Have you had the experience of losing track of time?
Many of us have had the experience of being fully engaged in something, looking up, and thinking, what happened to the time?
Have you had the experience of time moving in slow motion? For me, that happens waiting in line. When has it happened recently for you?
There's a lot going on in the research on human perception of time. Neuroscientst Sylvie Droit-Volet at the University of Clermont in Avignon, France, is leading research on the multiple ways our brains track our perceptions of duration under different experiential conditions and across our lifespans. No surprise that our brains don't run on the relatively modern technology of clock time.
Consistent with our observations at Kairos Cognition, we experience duration: the ancient meaning goes to wood which persists over time. And we experience the present moment, which is ephemeral, going back to the ancient experience of fever, which is highly present, then disappears.
The rapid response shows up when we activate our reaction processes -- what we call the Associative process. For most of us, the powerful experience of this shows up when we're surprised; something unexpected shows up in our line of sight; an unexpected noise bounces off our eardrums and rattles our cochlear bones; we're surprised by a touch.
From these stimuli, we become fully present to the event. We stop tracking the duration of the event. Our heightened presence can be activated by fear, surprise, curiosity. It creates a powerful present awareness that then fades. Hence the analogy to fever. We live in the moment.
Duration shows up within our Sequential process. When we slow ourselves down and engage with intentionality, when we predict, plan, and move toward a goal, we activate our brain's ability to perceive, track, and remember the duration of our engagement. We often call it time spent.
Since my theme -- in the moment and for a duration of posts -- is metacognition, this coming week, catch yourself fully engaged and losing track, maybe even just for short time, of the passage of that time.
Another time, find yourself fully aware of feeling the seconds, minutes, maybe hours passing.
When is your existence timeless, and when is your time being spent?
If you have time for more, there will be more on time in the next post.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper