Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: we're back for part two of our discussion of this
Speaker 1: present moment, the now, and we're trying to get inside
Speaker 1: the now. So in our last episode we talked some
Speaker 1: about the physics of now, but the history of time
Speaker 1: keeping and about the physical concept of now, of the present,
Speaker 1: and whether there is such a thing as now. Now.
Speaker 1: We're going to keep doing this, probably accidentally several time
Speaker 1: and now all the time, but physicists in general would
Speaker 1: probably say that there is no such thing as now
Speaker 1: from a universal point of view, that relativity shows us
Speaker 1: that there isn't simultaneity across the universe, and there's no
Speaker 1: external objective way to to sort synchronize events into and
Speaker 1: now in the timeline of the universe right and and similarly,
Speaker 1: you can't say I'm gonna do x uh eight now's
Speaker 1: from right now. It just doesn't work. Yeah, there's no
Speaker 1: apparent unit of now in in physical time keeping either.
Speaker 1: But physics aside, we still do have this profound sense
Speaker 1: of the present. I mean there's a reason these concepts
Speaker 1: appear in our language. Why do we have a word
Speaker 1: for now? Why do we have a word for the
Speaker 1: present if there isn't something relevant going on there? So
Speaker 1: this time we wanted to explore the philosophy of the present,
Speaker 1: the philosophy of now, and the psychology and neuroscience of now.
Speaker 1: What's going on in our minds when we perceive a
Speaker 1: present moment, when we think about what's happening right now?
Speaker 1: You know, I know I've mentioned New age and spiritual
Speaker 1: author Eckart Tootle on the show before and how I
Speaker 1: found some of his ideas concerning mindfulness rather helpful. Uh,
Speaker 1: And what his central thesis is that the present is
Speaker 1: is all we have and this too, being part of
Speaker 1: time is an illusion. Oh great, so we've got nothing, Well,
Speaker 1: you've got, but there's a lot to be had and nothing.
Speaker 1: Here's here's a quote from totally. He says, quote time
Speaker 1: isn't precious at all because it is an illusion. What
Speaker 1: you perceive as precious is not time. But the one
Speaker 1: point that is out of time the now. And I
Speaker 1: really like that the idea that maybe we shouldn't think
Speaker 1: of now as a point within time, but a point
Speaker 1: outside of time. Yeah, I kind of like that too.
Speaker 1: I think it might be easy for, you know, some
Speaker 1: kind of hard science minded people to think of that
Speaker 1: as like, oh, that's just new age nonsense, that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean anything. I think that kind of does mean something.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about your experience of time. What do
Speaker 1: you have the power to act on in your own experience? Like,
Speaker 1: what point of time do you have the power to
Speaker 1: do something about. You can't really do anything about the
Speaker 1: past past, because it's already happened. You can remember it,
Speaker 1: but you can't change it except in your memory by
Speaker 1: distorting it. And don't underestimate the power of that. No,
Speaker 1: that can happen, but you can't actually change what happened
Speaker 1: in reality. You can change your memory, but the past
Speaker 1: is gone. You can't really change the future because it's
Speaker 1: not here yet. You don't have access to it. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's you know, you don't have any power over
Speaker 1: things that are causally disconnected from you down the chain,
Speaker 1: And in a weird way, you almost don't really have
Speaker 1: the power to change the present either, because it's happening.
Speaker 1: That's right, it's happening right now, at least as you
Speaker 1: sense it. I mean, to whatever extent there is such
Speaker 1: a thing as the present in our experience, it's what
Speaker 1: you're experiencing, not really what you're doing. So where where
Speaker 1: do you live? Where does action happen? Where does change
Speaker 1: take place? Yeah? Is it? To what extent? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it a conscious thing? Is it is? It? Is?
Speaker 1: It's subconscious? Is it a series of subconscious processes that
Speaker 1: are going on? Are we all as as our friend, uh,
Speaker 1: Scott Baker who put it, Are we all just slaves
Speaker 1: to the darkness that comes before and therefore there's no
Speaker 1: there's no real choice or or or agency at all. Well,
Speaker 1: I'd say that I think our Scott Baker and Eckhart
Speaker 1: total are on exactly the same page here that it's
Speaker 1: just a question of whether you make it sound positive
Speaker 1: or make it sound negative. I never thought of that before. Now,
Speaker 1: wouldn't you kind of agree? Yeah? Yeah, I think there's
Speaker 1: a valid point. Yeah, Uh, totally is just totally is
Speaker 1: selling a a more positive vision of what the world
Speaker 1: can be, um and uh and Baker baman not. That's
Speaker 1: not to say that Baker doesn't have some optimistic ideas
Speaker 1: in mind, but he has a much darker vision of
Speaker 1: of of reality of course, and this we're already getting
Speaker 1: into the realm of philosophy, right, and there is a
Speaker 1: heck of a lot of philosophy of time out there.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yes, yeah, I mean the nature of the
Speaker 1: present moment is it's tied up with our experience of reality.
Speaker 1: So it is of course the domain of philosophy. It's
Speaker 1: one of the most argued about topics in all the philosophy.
Speaker 1: You have multiple different schools of thought that weigh in
Speaker 1: on the nature of now and time and the place
Speaker 1: of time, of now in time, and we could we
Speaker 1: could podcast until the end of time about just the
Speaker 1: various approaches to this. Yeah. I would say one reason
Speaker 1: that philosophy of time is so popular is because it's
Speaker 1: so closely related to the philosophy of the perception of
Speaker 1: free will. Um. This came up actually just a minute ago,
Speaker 1: and what I was talking about comparing you know, our
Speaker 1: Scott Baker and Eckartley. In both cases, I think they
Speaker 1: might be add I don't want to speak too much
Speaker 1: for totally, but I think in both cases it sounds
Speaker 1: like they're advocating a universe in which we just kind
Speaker 1: of accept that we are not necessarily the causal agents
Speaker 1: ourselves that bring about change. That we have the experience,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of the sensation of being behind our
Speaker 1: own actions. But you can't get behind the behind the actions.
Speaker 1: You know that that you as you are acting now
Speaker 1: or a product of things that came before, and though
Speaker 1: those consequences that came before, we'll have consequences that echo
Speaker 1: into the future. But you don't necessarily have free will
Speaker 1: in the classical sense under this understanding of time, because
Speaker 1: where would the free will take place? What would happen?
