If you take enough acid, it can become incredibly difficult to perceive the passage of time with eyes closed. On one of my higher doses, I was in such an uncomfortable state of mental agitation, fetal position under my covers, that I tried killing time by playing a game of pretending hours were passing when I closed my eyes, and I could briefly believe it until an external sound clued me back in.<p>Changes in spatial perception might also explain some mental visions, like truly massive scale structures that are hard to imagine when sober, but those incidents aren't as profound on acid in my experience, and you don't see them visually. They're more high-definition thoughts.
> “In older language, distances were typically given by time — the days it takes to go from one valley to another — since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.”<p>This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not conceptualize of change occurring within a stratum like time. Were there any reasons we would track the number of sunsets before the advent of agriculture?<p>I would really like to see some research on why time behaves so strangely on psychedelics. Our everyday consciousness is mostly stable and steady so it's quite natural to think of it as dependent on time, as if there is a constant metronome quietly ticking away in the background. Most people assume that 2018 will <i>feel</i> mostly the same and <i>take</i> about as long as 2017. Only when things start slowing down and we peer behind the curtains of our egos do we get the sense that things are much weirder than we'd like to think.<p>Personally, I think the illusion of time must involve a many different brain processes. Memory is certainly one of the keys, but I wonder if the overall state of connectivity or speed or processing of the brain doesn't have an effect. The ego also seems implicated somehow, as we experience time differently in states of flow and moments of awe and wonder.
In short, time awareness and spatial awareness are linked. Does that mean if you increase your spatial reasoning skills, you could increase the accuracy of your perception of time? I ask because my spatial reasoning skills suck and so does my sense of time. The possibility of increasing both of these skills at the same time instead of just the one changes the cost/benefit equation for me.
This is a really interesting concept. I'm able to take a look at the layout of a room, then turn off the light and navigate across the room easily without running into obstacles. It's not a perfect skill, but it seems like a very tangible ability to me since I consciously do it. I'm also able to wake myself up most mornings without an alarm within 15 minutes of my intended time despite not having a regular schedule, but since I do that while unconscious, I'm hesitant to believe that it's a real ability and not just good luck. The idea that my brain's ability to count beats in time could be related to my it's ability to track location in space makes me believe it could be a tangible ability after all.
I am not sure what to make of this. My spatial sense is immaculate - I can sense direction/orientation extremely well - I have near-perfect recall of "way to destination" - so much so that after having visited any previously unknown location once, I can navigate back to it years later without much effort.<p>Time, on the other hand, is a complete mystery to me - I can not tell if a few minutes have passed or hours. I am totally dependent on my clock and calendar to be a functional adult. Similarly, I have no sense of rhythm, beats etc. Nada, zilch, zero.
That article prompted me to reread "Remembrance of Times East" [1]. That describes an Australian aboriginal tribe which only has absolute position terms, no relative ones. So they say for instance "the cup on the north-east side of the table", rather than left or right.<p>This even affects their concept of time, whose flow from past to future is described in terms of an absolute geographical orientation frame. Rather than me repeat it here, if you're interested, read the abstract of [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610386621?url_ver=Z39.88-2003" rel="nofollow">http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610386621...</a>
Time is a path “through” space. In other words, <i>change over space</i> IS TIME. That is why they found “timekeeping” in the space brain. In a sense, they didn’t discover anything. They reaffirmed that time is an aspect of space (or of any n-manifold).
Fascinating article. Time is a human construct, it's interesting to me how the fundamentals of the planet - sunrise and sunset, the two solstice moments as the planet tilts into the other direction to provide more of less sunlight - are overshadowed by human habit patterns. The 'Brain’s Space-Time Matrix' sounds like our true underpinnings, as opposed to our concepts of time by the clock and calendar year..
This is a half-formed thought, but if you are blind, how would you perceive space? You can feel against a wall, but you will only be correlating time with locomotion (how long it takes to move your hand against a wall at a certain force) to create space. Spatial reasoning becomes temporal reasoning. (Ignore for the moment you can directionally locate by hearing). It makes this result even more fascinating to me that they are biologically linked to the same part of the brain, rather than one part compensating for another.