Why do we perceive time to pass at the rate that we do?

[deadstar33]

What determines our perception of the rate at which time passes? My understanding from relativity would be that the rate at which we perceive time to pass relative to a fully stationary observer is mostly (or fully) dependent on our velocity at any particular moment, which remains basically the exact same for every creature on Earth as Earth moves through space. Given this, the rate at which we perceive time to pass does not appear to change as our velocity changes when there is no reference frame (no control observer for the experiment). Am I basically right in what I have said so far?

My main question here is: does our perception of time have to be the way it is due to physical laws, or is it reliant upon our physiology to a certain extent i.e. our brains capacity for registering time passing between events?

Thanks. Feel free to point out anywhere I may have said something silly. This isn't my area of expertise.

 

[bcrowell]

Relativistic effects apply equally to all measuring devices, e.g., time dilation applies equally to all clocks. This is the reason that it is reasonable to interpret it as an effect involving time itself. The brain is just another clock.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Relativity states that even when you are traveling at a high rate of speed, your own perception of time, and all clocks, instruments, etc, traveling with you will all be affected in the same way so that you will have no perception of any time dilation. But you will measure, perceive, see, etc, time dilation in the stationary observer left behind and he will measure, perceive, see, etc time dilation in you and your clocks and instruments.

 

[_PJ_]

What determines our perception of the rate at which time passes?

Your acceleration.

 

[ghwellsjr]

What determines our perception of the rate at which time passes?

Your acceleration.

How is that?

 

[jamjr1979]

Acceleration determines your perception of every other observers clock. Your clock ticks as normal. When it comes to the why in the perception it is because motion through space slows motion through time it is always equal to the speed of light when combined with each other. So at rest all motion is through time and when in motion you are diverting some of your motion though space so it must equal out by a relativistic slowing of time. You wouldn't know the difference the clock ticks the same, the only way to know you are moving at all without reference is during accelerated motion because you can feel it. When in constant velocity motion you can't tell without reference. Read Brian Greenes' The Elegant Unvierse or Fabric of the Cosmos. The analogies are great.

 

[ghwellsjr]

What has acceleration got to do with my perception of another person's clock? Can't I just look at it the same way I look at mine and get a perception of the rate of time?

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand how your post or PJ's post connect acceleration with the perception of time or its rate.

 

[jamjr1979]

Accerlation only affects your perception of time because as you receive information about the other persons clock, you can't look at it you are moving they are stationary. As you receive the information about it you will notice it incrementally changing relative to your clock as you accerlate.

 

[nitsuj]

"What determines our perception of the rate at which time passes?"

You guys got it all wrong.

It's fun.

Fun determines your perception of the rate at which time passes.

lol, human perception of time.

 

[Buckleymanor]

The rate at which we percieve time to pass is subjective to individual interpretation.
Each individuals physiology or state of mind can imagine time to pass at slower or faster rate than anothers.
For example if you were to fall asleep, eight hours might elapse by the clock on the wall but the individual might only percieve or imagine that a short period of time had elapsed.
Perception of time has no relivance to the rate at which physical time passes measured by clocks, similar to the way the colour purple might be perceived as pink by different people.
It would be no use if each individual used his perception of time to get to work by nine.
That is why we have clocks.

 

[rjbeery]

What determines our perception of the rate at which time passes?

You're getting different answers because the question is a bit ambiguous. If mean you objective measurement of time dilation then bcrowell and ghwellsjr gave adequate answers. If you literally mean "our" perception of time flow as human beings then nitsuj and Buckleymanor gave answers that I believe are closer to the truth. Expanding on their comments, humans perceive time as we do due to a function of the processing power of our brains and the rate of electro-chemical signalling in our nervous system. Had we been "wired" to internally transmit data at something closer to the speed of light we would probably experience time in a much different manner.

 

[rchase]

The fundametal answer of why time passes at the rate it does is that we are made of matter. It is said that light does not observe space and time like matter does, and that antiparticles move 'backward' through time in a sense (although we obviously can't ask them which way they are going as they whizz past). We are carbon based life forms. This sets our stage for being very inertial, and very weighty in space-time. If we were lepton based, time would be very flighty and seemingly inconsistent around us as our directionality at high velocity changed often.
So fundametally, we measure time in change, of which the orbits of planets are fairly consistent... The rate of change of everything limited by the speed of light as it interacts with everything.

 

[bobc2]

My main question here is: does our perception of time have to be the way it is due to physical laws, or is it reliant upon our physiology to a certain extent i.e. our brains capacity for registering time passing between events?

