Don't Just Stand There
A lot of people have been checking out "The Possibilian," a piece in The New Yorker about David Eagelman, whose research deals with the perception of time.
He discusses feelings I think we're all familiar with. That during extreme moments, time seems to slow down. It reminded me of when I was a kid. My parents would go out on Saturdays, leaving me and my brother home alone. We'd do stuff like play hockey. Sometimes, you'd knock over a lamp--it really did seem to take longer to hit the ground than gravity would suggest.
Which reminds me, I trained myself (as much as a I could) not to stand by, dumbfounded, when these events occurred, but to try to stop it. I think I saved a few lamps that way.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:17 AM
2 Comments:
Medieval philosophers and theologians debated what Time is, and whether angels experience Time or anything like it (they do, but not as we do), and whether in the next life humans will experience Time in the same way as we do now.
Modern philosophers (even those who don't believe in angels) often return to the medieval debates to get different persectives on what Time is, and what it could be.
Meanwhile, modern psychologists have investigated the perception of time, and found that it many ways it doesn't match what a simplistic Cartesian-Newtonian viewpoint might suggest. The falling lamp may seem slow or fast, but either way it seems like a continuous motion which can be divided into arbitrary small pieces. And as alluded to in the Eagleman article you linked to, some sensory data -- such as the sound of a door slamming or an electric shock -- are psychologically experienced as a monad: the mind does not (and apparently cannot) subdivide them into a continuous sequence lasting for a period of time, even though the sound or the electricity clearly does last for more than zero time.
Back in my druggie days in the late 1980s, I found that marijuana and nitrous oxide were very effective ways to slow down subjective time. I would play side two of CCR's Bayou Country, do the drugs during the first track, and then by the time the second track ended, the silence between track 2 and track 3 seemed to take forever.
Don't try this at home.
Grateful Dead music seems endless to me even without drugs.
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