I often sit and ponder time..  You know, where has it gone, how come I am not getting anything done in long amounts of time, why does time seem faster at some points and slower at others, and how does my perception of time change.

When time feels like it is moving slowly does this mean my brain is sped up?  Is this just my perception because I am just focusing on time more?  When I wake up in the morning, am really tired, and blink to find that 10 minutes has blown by is my brain really functioning that slowly? Maybe time has really spead up?  There is no indication that others think so.  Whats the deal when someone in a group says that time has dragged/flown and everyone in the group has the same perception?  On and on and on and my internal conversation never ends.  There is never any peace in the head of a strippee. :)

This article on the BBC News web site has some interesting information on time perception and sleep scheudles.  The really interesting stuff is the discussion about the man in a cave experiment.  Some dude that locked himself in a cave for two months and slept, awoke, and ate on his own schedule, without the influence of day/night or society.

Mentally, he had completely lost track of time, but the results showed his body had kept up a rhythm.

While the length of Siffre’s waking days varied widely, from 40 hours to just six, a clear pattern emerged. The average length of his days was just over 24 hours. Evolution, it seems, had tailored his body’s clock to run closely to the Earth’s day length.

And an experiment conserning the reality of the perception of time.  The basis is that sometimes time seems to be moving slowly and sometimes quickly.  Given that, for the subject in the experiment, time moves slower when something intense is happening (car accident, falling, etc.) which may suggesting that the brain/thought process is speeding up.  The experiment involved a "perceptual chronometer", a wristwatch-like device which flicked blindingly fast between two LED screens.  So fast that a person can only see a blur and not the number that is on one of the screens.  When the experimentee "performs a terrifying backwards free-fall of 33 metres" does his brain speed up enableing him to see the number?

All Jesse had to do was jump, and read. As he ascended the 33ft metal cage no-one seemed to believe this curious experiment might work.

When Jesse landed, he noted he had seen "98". Dr Eagleman checked. In fact the number was 96. Not quite spot-on, but the two numbers look very similar on a digital screen.

"I would have loved it if he had seen the numbers exactly," says Dr Eagleman. "But this at least suggests to me that he’s able to take in information faster than he was before".

Further jumps got similar results - all suggesting that time did seem to slow down for Jesse during the jump.

So while time on the clock may be constant, the time in one’s brain is elastic and personal

Very interesting.  But what does similar resluts mean?  Did he ever see the exact number? Was jumping off backwards consistantly frighting enough to keep getting the results after growing more accustomed to it?  Did they try traveling at similar speeds by other means to make sure that it wan’t caused by the physical movement?

I also don’t buy the part about "ASPS, or Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome - a disorder of the body clock that shifts their day forward."  If this is real then I must have TSPS, or Tardy Sleep Phase Syndrome, because I like to stay up late and get up late.  I am, however, doing an experiment about this very subject, right now, to see if I can turn myself into an early riser.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Personal, Science, Scott. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.