Consider a rocket sitting at rest in a 4-dimensional Minkowski space represented by the normal spatial coordinates, X1, X2 and X3 along with X4 (4th spatial dimension). Just sitting there, in our model, it is actually moving along the 4th dimension at the speed of light. To see this, consider what position the rocket must be at along the 4th dimension after one second has lapsed in order for one on board to observe (we leave out the details) the position of the photon of light that has just traveled 186,000 miles along the rest system X1 axis. At that instant the rocket must be positioned 186,000 miles from the origin along the X4 axis (4th dimension).

Now, consider the situation for the blue rocket moving at relativistic speed along the X1 axis of the black rest system. We can represent the coordinates (blue) of the moving rocket as shown below. The strange thing about special relativity is that the rocket is now moving at the speed of light along a 4-dimensional path called the world line, i.e., moving at light speed along the blue X4 coordinate. Even more mysteriously the 3-D cross-section of the universe that the blue observer is living in at a given instant corresponds to a different slice of the 4-D universe as indicated below by the direction of the blue X1 coordinate.

Finally, to make our model a little more surreal, we consider that the rocket, the material object, does not move at all. In fact no physical objects in this 4-D universe are moving at all. In this model, we have a 4-D universe populated with 4-dimensional objects, and if the objects are 4-dimensional, they are not moving.

The point of this is to emphasize that if you wish to carry on a discussion about the passing of time, it might help to first establish a special relativity model of space. Then, see if you can include a concept of the passing of time. For the present model, since there is no physical object in motion, you might consider a conjecture or hypothesis about what it is that is moving along the 4th dimension at the speed of light (note that the 4-D body of someone living for 90 years would extend the order of inches along the X1, X2 and X3 dimensions, but extend the order of 10^13 miles along the 4th dimension).

Two of many models for accounting for time in the literature include 1) A 3-D consciousness advances along the spaghetti-like bundle of neuron fibers (10^13 miles long along a 4-D world line), watching a 3-D movie in a sense, and 2) Consciousness persists all along the neuron world line, and within each approximately 18,600 mile region (roughly 0.1 sec) a psychological illusion of motion is presented to the consciousness (omitting details of the 3-D neuron fractals--essentially corresponding to memory of events that occurred on earlier sections of the world line).

By the way, when considering motion along the world line, we really are just using time ("proper time") as a parameter, the X4 is the actual spatial dimension. So, in that sense we don't really consider time as a physical dimension. We do the same thing in ordinary 3-D space when analyzing the path of a projectile moving through 3-D space--we use time as a parameter--two parametric equations, one for the horizontal dimension and one for the vertical dimension.

Forgive the overly verbose description here. And please don't take it that I'm trying to advance anyone's pet conjectures about time. You can google this stuff. I just thought it might be relevant to point out the possible benefit of considering a special relativity model of some sort when launching into a discussion of time passage.

Having said all of that, it may be more appropriate to discuss the passing of time subject over in a philosophy/metaphysics forum (check the physics forum rules).

 

[Buckleymanor]

Having said all of that, it may be more appropriate to discuss the passing of time subject over in a philosophy/metaphysics forum (check the physics forum rules).

Interesting analysis though I reckon the poster was looking for something along the lines off.

our brains capacity for registering time passing between events?

Which sits neatly into metaphysics.

 

[nitsuj]

"My main question here is: does our perception of time have to be the way it is due to physical laws, or is it reliant upon our physiology to a certain extent i.e. our brains capacity for registering time passing between events?"

Im gunna try and re-word your question into my answer

"our perception of time changes to be the way it is due to physical laws, it is reliant upon our physiology to an absolute extent i.e. our brains capacity for registering time passing between events"

Thinking back to when I was a kid, I remmeber how things like waiting for the week end or Christmas morning could seem like an eternity. At 12 years old thinking about how cool it would be that I could drive when I got "older", only 4 years away seemed like a huge leap into the future. Today, just the loan for my car is 4 years, and is not nearly as big a leap into the future at my current age. Time affects everything, but not the the way I remmeber it.

There are few but some cases of unusual mental illnesses that relate to peoples perception in a limited scope, such as not being able to identify animals and being mentaly capable in every other sense. Perhaps there are cases where someone has no "sense" of time passing. Maybe confused when they find out what time it is. that might be worthwhile for you to look up to find an acceptable answer for you. In, either case I think that is the best angle, cause here you are just gunna have spacetime answers.

deadstar33, at what rate do you perceive time to pass?

And one last try. The answer is two things the distances and the speeds. Imagine you had no idea of our solar system and what "makes" the change from winter to winter again, and simularly from day to day again. I am sure your gut feel would be that days "happen" more quickly then years. But making a day cycle only takes 1,700km/h, while a year cycle takes 100,000km/h. Which one is "happening" faster?

 

[rchase]

I think neurology belongs in another forum. But to answer clearly...
I once read a book called "Einstiens Dreams" very pervocative LSD dreamscape about how time passes. Frankly it is possible that environmental energy affects the resonance of our neurology and response time much like an atomic clock. However, the slowing of chemical interactions in the mind alters the speed of thought, not the laws of physics to the organism as a whole. (Consider chemical energy for one example.)

