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StewieGriffin
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How do we perceive the Time?
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StewieGriffin said:How do we perceive the Time?
Ever heard of a clock?StewieGriffin said:I was about to agree with you as this was my own opinion too, but it just came to me: How do we perceive the "rate" of the passage of time? I like to propose that we do it by comparing one ordered set with another, but then it comes the question of: What is the structure I define on these ordered sets that enables me to compare them and judge on their relative "rate of occurrence"? -for which I have no answer right now.
Evo said:Ever heard of a clock?
Perhaps if you do a search on the history of how humans decided to "tell time" and how they agreed to divide time up according to the length of a day, it might help you. It's really very easy to understand.
I'm quite serious. Biologically, humans have adapted to day/night patterns based on the length of a day here on earth. Our mechanical clocks are based on the length of a day. How we biologically perceive time is very closely tied to the length of a day. People that are completely obscured from daylight and knowledge of time will slightly shift their circadian rythms, but not drastically.StewieGriffin said::uhh: That was funny (sort of);
:shy: but "funny" was ALL that it could be.
Evo said:I'm quite serious. Biologically, humans have adapted to day/night patterns based on the length of a day here on earth. Our mechanical clocks are based on the length of a day. How we biologically perceive time is very closely tied to the length of a day. People that are completely obscured from daylight and knowledge of time will slightly shift their circadian rythms, but not drastically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm
apeiron said:You can say that our perception of time is tied to our sense of having a rate of action. So we get used to being able to doing things at a certain rate (like hitting tennis balls, generating mental images, whatever) and these actions connect to make a flow of changing experience.
Which is why time drags when you are not engaged in a rapid flow of events and speeds past when you are in a flow of activity.
It is more complicated than that of course. You can get into the role of the basal ganglia and cerebellum if you want to talk neurology. But basically we don't experience time in some stand back and measure it way. It is all about the rate at which we can create actual change - which works out at around two or three attention shifts per second.
StewieGriffin said:I was about to agree with you as this was my own opinion too, but it just came to me: How do we perceive the "rate" of the passage of time? I like to propose that we do it by comparing one ordered set with another, but then it comes the question of: What is the structure I define on these ordered sets that enables me to compare them and judge on their relative "rate of occurrence"? -for which I have no answer right now.
Evo said:Stewie, you asked an extremely vague question in the biology forum.
Perhaps you should clearly explain in detail exactly what you want to know rather than make us play a guessing game.
StewieGriffin said:Implicit in your concept of "rate" is "time" again; to me it is more like you are utilizing the notion of time to define the very same thing.
Stewie, when I sent your postStewieGriffin said:Evo, I explained my point clearly on the very quote you picked up to reply to at first
to a physics mentor, they weren't sure what you meant either. They wondered if you meant the distancewas about to agree with you as this was my own opinion too, but it just came to me: How do we perceive the "rate" of the passage of time? I like to propose that we do it by comparing one ordered set with another, but then it comes the question of: What is the structure I define on these ordered sets that enables me to compare them and judge on their relative "rate of occurrence"? -for which I have no answer right now.
.1 second is however far light travels in that interval
StewieGriffin said:I was about to agree with you as this was my own opinion too, but it just came to me: How do we perceive the "rate" of the passage of time? I like to propose that we do it by comparing one ordered set with another, but then it comes the question of: What is the structure I define on these ordered sets that enables me to compare them and judge on their relative "rate of occurrence"? -for which I have no answer right now.
1- Without loss of generality, I am assuming that here, sight is the only means of perception of the external world.
Evo said:It seems the amount of information you can process and remember greatly increases while under such great stress.
jackmell said:May I offer an hypothesis:
My understanding is that neurons "integrate". They sum up past behavior and that sum influences their present behavior. This integration is always changing, even when we're sleeping and it's value is constantly affecting our neural circuitry by changing synapses in our brain. So consider watching a minute pass by on a clock. During that one minute, some neural pathway in the brain has changed; some synapse has grown stronger or weaker perhaps. That in turn affects other pathways that are linked or connected to those neurons. The overall dynamic state of the brain is altered (slightly) by that passage of time. Our perception of that changing dynamics, how we "feel" this changing physiology, may be how we perceive time.
1- No lollipop.
StewieGriffin said:I can't reason this way -ignorance, been to doctor, medications hurt my stomach- but I think we cannot be real-time conscious of the dynamics of our (personal) neural structure, can we?
Update: What I am trying to say/support is that we conclude a sense of time/passage from our previously aggregated perceptive data.
jackmell said:Why not Stewie? I believe consciousness is precisely just (the sum total of) that realization. Or rather, it's an emergent property of the sum total of our neural dynamics.
StewieGriffin said:Jack, do you mean we are "real-time" conscious of the dynamics?
On a side note, I was just thinking of how do we basically "differentiate"? That's the very building block of our intellectual existence, but yet, do we really differentiate between two things at the very "same time"? And if so, what do we exactly/algorithmically mean by that term -at the cognitive level.
Continued...Brains have a difficult problem to solve. Signals from different modalities are processed at different speeds in distant neural regions, but to be useful to the organism as a whole, these signals must become aligned in time and correctly tagged to outside events (Eagleman, 2005b). Understanding the timing of events, such as a motor act followed by a sensory consequence, is critical for moving, speaking, determining causality, and decoding the barrage of temporal patterns at our sensory receptors.
Despite its importance to behavior and perception, the neural bases of time perception remain shrouded in mystery. Scattered confederacies of investigators have been interested in time for decades, but only in the past few years has a concerted effort been applied to old problems. Now, experimental psychology is striving to understand how animals perceive and encode temporal intervals, whereas physiology, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and EEG unmask how neurons and brain regions underlie temporal computations. In this review, we sketch parts of an emerging picture and highlight remaining confusions about time in the brain. Some of the overarching questions are as follows: How do brains encode and decode information that streams in through time? How are signals entering various brain regions at varied times coordinated with one another? What is the temporal precision with which perception represents the outside world? How are intervals, durations, and sequences coded in the brain? What factors (causality, attention, adrenaline, or eye movements) influence temporal judgments and why? Does the brain constantly recalibrate its time perception? In this mini-symposium, we illustrate different experimental approaches that attempt to shine light on these questions and others.
from the articleEvo said:This is also a good article.
Time and the Brain: How Subjective Time Relates to Neural Time
Continued...
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/25/45/10369
Time perception refers to the subjective experience of time passing. It is how we perceive the passage of time, including how fast or slow time seems to be moving.
Our brain perceives time through a complex process involving multiple brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. These areas work together to process and integrate information from our senses and create our perception of time.
There are many factors that can influence our perception of time, including age, emotions, attention, and external stimuli. For example, time may seem to pass more quickly when we are engaged in a fun activity, while it may seem to slow down when we are bored or anxious.
While we cannot directly control our perception of time, we can influence it through various techniques such as mindfulness, meditation, and changing our daily routines. These practices can help us become more aware of our perception of time and potentially alter it in certain situations.
There are several theories as to why time seems to pass more quickly as we age. One is that our perception of time is relative to our lifespan, so as we get older, a year becomes a smaller portion of our overall life experience. Additionally, as we age, we tend to have more routine and less novel experiences, which can make time feel like it is passing more quickly.