Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain

> This may be why time seems to speed up as you age: you develop more compressed representations of events, and the memories to be read out are correspondingly impoverished. When you are a child, and everything is novel, the richness of the memory gives the impression of increased time passage—for example, when looking back at the end of a childhood summer.

With no proof or otherwise, I had always conjectured that this was because time is compared proportionally. When I was 6, the three months of summer were approx 3 / 72 of my life = 1 / 24. When I am 60, those three months will occupy 1 / 240 of my life.

> At bottom, causality requires a temporal order judgment: did my motor act come before or after that sensory signal?

The problem is, the brain is a causality-building machine; it loves to find causality where there is none.

If you tell a room of 100 people the following story: "A person fell, there was a sound of a gunshot, and another person was seen running", and then ask each member of the audience to retell the story and explain what happened, a majority of the audience will reconstruct the story by placing the gun shot first, and explain that what happened is the person was killed by the gun.

In this example, no perception-lag is involved; if a story doesn't make sense the way it's told, but makes sense with a few "minor" alterations, then the brain automatically makes those alterations in order to generate meaning.

Hence: superstition, unreliability of witnesses, etc.

I've recently been playing Minecraft on 2b2t.org. The server has a regular lag which can be very annoying when you are starting out. In chat the other day, a player commented that he loved the lag saying it was 'part of the experience'. I started thinking about that and realized that the lag, if you assume it is always present, can be used as a tool. If you know lag is coming, you can do things that you know will be 'unwound' over the next X many seconds. That means you could fall into a hole and see what's in there, then when you lag warp back to where you were, decide not to go into the hole because there was nothing in it of interest.

Imagine if we had that ability here.

John Dobson (, the creator of the dobsonian telescope) in a very interesting interview on "Tonights show" says as follows:

http://www.mystacki.com/#!/post/126/john-dobson:-on-the-toni...

We see a universe of matter and energy in space and time. Matter and energy are the same thing-- Einstein put that together with E=MC2; Space and time are the same thing. Einstein put those two together also with his theory of General Relativity and gravitation. Now whatever you look at you see it in the past (the light that carries the information has to reflect from an objects surface to your eye and that takes time.) You can't see anything when it happens. If you look at it from the point of view from Einstein's equations, the separation between you and what you see is always zero. You see things away from you in space by a trick of seeing backwards in time. You see the sun 8.5 light mins away by seeing it 8.5 light minutes ago. This what Indian philosophy calls Maya or illusion and maintains that space and time are mental concepts. Dobson terms Einstein's equations as the "Equations of Maya or Illusion" http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/41/john-dobson

Immanuel Kant argued--some say proved--this very thing two centuries ago in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Ancient "mystics" knew this for ages. Using modern slang, it is an "environmental conditioning" and "habituation". Newly born babies presumably have no notion of time, except, perhaps, some bodily rithms, like states of sleep and being awake, but sleep too, has evolved the way it is partly due to day/night circle in our shared environment. Other creatures, notably deep water fish and mammals, have different mechanisms for "doing maintenance", like "switching between hemispheres", so they are never asleep (I am oversimplifying, of course). But it is clear that us and them have very different notion of time.

Does anyone know if there is an implementation of the key-press-light-flash-delay temporal illusion anywhere online? I'd love to try that out and experience the light flash "before" the key press after conditioning my brain to integrate the 200ms delay.

If there isn't one, I may have to write it. It sounds really trippy.

I wonder if the reason we find slow motion in movies interesting (e.g. makes things more salient) is related to the time-perception-slows-during-startles thing.

(Assuming the startle slow-down is a side effect of the brain kicking up retention, based on the current experience having valuable information, we might learn to implicitly associate side-effects like time dilation with "this is valuable experience information". But mostly I have no idea what I'm talking about; I'm not even sure it's a well-formed testable idea.)

Excellent article.

Thinking about it, 24fps (good old fashioned film), even though laughably low by the standards of modern displays, manages >1 frame per perceptual time-quanta, which is enough to give the illusion of motion. Any lower than that, and you start getting "frames" where there's no change in the film frame, and the motion illusion breaks down.

So that is what consciousness is, the ability to construct a structured model of the world from disorganized unstructured signals.

Well, consciousness is more than that. It is also self awareness.

But to make a useful world model the brain has to constantly recalibrate model construction in reference to what you could call, well, what else but, the self.

We are meaning making machines.

The longer we live, the more the "meaning-making" and hence it reflects as compressed time.

However, meditation does "stretch" time back to how it felt like when I was a kid (in my memory at least).

Huh, I thought they did the falling/time dilation experiment on Mythbusters and found that the subjects could read the digits that were previously flashing too fast.

Any perception, by definition, is a construction of the brain.

I would love to see an Inception style movie script inspired by temporal integration.

No shit