 

[bobc2]

"our perception of time changes to be the way it is due to physical laws, it is reliant upon our physiology to an absolute extent i.e. our brains capacity for registering time passing between events"

See, this is what I meant by first adapting a special relativity model for space and time. Different observers moving at relativistic speeds with respect to each other do not share the same 3-D cross-section of the universe, which implies that the universe is 4-dimensional and populated by 4-dimensional objects (including the physical bodies). So, when you talk about brain interactions, that implies molecular motion, not consistent with static 4-D molecules.

 

[nitsuj]

Heya bobc2,

I'm gunna reword my rewording of the OPs question so my intended message is more clear. From a physics perspective I have no doubt you are right. that being said here is what I meant:

As our understanding of time changes from a physics perspective our "perception" of time changes. However it is still all within our heads, or is still our perception.

The idea of perception spoils the question. it rhymes, so its true :)

 

[bobc2]

Heya bobc2,

I'm gunna reword my rewording of the OPs question so my intended message is more clear. From a physics perspective I have no doubt you are right. that being said here is what I meant:

As our understanding of time changes from a physics perspective our "perception" of time changes. However it is still all within our heads, or is still our perception.

The idea of perception spoils the question. it rhymes, so its true :)

I understand, nitsuj--good comment. And actually there will be some pretty sharp physicists on this forum who would doubt very much that I am right. Since this is a special relativity thread, I was just trying to give the discussion a little bit of special relativity context. But your comments have served the discussion better than my little foray into 4-dimensional objects. The picture of different observers living in different 3-D slices of a 4-D universe, yet some aspect of observers moving along their world lines at light speed, has always fascinated me and still seems very mysterious. Do we just have some stubborn illusion about time? (I wish I knew what Einstein really had in mind with his "...stubborn illusion..." statement. Maybe someone on the forum has some ideas on that.)

 

[Rap]

If you want a scientific answer, ask a scientific question. A scientific question is one concerning repeatable measurements. The question that has to be asked, then, is how do you measure one's perception of the rate of time? But then, maybe that is like asking how long is a meter? If you use the meter as the definition of length, then it makes no sense to ask how long is a meter. It only makes sense to ask what is the ratio of some length to the defined length of the meter. So, if we take our present perception of the rate of time passage as the fundamental unit, it makes no sense to ask what is the rate at which we see time pass? It only makes sense to compare our rate with other perceived rates.

In a sense, that is why the meter and the second are defined the way they are. They represent distances and time intervals that are not incomprehensibly large or small. The second is about the time between human heart beats, the meter is about the length of a human arm span, zero degrees Celcius is about the freezing point of water, 100 is about the boiling point of water.

So the scientific question would be - why does the human heart beat about once per second, why is the human arm span about a meter? This has to do with the physics of life and the theory of evolution. Humans cannot be orders of magnitude smaller and still be human, its physically impossible. They cannot respond to stimuli orders of magnitude more quickly and still be human - its physically impossible. There seems to be a limit on the size of organisms - no life form has ever been larger than the dinosaur. I don't know the reason for this - any ideas?

A mouse's heart beats 500 times per second, an elephant 28 beats per second. A wild mouse lives a couple of years - 2x10^10 beats per lifetime. A wild human lives 40 years - 1.2x10^9 beats per lifetime. A wild elephant lives 70 years - 5x10^9 beats per lifetime. Hmm - about the same? - I guess a mouse sees time pass more slowly, an elephant more quickly. Check out http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15855403

 

[bobc2]

If you have thirty people sitting and/or wandering around in a closed room (no access to outside) for several hours, then ask them to each write on a piece of paper the time of day, you would get some range of answers. I guess someone could sit there measuring his pulse for a few hours and come up with a fairly accurate answer.

I'm not sure what this all has to do with special relativity. There is wavingess in the 3-D neuron fractals along the 10^13 mile long neuron world line. Is the consciousness an intrinsic property of matter? If so, which component of matter? Is it the mass (wringkles in space), electric charge, weak charge, or color charge? Is the consciousness associated with some unknown entity? Does the consciousness do information processing or does it just observe results of neuron patterns along the world line? How do the correlation functions and eigenvalue/eigenvector processes arise? Is there a universal consciousness synchronized to the individual proper distances among various neuron world lines?

But, now we have strayed far away from questions appropriate to special relativity threads.

 

[nitsuj]

"So the scientific question would be - why does the human heart beat about once per second, why is the human arm span about a meter?"

