleasure from them.

We Are The Architects Of Our

Memory

We Are The Architects Of Our

Memory

Our contact with the present keeps breaking off, and we dip into the past.

If we did not have this ability, we would be left with nothing more than a narrow beam of consciousness to illuminate only the present.

Everything before and after it would lie in the dark.

We journey to the past and future so quickly that we don’t even notice the leap from the now to the then.

Journey

Life without Past and Future

If

PAST PRESENT FUTURE


If

PRESENT

Could we live in such an eternal present?

Things to Ponder

William James said….If the past did not linger on in our minds,

images and feelings would be like “a string of bead-like sensations, all separate.” Every impression would be lost forever as soon as it was extinguished. We would see no connection between what just was and what now is.


James thought his vision of a life devoid of memory was pure fiction; after all, memory seems so natural that we can hardly imagine a life without it.

But contrary to James’s belief, a life in the unvarying present is possible!

H.M – Man without Memory


He forgets everything you tell him on the spot

If you leave the room and come back a few minutes later, H.M.

acts as though he is seeing you for the first time.

Words that he heard, or even used himself, vanish from his

mind in less than a minute.

H.M. lives exclusively in the present; past and future have no

meaning for him.

For most people, life is like a film, with one image flowing into

the

next, but H.M. feels as though he is looking at a series of

unrelated photos.

Just as William James imagined, H.M. does not recognize the

least connection between one snapshot and the next. For H.M.,

every new moment is “like waking from a dream.”

H.M – Man without Memory

Several Kinds of Memory

H.M.’s capabilities and limitations proved that there is not just

one memory, but several.

H.M. had retained his implicit memory, but implicit memory

appears to contribute little to the experience of time, which

requires explicit memory to store information and experiences.

Explicit memory, in turn, consists of two stages

The first stage is the working memory.

The second of the memory passes along a piece of information

only when it seems so important that it engages us intensively,

extensively, or repeatedly.

This entry into long-term memory is blocked in H.M.’s case.

Retouching Experiences

Memories are not simply there; we create them. We tell our

history anew, and in the process past and present are linked.

When we recall our past, our feelings at the time of the event

are the most likely element to be reshaped in the process of

reconstruction. We generally see the past in the light that

seems logical from our current perspective.

Moreover, people select what they remember to suit their

current state of mind. If you are in good spirits, you think

primarily of the happy times when picturing your relationship

with your spouse, but if you are feeling blue, you focus on the

fighting and disappointments during your years together.

When we take a tour through our own memory, We ourselves are the architects of our own recollections, aren’t we?

Things to Ponder

What does it really mean to say we have “no time”?

The root of the problem is not a lack of time, nor is it too quick

a pace imposed by other people, but a combination of factors

originating within ourselves: an inability to concentrate, an

overwhelming feeling of stress, and a lack of motivation

What should we prefer: having time or having no time?

Neurologists and afflicted patients often come up against a

syndrome known as the “weekend headache”: when the stress

lets up, patients experience pain instead of relief.

The Allure of Speed

TIME CHANGES AS we look back on it. Expanses of time that

once seemed endless get so compressed as to be nearly

unrecognizable. An experience that went by like nothing

balloons in our memory

“An Hour Is Not Merely an Hour”

The passage of time quite naturally makes the past seem

briefer from a distance. The further back an interval of time

lies, the shorter we imagine it to have lasted. Typically, the

past week occupies more space in our memory than does the

week before that, and far more than a week during the

previous year is likely to. Where did the lost time wind up? It

appears to be gone, along with all the little incidents in our

lives we no longer remember. Can it be restored?

Why Life Speeds Up As We Grow Older

Humans need nearly a decade to develop a feeling for time.

Past and future are alien to newborns

Infants just one month old recognize sounds that are played to

them repeatedly.

By the time they are six months old, infants can differentiate

between rhythmic time patterns.

When they are seven months old, children can learn a rhythm

even in the absence of sounds


By the age of four, children can grasp the concept of an entire

day.

Adolescents begin to grasp the concept of the span of a whole

life. Dealing with time concepts no longer poses difficulties for

teenagers, who have internalized the fact that while minutes

and months cannot be seen or touched, they still determine

our lives.

A few years after puberty, time, which has seemed so slow-

moving up to this point, begins to accelerate. Our time

commitments increase, but the days do not grow longer. The

immediate future seems like a bulging suitcase into which

there is far too much to stuff.


As the years go by, people are usually disconcerted to find that

the older they get, the faster time seems to pass

But why do people often remember more from their youth

than from their more recent past? Shouldn’t our oldest

memories be the most faded, and our newer ones be fresher

and more numerous? Never again would we experience so

much change.

The more knowledge of the world we acquire, the fewer new

memories are retained in our memory—it would be a waste of

brain capacity to remember slight variations on a familiar

theme. But the fewer memories we have retained from a

period, the shorter that period seems in retrospect. The

ongoing acceleration of years as we grow older is a price we

pay for learning.


WE ARE PERPETUALLY short of time.

An inability to concentrate is one major contributing factor in

feelings of relentless time pressure.

Time is eaten up not only by the activity we are carrying out at

a given moment, but also by the unfinished business we are

juggling in our heads, because every activity we keep on the

front burner encumbers our working memory.

Unfortunately, multitasking is one of the surest ways to fritter

away time.

Every time we turn our attention to a different activity, the

mind needs to switch gears, which explains why we always

seem to require more time for a task if we are interrupted.

The Cup of Life Runneth Over

The Secret Pulse of Time

Education

Transcript of The Secret Pulse of Time