Oct
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Mon
3rd
David Eagleman on Time and the Brain
“Clocks offer at best a convenient fiction. (…) They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that it often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.”
A sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. (…)
The interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.” (…)
The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, “encased in darkness and silence,” at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. (…)
[Eagleman] thought of time not just as a neuronal computation—a matter for biological clocks—but as a window on the movements of the mind. (…)
Reality is a tape-delayed broadcast, carefully censored before it reaches us. (…)
“Time is this rubbery thing,” Eagleman said. “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.”
“Clocks offer at best a convenient fiction. (…) They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that it often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.”
A sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. (…)
The interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.” (…)
The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, “encased in darkness and silence,” at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. (…)
[Eagleman] thought of time not just as a neuronal computation—a matter for biological clocks—but as a window on the movements of the mind. (…)
Reality is a tape-delayed broadcast, carefully censored before it reaches us. (…)
“Time is this rubbery thing,” Eagleman said. “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.”
— David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, paraphrased by Burkhard Bilger, The Possibilian, The New Yorker, Aprill 25, 2011