"per second" is a neat measurement. It is from dividing up a "cycle" of movments between two objects into 24 parts, in this case it is one full turn of the Earth compared to the sun. From there seconds are fractions of those 24 bits. So what you said is a comparison of identified cycles/patterns ect, the cycle of a human heart beat is 1/84600 a rotation of Earth compared to the sun. Comparatively, in your mouse/elephant heartbeat time scenario you are basicaly indexing the life expectancy of each animal to an equal value, say both live for exactly 1 life, the cycle is defined as from birth to death. you are then cutting that cycle up into parts equal to the number of cycles of their heart.

"I guess a mouse sees time pass more slowly, an elephant more quickly" only if you truly believe that life expectancy is the absolute measure of time, in that the elephant and mouse experience the same amount of "time" within their lifetime. However you suggested that you feel time is better described as revolutions of Earth compared to the sun (as was once measured at a specific point in time "years" ago).

mmm... you can almost smell the relativity.

 

[Rap]

However you suggested that you feel time is better described as revolutions of Earth compared to the sun (as was once measured at a specific point in time "years" ago).

The length of a day is much more stable than the human heart beat, so we take a stable reference and divide it as many times as we need to get about a human heart beat. The stable one doesn't have to have a frequency that is neither "very slow nor very fast". Same thing is done today. The speed of light is too fast to be comprehended in terms of everyday experience, the frequency of light from a cesium atom is too high to be comprehended in terms of everyday experience, yet they are used to define the meter and the second, easily comprehended in terms of everyday experience.

 

[petm1]

Consider a rocket sitting at rest in a 4-dimensional Minkowski space represented by the normal spatial coordinates, X1, X2 and X3 along with X4 (4th spatial dimension). Just sitting there, in our model, it is actually moving along the 4th dimension at the speed of light. To see this, consider what position the rocket must be at along the 4th dimension after one second has lapsed in order for one on board to observe (we leave out the details) the position of the photon of light that has just traveled 186,000 miles along the rest system X1 axis. At that instant the rocket must be positioned 186,000 miles from the origin along the X4 axis (4th dimension).

Now, consider the situation for the blue rocket moving at relativistic speed along the X1 axis of the black rest system. We can represent the coordinates (blue) of the moving rocket as shown below. The strange thing about special relativity is that the rocket is now moving at the speed of light along a 4-dimensional path called the world line, i.e., moving at light speed along the blue X4 coordinate. Even more mysteriously the 3-D cross-section of the universe that the blue observer is living in at a given instant corresponds to a different slice of the 4-D universe as indicated below by the direction of the blue X1 coordinate.

Finally, to make our model a little more surreal, we consider that the rocket, the material object, does not move at all. In fact no physical objects in this 4-D universe are moving at all. In this model, we have a 4-D universe populated with 4-dimensional objects, and if the objects are 4-dimensional, they are not moving.

The point of this is to emphasize that if you wish to carry on a discussion about the passing of time, it might help to first establish a special relativity model of space. Then, see if you can include a concept of the passing of time. For the present model, since there is no physical object in motion, you might consider a conjecture or hypothesis about what it is that is moving along the 4th dimension at the speed of light (note that the 4-D body of someone living for 90 years would extend the order of inches along the X1, X2 and X3 dimensions, but extend the order of 10^13 miles along the 4th dimension).

Two of many models for accounting for time in the literature include 1) A 3-D consciousness advances along the spaghetti-like bundle of neuron fibers (10^13 miles long along a 4-D world line), watching a 3-D movie in a sense, and 2) Consciousness persists all along the neuron world line, and within each approximately 18,600 mile region (roughly 0.1 sec) a psychological illusion of motion is presented to the consciousness (omitting details of the 3-D neuron fractals--essentially corresponding to memory of events that occurred on earlier sections of the world line).

By the way, when considering motion along the world line, we really are just using time ("proper time") as a parameter, the X4 is the actual spatial dimension. So, in that sense we don't really consider time as a physical dimension. We do the same thing in ordinary 3-D space when analyzing the path of a projectile moving through 3-D space--we use time as a parameter--two parametric equations, one for the horizontal dimension and one for the vertical dimension.

Forgive the overly verbose description here. And please don't take it that I'm trying to advance anyone's pet conjectures about time. You can google this stuff. I just thought it might be relevant to point out the possible benefit of considering a special relativity model of some sort when launching into a discussion of time passage.

Having said all of that, it may be more appropriate to discuss the passing of time subject over in a philosophy/metaphysics forum (check the physics forum rules).

The motion of time is dilation, and to me the difference between your graph and what we see is that the path of the world line begins at the center of mass of the object you are drawing. Time is continuous, with the object in your example a space ship, centered in time as if unmoving but always dilating. We may always attribute the speed of light to the photon but it is the speed of the interaction between the photon and matter that is always the same, after all what does the photon care if it is moving at c or if it is stationary with matter dilating into it at c both interactions would still take place at the same point in time.