> 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.
I believe it's based on what the brain considers valuable information (or necessary to determine the situation). When you drive a longer distance the first time it seems like a year. After driving the same distance plenty of times the brain filters out the information as it's considered "safe" or of no value. The opposite happens if you are in an accident, the brain needs all the information it can get, time seem to slow down as a lot of information is taken in. Just my theory anyways; condensed: time perception is relative to information stream the brain takes in.
Another conjecture to consider is individual perception of time could be based on new experiences. That is, when experiences are mostly new, time feels slower. When most experiences are old (i.e. routine), time feels faster.
This conjecture then tells one to go out and experience new things regularly!
That's not necessarily the case. Another possibility is that when it seems like time is passing more rapidly, it's because the events occurring have a lot of similarity to previously experienced events—so the brain compresses them. It fits the data in the same way: more things are novel when you're younger, less can be compressed. And, it fits exceptions to this rule that occur later in life (in my own experience anyway).
To get around it, I think having less abstract experiences would be a good approach. If you're thinking in a highly abstract manner, maybe all your mornings might be identical and can be compressed into the unit 'morning.' In particular, I mean mindfulness, through meditation. Or you could just throw yourself into something new.
> 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.
There's another layer of pattern-finding involved: "Why the hell is a person telling me these facts? If they're being told this way the other person must also believe they are related."
It's like conditional probability: Knowing that they're being communicated to me, it's very likely these facts are related.
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.
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
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.)
I think we find slo-mo interesting because it lets us experience the very passage of present time and events slowly, rather than just perceived passage which is after the fact.So we get to see things in a way we haven't before, which would presumably be more memorable and also would slow down perception of time passing....
I think of it like zooming in on an image so that it's easier to process information in a higher resolution. Slow motion is like zooming in so that you can interpret things on a higher resolution as well (just on a different axis). Scrubbing back and forth across video is like interactive zoom where you can gather more precise information about a particular subset of the total data and compare to the whole.
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.
a) 24FPS are easily detected as flickering; our true flicker fusion frequency is found around 60-80Hz.
b) Perceptual time discretisation heavily depends on the modality and even the task in question. For motion extraction, this "limit" may be much lower or higher than for olfactory tasks or memory retrieval. Overall, it's really hard to put a time delta on neural processes -- after all, biological systems are more or less continuous.
> 24FPS are easily detected as flickering; our true flicker fusion frequency is found around 60-80Hz.
Shooter player here. This is a laughable statement. Pretty much anybody can tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz - even the mouse cursor moves smoother. Good players try to play at higher than 120hz rates, because it does make the difference.
Those statements are not necessarily in contradiction. When I quickly move the mouse in a circle on my computer I see the pointer displayed at several, quite far away, locations at the same time. It looks like the same time anyway because of temporal fusion.
If the mouse were moving continuously you would be able to see the full trace of its path and not just a few discrete locations along the way. A higher frequency would get closer to this.
Also, in an interactive scenario, the frame rate will impact how quick you get feedback on your actions.
With 60Hz, the frames each take 17ms, meaning the next frame will be on average 8.3 ms away. Thus if you perform an ingame action, you will get visual feedback in ~8.3ms, whereas with 120Hz it will come in 4.1ms.
There is probably some kind of buffering done, so likely your action will not end up in the currently drawn frame but the one after that. So the response will on average come 3/2 frames after your action: 25ms later for 60Hz v.s. 12.5 ms for 120Hz. 10ms faster reaction time should be noticeable.
Hmmm, their statement doesn't say that nobody can but says that some people can't. Those for whom the value is 60Hz or less. What their statement does say is that around 80Hz is a value that is indistinguishable from anything higher
I imagine they both do something VSync, however, does not change the refresh rate of the pixels on the screen. It changes the refresh rate of pixels in the buffer. Monitors can only update each pixel at a given rate and that's determined in hardware first, software second.
Only with motion blur. Movies seem fluid even at 18 fps because the motion is so blurred. If you try to play a video game without motion blur at 18 fps it just looks awful.
It also depends on darkness and color, so I really doubt the eye's fps has anything to do with the brains perception of time.
For those that have a hard time seeing why this matters, it can be thought of as a matter of sampled versus not.
Games are essentially sampled screenshots. With virtually no hints as to what happened between samples. Just, in one frame an item is in coordinate X. In the next, it is in Y.
Movies, on the other hand, were not discrete samples of time. If between frame A and B, an item moved between point X and Y, then it will leave a blur between them.
That is, the information is distorted, but it is there. Unlike the discrete sampling where the information is just lost.
Right, I hadn't meant to say that you keep all of the information. Just that you don't typically lose all of it. Contrasted with perfectly discrete samples.
With the old fashioned film you are probably referring to, projectors are designed to flash each image twice or even three times, meaning that a 24fps movie has a flicker rate of 48 or 72 Hz[0].
The takeaway is that the perceptual frame rate for brightness is higher than the perceptual frame rate for motion.
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.
It's not possible to define something by it's ability to do something else. A smoker is not smoking cigarettes, nor inhaling smoke. Whatever is responsible for consciousness (and there's plenty evidence, more than to the contrary, that is not the brain), it can not be defined by what it does. Consciousness is not my reading the words I'm writing here, not me thinking the words before writing them in a foreign language.
It's trivial to say that consciousness gives us the ability to do many things, still it escapes a definition mainly for the very fact that it does something, as opposed to everything else that falls under the umbrella of science(s), where description by attributes (e.g. the charge of the electron) sort of says what an objects says. It still escapes an ontological knowledge (we don't have the eye of God, as Putnam put it), but the electron doesn't really do anything, so we're not forced to explain something else than its properties, intrinsic or extrinsic.
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.
You mean the entertainers whose show, at the very basest level, is a show about doing (often) high-budget, high school science fair projects?
In many of their more sciency, less blowy-up-y experiments, they're actually quite good about following the scientific method.
If they had a large enough sample size, which when they bring in people for experiments is very easy to make large enough, then they are very likely measuring a real effect. The question is what are they measuring?
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.