Speaker 1: What changes in the now? Alright, So so let's just
Speaker 1: roll through some of the broad categories of philosophy of
Speaker 1: time and the now, uh, and and again again. Each
Speaker 1: of these is a topic that we could easily do
Speaker 1: an entire podcast episode on and and maybe very well
Speaker 1: returned to in the future. So first up, we have
Speaker 1: to touch on fatalism. My favorite. This is the notion
Speaker 1: to him that the future is unavoidable. With enough data,
Speaker 1: or perhaps a robust enough simulation, you could accurately predict
Speaker 1: all future events. What's more, you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: avoid those events. The future is not open, but rit
Speaker 1: closed in inexorable, and this entails a good bit more
Speaker 1: than the present, but we'll see how it all ties in. Shortly,
Speaker 1: I would say that this point of view and my
Speaker 1: experience is more popular with physicist than it is with philosophers,
Speaker 1: because a lot of philosophers, I think, are are caught
Speaker 1: up in the idea of explaining agency, like they're really
Speaker 1: trying to find free will and agency and our actions.
Speaker 1: But you know, physicists just say, well, look at what
Speaker 1: the math says. It looks. You know, every indication from
Speaker 1: our mathematical model of the universe is that past and
Speaker 1: present and future they're all just part of the same block.
Speaker 1: And that's a block of the universe that exists. So
Speaker 1: what how how could you change it? In what sense
Speaker 1: would you be altering the future? Up next, we have
Speaker 1: a reductionism with respect to time. So the idea here
Speaker 1: is that time does not exist independently of the events
Speaker 1: that occur in time. When we talk about time, we're
Speaker 1: talking about temporal relations among things and events. And this
Speaker 1: was an argument of Aristotle and many others. So where
Speaker 1: do you think this would fit into our idea of
Speaker 1: modern physics? It seems like modern physics except for the
Speaker 1: people who don't believe in time like you know, Julian
Speaker 1: Barber and all those. Most modern physicists would probably not
Speaker 1: agree with this, would you say, because spacetime is spacetime? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would think so. Up next, we have platonism, as
Speaker 1: in Plato with respect to time, Plato, Newton, and others.
Speaker 1: They counter reductionism with respect to time. The general ideas
Speaker 1: there with the idea that time is the independent container
Speaker 1: in which all else is stored. Okay, so this sounds
Speaker 1: a little bit more like the spacetime idea, like spacetime
Speaker 1: could exist without the objects in it. Maybe. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: this next one is a doozy and it takes us
Speaker 1: all the way up to Uh. This is mc taggart's argument,
Speaker 1: which he made in his work The Unreality of Time. J. N. E.
Speaker 1: McTaggart argued that there is no such thing as time.
Speaker 1: He argued that there are two ways to order time,
Speaker 1: A series in which we measure everything by its relation
Speaker 1: to the present, and B series, in which we measure
Speaker 1: things by the relationship between two moments in time. Each
Speaker 1: one comes with it share of complications and Nictaggart believes
Speaker 1: that time containing both A and B series is not real,
Speaker 1: but other thinkers have come along to accept either A
Speaker 1: or B rather than reject time itself. So this is
Speaker 1: sort of asking the question of whether time actually flows, like,
Speaker 1: is there such a thing as the present? Is there
Speaker 1: happening in the universe? And if things really do happen,
Speaker 1: that would seem to be the A series, Right. If
Speaker 1: if there's a present moment moving along through the history
Speaker 1: of the universe, that that's the A series, and the
Speaker 1: B series would be that time is just a It's
Speaker 1: just a measurement between change events, right, So that the
Speaker 1: subset here people who latch onto A or B A
Speaker 1: theory is that is that A series is all there
Speaker 1: is and anything that looks like B is really A.
Speaker 1: In other words, time passes yet a past a present
Speaker 1: in the future. This is also referred to as the
Speaker 1: tensed view of time. And you have B theory, which
Speaker 1: this say is B is all there is, anything that
Speaker 1: looks like A is actually be and time time does
Speaker 1: not pass the tense less theory of right. You know,
Speaker 1: we talked about this, and I think maybe we should
Speaker 1: come back in the future outside of this discussion of
Speaker 1: the present moment and now to do a whole episode
Speaker 1: on the idea that time doesn't exist, because I think
Speaker 1: this is not a majority viewpoint among physicists. You know,
Speaker 1: the majority physicists might say nothing actually happens. There is
Speaker 1: no present moment in the universe, but there is a
Speaker 1: time in the universe. Right. It's it's such a mind
Speaker 1: blowing topic that we we do need more time to
Speaker 1: consider it, and we will come back to it at
Speaker 1: a future point in time. Right, that's when we'll discuss
Speaker 1: that there's no such thing as time. Of course, it's
Speaker 1: all an illusion. But yeah, so hopefully then we can
Speaker 1: talk about Julian Barber and McTaggart and the others who
Speaker 1: agree with them. Alright, So moving along with the sort
Speaker 1: of broad schools of the philosophy of time, we have
Speaker 1: a present is um. This is an a theorist approach
Speaker 1: that states that only the present exists. Things outside of
Speaker 1: the present. So the claw source of roads, Genghis Khan,
Speaker 1: or the next Fast and Furious movie does not exist.
Speaker 1: They just literally are not real until they are currently existing. Right.
Speaker 1: If it's not currently existing, it's not a thing, be
Speaker 1: it Genghis Khan or or or a movie that is
Speaker 1: inevitable but not yet made. So the only thing that
Speaker 1: exists is the present moment, and the past and the
Speaker 1: future are not real and do not exist. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems like it would be hard to make sense
Speaker 1: of for me, It would be hard to make sense
Speaker 1: of that picture of the universe given um, given like
Speaker 1: the lack of simultaneity you know, across the universe and
Speaker 1: the fact that things can appear out of order to
Speaker 1: different observers based on the speed of light and all that,
Speaker 1: right exactly, so, we have another another argument that might
Speaker 1: work better with all that, and that is eternalism. This
Speaker 1: is one of several non presidentism approaches, and it argues
Speaker 1: that objects from the past and future exist. We can
Speaker 1: call these non present objects. They exist just as much
Speaker 1: as present objects. So the Clossus of Roads and Genghis
Speaker 1: Khan exist just as much as you and I, even
Speaker 1: if they are no longer present. And here's the other thing,
Speaker 1: the inevitable next the Fast and the Furious movie is
Speaker 1: much the same. It's as real as anything that's around
Speaker 1: right now or existed in the past. But that's only
Speaker 1: because it's actually going to happen. It's not like hypothetical
Speaker 1: future things that never actually happen exist right now. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the thing, it's ultimately hypothetical because something could occur,
Speaker 1: or a series of things that could occur that would
Speaker 1: obviously prevent the next Fast and Furious movie from happening.
Speaker 1: But in that case it never would have existed to
Speaker 1: begin with. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I would say
Speaker 1: under this model, only the future that actually happens to
Speaker 1: come to exist exists right now. But of course we
Speaker 1: never got another Interspace movie, we know when we never
Speaker 1: got to explore future um miniaturized adventures inside of Martin
Speaker 1: short stomach. Oh but we will because Hollywood will continue
Speaker 1: to be out of ideas for new things, and they
Speaker 1: will just revisit old franchises until they're plowing into like
Speaker 1: Police Academy reboots and stuff, and they've got to get
Speaker 1: to Interspace two before they do the Police Academy reboot.
Speaker 1: All right, well, I look forward to Interspace too, even
Speaker 1: if I'm ultimately disappointed at how overwhelming the c g
Speaker 1: I is. Alright, Beyond this, we have the growing Block
Speaker 1: Universe theory of time. This is an anti presidentism approach
Speaker 1: in which the universe is continually getting bigger because of
Speaker 1: all this stuff we keep adding. So we're you know,
Speaker 1: we're front loading time with new time, new stuff, new
Speaker 1: space time. So every second that exists, we're essentially adding
Speaker 1: a room onto the house because there's more for the
Speaker 1: universe to contain since it contains past and present. Okay,
Speaker 1: and then just a one added note on time travel
Speaker 1: that I thought was interesting. So time travel cannot happen
Speaker 1: in an eighth theory theorist president is um because the
Speaker 1: present is all their is, so you can't travel into
Speaker 1: the future of the past. Uh. And of course you know,
Speaker 1: in addition to all the backward this is an addition
Speaker 1: to all the backward causation is impossible talk, which is
Speaker 1: all fruit for another discussion. Yeah, well, I think backward
Speaker 1: time travel is also impossible under b theory, right. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean I would say that that that is my
Speaker 1: understanding as well. But we're really overdue too for a
Speaker 1: proper time travel discussion on this show. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: think we should take a quick break and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we will start to look at the psychology
Speaker 1: and neuroscience of our experience of now, what what happens
Speaker 1: to the mind on the present moment? Thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So in our previous episode, we talked a little bit
Speaker 1: about mental time travel uh in memory and how these
Speaker 1: are core to our experience of time as flowing. We
Speaker 1: remember what has come before, we anticipate and use mental
Speaker 1: time travel or chronasthesia to understand what is going to happen.
Speaker 1: And then we have to wonder what what what would
Speaker 1: it be like to be un shackled from these I
Speaker 1: mean that's kind of cord to a lot of meditative
Speaker 1: exercises or even the flow states that we get into
Speaker 1: with our our work or our hobbies, like what what
Speaker 1: can we do to cut off the default mode network
Speaker 1: and no longer worry about the past and the future
Speaker 1: and live in the quote unquote present. Well, some answers
Speaker 1: to this question can be found in an individual known
Speaker 1: to psychologists as Patient K. This is a Toronto resident
Speaker 1: who suffered severe brain damage during a motorcycle accident, and
Speaker 1: he lost his episodic memory. So it's important to note
Speaker 1: here he can still do all the things he learned
Speaker 1: to do prior to the accident thanks to his procedural memory. Right, so,
Speaker 1: if you lose your ability to make memories, you still
Speaker 1: probably remember how to tie your shoes, right, you can't
Speaker 1: remember what you had for breakfast? Right. So this guy
Speaker 1: can speak, he can play games that he learned previously,
Speaker 1: He can navigate his his neighborhood without becoming lost. But
Speaker 1: he cannot remember what he did yesterday, and he cannot
Speaker 1: acculate on what he's going to do tomorrow. He has
Speaker 1: no autobiographical memory at all. Now, that second thing you
Speaker 1: said is fascinating. So his ability to make memories is compromised.
Speaker 1: And it's not just that now he can't remember what
Speaker 1: he had for breakfast, can't remember, you know, what he
Speaker 1: did yesterday. He also can't imagine what tomorrow will be like.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating to me because it means, in some sense,
Speaker 1: our ability to remember the past is necessary for our
Speaker 1: ability to imagine the future. That forward and backward time
Speaker 1: travel are inextricably linked. Yeah, and now something's pointed out
Speaker 1: about this patient by Dan Falk and his book In
Speaker 1: Search of Time, The History, Physics and Philosophy of Time.
Speaker 1: He says that patient Casey is quote completely rooted in
Speaker 1: the present, with no ability to move backwards for forward
Speaker 1: cognitively in time. And here's the thing too, He's completely
Speaker 1: unaware of his condition because he has no no memory,
Speaker 1: he cannot form new memories of explanations of what's going
Speaker 1: on here, and uh Daniel Shackter, who who wrote the
Speaker 1: silent to seven Sins of Memory, which we've referenced on
Speaker 1: the show before he had He has said that the
Speaker 1: patient Casey is quote, a shell of a person, a fragment,
Speaker 1: but also notes that Casey rates his own personal happiness
Speaker 1: at a level of four out of five, so he's
Speaker 1: he's he's quite happy, He's not in a state of misery.
Speaker 1: And you have to, you know, ask to what to
Speaker 1: what degree is he happy because he's unshackled from worrying
Speaker 1: about the future and contemplating the future or remembering anything
Speaker 1: in the past. Yeah, I mean that it's sort of
Speaker 1: like asking like, would you like to be like that?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think most people probably wouldn't, because you
Speaker 1: would still feel that many opportunities for things that you
Speaker 1: deeply care about in life are would be closed off
Speaker 1: to you if you had this condition, even though the
Speaker 1: having the condition might not be all that unpleasant in
Speaker 1: the moment. Yeah, I mean, it comes down to that
Speaker 1: description of a shell of a person. Would you like
Speaker 1: to be a shell of a person who's tremendously happy
Speaker 1: all the time? Four out of five, tremendously happy. I mean, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know what would you rate yourself, Robert, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know what out of well? It vary, you know,
Speaker 1: it varies from moment to moment. I guess I would
Speaker 1: say four out of five because I wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: say five out of five. That's that doesn't leave me
Speaker 1: any room for improvement. You could always be happier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But I you know, I I hesitated to give myself
Speaker 1: a three. It's a complex question, you know. I hate
Speaker 1: to answer well being questions in relation to coffee because
Speaker 1: it's such a cliche. But I know mine is in
Speaker 1: relation to coffee. It's like when I when I have
Speaker 1: had a little bit of coffee, I'm a four. But
Speaker 1: when I've had, you know, two cups of coffee, I'm
Speaker 1: a two. Oh, because you get you get too jittery,
Speaker 1: and I get that, I get the fear. Yeah, it's bad.
Speaker 1: I have I have noticed that with my own caffeine consumption,
Speaker 1: that the rate is a little different now. In his
Speaker 1: book book, Falk also references another individual, a San Diego
Speaker 1: resident named ep and he has nearly a nearly identical
Speaker 1: condition to patient Casey and Likewise, he has described as
Speaker 1: being quote happy all the time, I'm quote and devoid
Speaker 1: of a stream of consciousness. He is trapped into present
Speaker 1: without the ability to traverse either recorded memory or simulated future.
Speaker 1: So this seems to show the same thing that he
Speaker 1: his inability to think about events in the past also
Speaker 1: prevents him from mentally exploring future events. Um, and I
Speaker 1: know I've seen at some point there was a case
Speaker 1: where one of these patients was being asked, uh, what
Speaker 1: will you do tomorrow? And his answer was whatever is
Speaker 1: most beneficial. That's that's that's revealing, like in a way,
Speaker 1: he's he's more honest about the He's more honest in
Speaker 1: his answer because he's he cannot engage in mental time travel. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: if I ask you what you're gonna do tomorrow, you're
Speaker 1: gonna kind of bluff a little bit, right, You're gonna say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I think what I'm gonna do is I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get up and do my normal stuff, do yoga,
Speaker 1: have breakfast, whatever. You're kind of bluffing. You can't really
Speaker 1: know that's what you're gonna do. You just think that's
Speaker 1: probably what you're gonna do. Right, It's it's ultimately my answer.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be just as inevitable as the next Fast
Speaker 1: and Furious movie, you know. Um, But obviously many different
Speaker 1: things could occur to to drive both of these trains
Speaker 1: off the track. I guess the true answer would be
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do whatever I do. Yeah. Uh, you know
Speaker 1: I mentioned uh Eckartola already. I'm gonna come back to
Speaker 1: him one last time in this episode because there's a
Speaker 1: wonderful children's book that he put out with Mutt's cartoonist
Speaker 1: Patrick McDonald, titled Guardians of Being. And it looks at
Speaker 1: our pets, cats and dogs in particular, and it looks
Speaker 1: at them as windows into the formless, into the timeless,
Speaker 1: the idea that that creatures are bound by neither past
Speaker 1: nor present. And this enables us to better center ourselves
Speaker 1: in the present. Uh and and and and you actually
Speaker 1: reference this a little bit, uh in the first episode
Speaker 1: talking about when you when you see the excitement that
Speaker 1: your dog has for a walk, right, Well, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's there's like nothing happier in the entire
Speaker 1: universe than Charlie about to go outside into the grass.
Speaker 1: And uh, and you get the sense I mean probably
Speaker 1: probably this is projection, but at least you get the
Speaker 1: feeling that this is because it's all there is to
Speaker 1: him right now. The only thing in the universe to
Speaker 1: him is the thing he's excited about doing, and it's
Speaker 1: he's seen all the signals it's about to happen. Like,
Speaker 1: he's not worried about anything else. There's nothing else beyond
Speaker 1: that thing. There's nothing really behind him. Is just all
Speaker 1: about what's about to happen. Yeah, he is. He is
Speaker 1: devoid or free from the very human concerns of time.
Speaker 1: And indeed this has been a long a long time
Speaker 1: understanding of animals that they neither remember the past nor
Speaker 1: contemplate the future in a truly meaningful human fashion. Now,
Speaker 1: I think that that's a little bit complicated by some
Speaker 1: observations of people like, for example, friends of All who
Speaker 1: we talk to on the show before um who you know.
Speaker 1: He's a primatologist. He studies apes primarily, but he talks
Speaker 1: a lot about the intelligence of animals and signs that
Speaker 1: he thinks he sees elements of rudimentary time travel in
Speaker 1: in some of the great apes and in some birds
Speaker 1: and stuff. Right, well, yeah, it does get complimental time travel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think not actual time. The morlocks did try and
Speaker 1: and steal the machine, as I recall. But yeah, if
Speaker 1: Falk gets into this a bit in his book, he
Speaker 1: he makes a point that that no ape has ever
Speaker 1: communicated with sign language anything to suggest he was remembering
Speaker 1: a past event. Of course, these sign language by apes
Speaker 1: as a way of develving into their mind is also
Speaker 1: a complicated situation. Uh. And and there have been studies
Speaker 1: with various animals and some birds, uh, mainly primates and
Speaker 1: birds that have that have allowed scientists to argue in
Speaker 1: favor of mental time travel. But the the argument against
Speaker 1: that is, well, to what extent are the do these
Speaker 1: anticipations fail to go beyond the context of the present?
Speaker 1: So like are they are they is using a tool
Speaker 1: to get a meal out of a log? Are you
Speaker 1: actually engaging in in mental time travel or are you
Speaker 1: just applying a certain uh you know, certain cleverness to
Speaker 1: the the situation or is there any difference between the two.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, I would say in the
Speaker 1: case of apes, I think there are some examples. I
Speaker 1: hope I'm not remembering this wrong, but I think I
Speaker 1: remember some examples of apes, for example, saving tools for
Speaker 1: later that they don't need for a task right now,
Speaker 1: but they know can be useful in the future. Or
Speaker 1: for example, I think it was Jay's right, Jay's remembering
Speaker 1: where items had been placed in a room even though
Speaker 1: they couldn't immediately access them. Yeah, these are scrub jays,
Speaker 1: I believe, right. Yeah, those those come up in experiments
Speaker 1: a lot. So this remains kind of an open question.
Speaker 1: There are some some fascinating arguments to be made on
Speaker 1: both sides. Uh. As far as humans go, however, human
Speaker 1: infants do seem to live in an eternal presence up
Speaker 1: until around eight months of age or so, and then
Speaker 1: key abilities begin to come online more between three and
Speaker 1: five and a six year old child is is just
Speaker 1: light years ahead of the smartest chimp or or j
Speaker 1: that has ever lived. And uh and this is this
Speaker 1: is a fascinating two. Between eight and ten years old,
Speaker 1: that's where begin when we begin to see time as
Speaker 1: an abstraction. Uh. And another great fact that I ran
Speaker 1: across in false book is that most ten year olds
Speaker 1: think they age an hour when the clock turns ahead
Speaker 1: for daylight savings, but most fifteen year old realize that
Speaker 1: that's not the case. I'm kind of surprised about that
Speaker 1: with ten year olds. I would think generally ten year
Speaker 1: olds would know that, like, the clocks don't determine how
Speaker 1: old you are. Well, I wonder how much of the
Speaker 1: two is just they're not thinking about that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: and if you just spring it on them, they might say, Oh, well,
Speaker 1: I guess I am the clocks. The clock when ahead
Speaker 1: an hour or so, I'm an hour ahead to Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but I found I found that in righted this
Speaker 1: idea that we don't have it now, we don't have
Speaker 1: a presence, and then our understanding of time just kind
Speaker 1: of begins to grow and swell until we can truly
Speaker 1: begin to understand the abstraction and just mind rending complexity
Speaker 1: of time. All right, well, I think it's time to
Speaker 1: turn to some psychology and neuroscience experiments to try to
Speaker 1: understand a little bit more about what's going on in
Speaker 1: the brain. We've established that physics probably doesn't really allow
Speaker 1: for a now, or at least doesn't allow for any
Speaker 1: kind of universal simultaneity. There's no externally objective now whether
Speaker 1: or not things actually happen, or whether or not time
Speaker 1: actually flows in the universe. That's maybe up for debate,
Speaker 1: but there's not a universal now, and we still have
Speaker 1: this experience of now. So what's going on in the
Speaker 1: brain when we have a feeling of the present, when
Speaker 1: we say something is happening now, how does the brain
Speaker 1: decide what now is? I want to look at a
Speaker 1: series of experiments and thoughts associated with the neuroscientist David
Speaker 1: Eagleman and many researchers working with Eagleman in his lab.
Speaker 1: They've done some really cool stuff with the perception of
Speaker 1: simultaneity in the brain. And the first case I want
Speaker 1: to look at is the idea of the flash lag experiments. Now, Robert,
Speaker 1: have you ever seen these demonstrated or had you know?
Speaker 1: Just let this work on your mind a little bit.
Speaker 1: I don't think I've actually observed footage of one of
Speaker 1: these experiments now, I've only read about them. They're more
Speaker 1: They sound very simple when you describe them, but when
Speaker 1: you actually notice it happening to you, it's a little
Speaker 1: bit troubling. So there are a lot of video demonstrations online.
Speaker 1: If you want to see it for yourself, you can
Speaker 1: go look up a video of a flash lag experiment.
Speaker 1: But I think I can describe it pretty simply here's
Speaker 1: one version. Imagine there's a room and in the middle
Speaker 1: of the room there's a big vertical hoop, and there
Speaker 1: is also a little light that flat that can flash
Speaker 1: somewhere in the room. And you see somebody standing at
Speaker 1: one end of the room throwing a ball through the air.
Speaker 1: And while the ball is in the air, there's a
Speaker 1: flash in the video and video of this room, and
Speaker 1: you watch it over and over again, Throw flash, throw flash.
Speaker 1: And what it looks like to you is that every
Speaker 1: time the flash happens uh somewhere in the air after
Speaker 1: the ball is about a foot or so past the hoop.
Speaker 1: But when the video gets slowed down frame by frame,
Speaker 1: you can see clearly that the flash happens at the
Speaker 1: exact same time the ball passes through the hoop. And
Speaker 1: your brain is getting it wrong. Your brain is lagging
Speaker 1: behind events in registering when it sees the flash. So
Speaker 1: you might not think this is all that weird, but
Speaker 1: it's weirder than it sounds. You're probably thinking, Okay, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: it takes the brain a fraction of a second to
Speaker 1: see things like there's a delay between external reality. Um,
Speaker 1: and the light has to hit my eyes, my mind
Speaker 1: has to process it. But it's weirder than that because
Speaker 1: it's not just that you're seeing the entire world or
Speaker 1: the whole video at a delay. You're seeing one part
Speaker 1: of the video at a delay relative to a different
Speaker 1: part of the same video. You're you're perceiving events out
Speaker 1: of order, so the flash is lagged relative to the
Speaker 1: motion of the ball. It's not just that we don't
Speaker 1: see things exactly when they happen. We don't necessarily see
Speaker 1: things in the order they happen. And again, this is
Speaker 1: this is seeing and perceiving, not remembering, right, Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is seeing and perceiving right there in the moment um.
Speaker 1: So this effect, and you can show this with all
Speaker 1: kinds of different things. Like another version of this would
Speaker 1: be you've got a square moving around on a screen,
Speaker 1: and when it passes a certain point on the screen,
Speaker 1: another square flashes up on the screen for a second,
Speaker 1: and you'll be asked to judge the relative positions of
Speaker 1: the squares, and you might say, well, the square that
Speaker 1: flashes up is I don't know, you know, three or
Speaker 1: four grid squares behind the moving square, But in fact
Speaker 1: they're exactly in the same place. Like the square that
Speaker 1: flashes up flashes up when the other. When the moving
Speaker 1: square is exactly in line with it, but you see
Speaker 1: it flashing up behind the moving square. Why is this?
Speaker 1: Why would your brain be lagging one type of perspective
Speaker 1: perception with with relation to the other. This effect has
Speaker 1: been known about for at least sixty years. There were
Speaker 1: experiments with it in the nineteen fifties and there have
Speaker 1: been a bunch of experiments on it since. And before
Speaker 1: Eagleman's team first had this paper about this in the
Speaker 1: year two thousand, there were two major explanations that have
Speaker 1: been hypothesized. One was known as the latent se difference,
Speaker 1: and this proposes that the brain processes moving objects faster
Speaker 1: than it processes flashed objects. And this assumes quote online
Speaker 1: model of visual perception, which essentially means that you are
Speaker 1: conscious of perceiving something as soon as the brain can
Speaker 1: get the data ready for you. It's all just coming
Speaker 1: in as fast as you can see it, and if
Speaker 1: it takes longer to get one kind of data ready,
Speaker 1: then you just perceive that thing later. You can think
Speaker 1: of this sort of like a TV camera that's supplying
Speaker 1: a live feed or a live stream, but the feed
Speaker 1: is a little bit glitchy, and some types of things
Speaker 1: show up on the screen and get pixelated out. It's
Speaker 1: basically live, but sometimes things get messed up. The other
Speaker 1: main explanation before their paper was motion extrapolation, and this
Speaker 1: basically says that perception is predictive. When your brain perceives
Speaker 1: a moving object, it compensates for a processing latency by
Speaker 1: making you see the object ahead of where it actually
Speaker 1: is in its trajectory. So under this model, when you
Speaker 1: like see an eagle diving after a rabbit, your brain
Speaker 1: actively moves the eagle ahead and its dive to make
Speaker 1: up for the processing lag. So it's really about ten
Speaker 1: feet from the ground, but your brain says, well, it's
Speaker 1: moving pretty fast. Let's make it look like it's seven
Speaker 1: feet from the ground to compensate. And then this is
Speaker 1: the basic prince of bowl of of of hunting. Right,
Speaker 1: you think you're going to aim for where the prey
Speaker 1: will be as opposed to where the prey is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but notice in hunting you actually have to aim ahead
Speaker 1: of where you see, so your brain isn't fully aiming
Speaker 1: ahead for you, like you have to use your hands
Speaker 1: and stuff to do that. You can't just aim at
Speaker 1: exactly where you see, because that's not actually ahead of
Speaker 1: the animal enough to to hit it with the arrow
Speaker 1: or whatever. So this version would be kind of like
Speaker 1: a live feed, but updated with predictive models of things
Speaker 1: that haven't yet taken place in front of the camera.
Speaker 1: It would be a predictive, anticipatory camera that says, Okay,
Speaker 1: you know this person is moving towards stage left. We'll
Speaker 1: just put them a few frames ahead to make up
Speaker 1: for the fact that the camera is a little slow. Wow,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it sounds like a system that is
Speaker 1: in place for a brain that is not not employing
Speaker 1: a lot of like conscious thought about the position of
Speaker 1: the target. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that's a
Speaker 1: really interesting idea. But you can, in iediately see some
Speaker 1: reasons for doubting this, and I'll bring up a big
Speaker 1: one in a minute. All right, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break, and when we come back, we'll have more
Speaker 1: on the science of now and we're back. So in
Speaker 1: their two thousand paper, Eagleman and said Snowski proposed an
Speaker 1: alternative explanation. It's not either of those. They call their
Speaker 1: explanation postdiction quote. Visual awareness is neither predictive nor online,
Speaker 1: but instead postdictive. And this means that when you perceive
Speaker 1: the flash, happening is retroactively determined by stuff that happens
Speaker 1: in a period of time after you see it. I'll
Speaker 1: explain why in a second, but they come up with
Speaker 1: a period of about eighty milliseconds following the flash. So
Speaker 1: in other words, then now you perceive is not a
Speaker 1: predictive model of the future like the motion extrapolation hypothesis,
Speaker 1: And it's not a slightly glitchy live feed like the
Speaker 1: latency difference hypothesis. It's more like a movie. It's more
Speaker 1: like a pre taped, edited film home patched together by
Speaker 1: your brain, and it happens really fast. It was a
Speaker 1: film that was only filmed about eighty milliseconds ago. But
Speaker 1: it's not a live feed. It's an edited product. It
Speaker 1: kind of it kind of plays into, you know, ideas
Speaker 1: of our of our brain, or at least our perception
Speaker 1: as being like the pilot in a cockpit, you know,
Speaker 1: and uh, and we're given the information we need to
Speaker 1: know about what the crew is doing. We're not actually
Speaker 1: piloting the starship, but we're just kind of the the
Speaker 1: head observer. Yeah, I mean there's a lot in neuroscience
Speaker 1: that can kind of create that impression, though that also
Speaker 1: gives a rise to the homunculous fallacy inside the brain.
Speaker 1: Um But I want to mention a couple of experiments
Speaker 1: that they used to back up this hypothesis of postdiction.
Speaker 1: So the first experiment tested the motion extrapolation theory and
Speaker 1: they found it to be wrong. So the way this
Speaker 1: works is you've got a ring going counterclockwise around a screen,
Speaker 1: and once it hits a certain spot on the screen,
Speaker 1: the screen flashes up an image of a white disk,
Speaker 1: and then the ring does one of three things. It
Speaker 1: either stops right when the white disc appears, or it
Speaker 1: continues along its original path, or it reverses direction and
Speaker 1: heads back to the top of the screen. And they said,
Speaker 1: to quote what participants report to have seen at the
Speaker 1: time of the flash depends on the events after the flash.
Speaker 1: So if the ring stops moving right at the time
Speaker 1: of the flash, there's no flash lag effect at all.
Speaker 1: If our brains were predicting the motion of the ring,
Speaker 1: we would probably see a flash lag effect even though
Speaker 1: the ring stops moving when the when the disc flashes up.
Speaker 1: And then they did another experiment experiment to which further
Speaker 1: tested the motion extrapolation theory by having the moving ring
Speaker 1: start with the flash, so that the white disk flashes
Speaker 1: up as soon as the ring starts moving. The flash
Speaker 1: lag effect still showed up even though there was no
Speaker 1: original trajector read to predict from. So this seems to,
Speaker 1: in my view, pretty much bust the motion prediction theory.
Speaker 1: If there's no original trajectory, how could you be predicting right?
Speaker 1: So instead, what this seems to indicate is that AFT
Speaker 1: is something that happens after we see a flash of
Speaker 1: something determines how we integrate the information of the flash.
Speaker 1: And this is consistent with other findings in psychology and neuroscience,
Speaker 1: for example, that this is really weird one the color
Speaker 1: fi effect. Robert, have you ever witnessed this one personally?
Speaker 1: I don't think I have. Okay, so very simple set up.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's it's so simple it'll sound like it
Speaker 1: couldn't be disturbing to you yet again, but it probably
Speaker 1: should be. So there's a screen that flashes two dots,
Speaker 1: that's all. Dot one appears, then disappears, then Dot two appears,
Speaker 1: then disappears. Weirdly enough, under the right conditions, like if
Speaker 1: it's happening fast enough, instead of seeing what really happens,
Speaker 1: Dot one appears, then disappears, Dot two appears, then disappears.
Speaker 1: In said, we perceive a dot moving back and forth
Speaker 1: between the positions of the two dots. This is the
Speaker 1: plane fi effect. It's the tendency of the brain to
Speaker 1: interpret a series of still images as continuous motion. And
Speaker 1: of course we we know that this is crucial in film, right. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean this really makes sense when you when you
Speaker 1: think about it, right, because we have evolved to perceive
Speaker 1: the movement of generally physical objects like a mouse running
Speaker 1: across the ground, and then the mouse is not going
Speaker 1: to teleport, and therefore, when you have a dot of
Speaker 1: light seem to teleport from one spot to another, our
Speaker 1: brain is interpreting that as movement from one spot to another.
Speaker 1: I think that's a very good explanation. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no reason to expect we'd see teleportation in nature,
Speaker 1: and if we see something that looks like teleportation, it
Speaker 1: would make the most sense for the brain to adapt
Speaker 1: to that as if it were an error. This This
Speaker 1: reminds me too that there have been experiments with very
Speaker 1: young children that demonstrate uh that they know that teleportation
Speaker 1: has not possible if they see something like teleportation presented
Speaker 1: to them, that they know that it's b S. That's cool.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets even weirder. So that's just the
Speaker 1: five effects. That's pretty normal, and we can see the
Speaker 1: normal explanation for that. It gets weirder when you add
Speaker 1: colors to the dots. So it's exact same setup. Dot
Speaker 1: one appears than disappears, Dot two appears than disappears, but
Speaker 1: make the dots different colors. Dot one is red, dot
Speaker 1: two is blue. What people claim to perceive usually in
Speaker 1: this experiment is not only a single dot moving between
Speaker 1: the two positions, but changing colors halfway along. So dot
Speaker 1: one is red, dot two is blue, and you see
Speaker 1: it moving to the dot to position and becoming blue
Speaker 1: about halfway there. Now, it would seem like this would
Speaker 1: only be possible if the brain were retroactively changing the
Speaker 1: contents of your present time perception, because if your if
Speaker 1: your brain is being pre addictive, if it's thinking ahead,
Speaker 1: there would be no way for the brain to predict
Speaker 1: the color of the second dot right because you haven't
Speaker 1: seen it yet. So the only way you could have.
Speaker 1: This illusion is if your brain is retroactively telling you
Speaker 1: what you're seeing right now. There you go. There, there's
Speaker 1: your now. So the now isn't is starting to look
Speaker 1: not so much like a now, The now is starting
Speaker 1: to look like a then. So earlier we mentioned that
Speaker 1: all this happens to within an eighty millisecond window after
Speaker 1: an event. What's the deal with the eighty milliseconds? Well,
Speaker 1: in the next couple of experiments, Eagleman and said Snowski
Speaker 1: tried to test the latency difference hypothesis. So they put
Speaker 1: a came up with a setup similar to the previous experiments.
Speaker 1: A ring goes around a screen, A white disk flashes
Speaker 1: in the rings path, and then verily, very shortly after that,
Speaker 1: the direction of the ring reverses. And essentially they wanted
Speaker 1: to see how long the ring had to keep going
Speaker 1: in the same direction as it's a original trajectory to
Speaker 1: produce the same flash lag effect from the earlier experiments.
Speaker 1: If it was just that flashes take a little bit
Speaker 1: longer to process than movement, allow the latency difference hypothesis.
Speaker 1: They figured that changing the direction of the ring more
Speaker 1: than you know, uh ten or twenty milliseconds after the
Speaker 1: flash shouldn't change the flash lag impression. Instead, they found
Speaker 1: that it did and it lessened it. So any reversal
Speaker 1: of the direction of the moving object and before twenty
Speaker 1: six milliseconds completely canceled the illusory displacement. And they found
Speaker 1: that sixty seven to eighty milliseconds of movement in the
Speaker 1: same direction as the original movement are needed to cause
Speaker 1: the full flash lag effect. And so their conclusion is
Speaker 1: that the flash quote resets motion integration, and motion is
Speaker 1: newly calculated and postdicted to the time of the flash.
Speaker 1: So what they're saying there their experiments show here is
Speaker 1: that flashes get processed a little bit different ly in
Speaker 1: the brain than motion does. And when we see a
Speaker 1: flashed object, the brain recalculates what we've just seen and
Speaker 1: presents it to us. So the first time we're seeing something,
Speaker 1: it has already been edited in post kind of a
Speaker 1: weird thing to imagine, Like, what does this mean for us?
Speaker 1: I would say that in some cases for visual processing,
Speaker 1: there is a lag window about eighty milliseconds in which
Speaker 1: our brains are still constructing the sense of now, now
Speaker 1: isn't happening? Now? Now is happening? At a delay, and
Speaker 1: you're not even getting the full story. So from this,
Speaker 1: I wonder if it could reasonably said be said that
Speaker 1: the human now is not a moment in reality, but
Speaker 1: first of all, a perceptual impression. It's sort of a
Speaker 1: sketch edited together by the brain, not necessarily reflecting the
Speaker 1: order in which events occurred, as might be measured by
Speaker 1: a camera or a machine, reflecting an information gathering period
Speaker 1: of roughly eighty milliseconds, and with variable editing, editing a
Speaker 1: facts depending on what happened during those eighty milliseconds. And
Speaker 1: this brings us, I mean, it just brings us back
Speaker 1: to the the idea of the cave. Right, we're just
Speaker 1: watching the silhouettes on the wall. But the way I
Speaker 1: put it is this, we already know that our memories
Speaker 1: are not perfect copies of events as they took place. Right.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this on the show lots of times.
Speaker 1: Our memories are very low resolution, very suggestible. We tend
Speaker 1: to change our memories without realizing it all the time.
Speaker 1: You just memory is not that good for lots of
Speaker 1: kinds of things. But what this suggests is even the
Speaker 1: first time you see something, it is in a way
Speaker 1: already like a memory. It's as if there is no
Speaker 1: such thing as seeing in the real time. Even when
Speaker 1: you think you're seeing something right now, it is already
Speaker 1: a kind of a constructed memory. Yeah, so many analogies
Speaker 1: I'm tempted to like to run to to explain this. Uh,
Speaker 1: they all have to They all hinge on the idea
Speaker 1: that what we were seeing we're really see you know.
Speaker 1: It's like the one that came to mind was, it's
Speaker 1: like if we're all going through life seeing through a periscope,
Speaker 1: you know, and so we're not really seeing out of
Speaker 1: our eyes, you know. Yeah, i'd have to be like
Speaker 1: a computerized periscope. It's like making some editing decisions about
Speaker 1: what passes through and stuff like that. Um, I mean,
Speaker 1: this would I think cause us to to be a
Speaker 1: little more cautious about even like, even if you're aware
Speaker 1: that you should be conscious of the fallibility of your
Speaker 1: own memory, and you know, if you were going to
Speaker 1: testify in a court case, you shouldn't be like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm absolutely sure that what happened here is you know, X, Y,
Speaker 1: and Z, because your memory is a little bit more
Speaker 1: fallible than you think it is. Probably, But even your
Speaker 1: perception of events you just now saw just a second
Speaker 1: ago is maybe a little more accurate maybe, but still
Speaker 1: could have flaws in it. Even though you think you
Speaker 1: just saw something, it's not necessarily how it was, especially
Speaker 1: if it happened fast. Legal experts will have to chime
Speaker 1: in and let us know if if this has actually
Speaker 1: been used, because we know that the foulibility of memory
Speaker 1: has come up in trial cases before. But but I
Speaker 1: wonder if anyone has just brought up, as has brought up,
Speaker 1: just how fallible even first impressions may be. I mean,
Speaker 1: I wonder by the time you get into a chord,
Speaker 1: it's always going to be a memory. But this might
Speaker 1: apply to like, say, uh, impressions from the moment, like
Speaker 1: if you immediately if you saw something and then immediately
Speaker 1: wrote down what you saw or told somebody else what
Speaker 1: you saw right then, Um, that that could maybe apply
Speaker 1: to that. Yeah, there's a place where things get even weirder.
Speaker 1: In a two thousand six paper published in Neurons, Stetson, Qui, Montague,
Speaker 1: and Eagleman found that you could actually manipulate this effect,
Speaker 1: the flash lag effect, to cause people to question their
Speaker 1: own causal role in real time actions. Here's how it
Speaker 1: went down. So the team had research subjects press a
Speaker 1: key to make a light flash. Pretty pretty simple, right,
Speaker 1: you press the key, the light comes up, But the
Speaker 1: light didn't flash immediately. There's a time lag between the
Speaker 1: key press and the flash. And because we're so adaptable
Speaker 1: and so crafty and and and such great little critters,
Speaker 1: our brains just started to say, Okay, we've noticed that
Speaker 1: there's a lag every time between when you press the
Speaker 1: key and the light comes up, so we're just going
Speaker 1: to start to ignore that. People started to perceive that
Speaker 1: the light was flashing as soon as the button was pressed.
Speaker 1: Then the researchers did the really devious thing. They cut
Speaker 1: out the delay after this adaptation period had taken place.
Speaker 1: And what did the subjects perceive then, Well, because of
Speaker 1: their adapted perception, sort of updating the speed of the
Speaker 1: flash perception, some of them started to think the light
Speaker 1: was flashing before they pressed the key. You know, I
Speaker 1: feel like I almost felt this effect when my work
Speaker 1: computer was updated most recently, because it got to where
Speaker 1: it was so slow, and it was there's a certain
Speaker 1: amount of lag time opening programs and sometimes even even typing,
Speaker 1: especially in a browser. And then everything was suddenly so fast.
Speaker 1: It was almost as if the words were appearing on
Speaker 1: the screen before I tied them, almost but not quite. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean one has to wonder that what would you
Speaker 1: start to feel if you genuinely believed that it was
Speaker 1: possible that the words were appearing on the screen before
Speaker 1: you typed them. Well, actually, that's you know what, I guess.
Speaker 1: I tend not I'd tend not to think of it
Speaker 1: in these terms. But when one enters a like a
Speaker 1: real flow state of writing, it's it's almost like that.
Speaker 1: And I can and certainly there have been writers before
Speaker 1: who claim a sort of uh, you know, muse inspiration
Speaker 1: or something, or the idea that something is writing through them.
Speaker 1: And I could see where where where it would where
Speaker 1: that situation would lend itself to such an interpretation. Right,
Speaker 1: You're probably never genuinely confused about what the words where
Speaker 1: the words are coming from. But if you work hape
Speaker 1: a bowl of being genuinely confused about that, that could
Speaker 1: lead to really interesting states of mind. And so there's
Speaker 1: a good New Yorker piece from two thousand eleven about
Speaker 1: Eagleman actually, and it discusses his hypothesis at the time
Speaker 1: that this very phenomenon could be one of the causes
Speaker 1: of auditory hallucinations in people with schizophrenia. Uh So this
Speaker 1: came to light when Eagleman discovered that people with schizophrenia
Speaker 1: tended to be very inaccurate on these types of timing tests.
Speaker 1: And so, to quote from the article quote, the voices
Speaker 1: in their heads he suspected were no different from anyone
Speaker 1: else's internal monologues. Their brains just processed them a little
Speaker 1: out of sequence so that the thoughts seemed to belong
Speaker 1: to someone else. And then a quote from Eagleman, all
Speaker 1: it takes is this tiny tweak in the brain, this
Speaker 1: tiny change in perception, and what you see as real
Speaker 1: isn't real to anyone else. So, yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: a fascinating question. Could schizophrenia or any kind of hallucinatory
Speaker 1: condition possibly becaused not by uh, you know, not by
Speaker 1: all the normal mechanisms, but by malfunctions in our constructed
Speaker 1: sense of now? Is your is your feeling of now,
Speaker 1: your period of now causation with relationship to the rest
Speaker 1: of time and the universe, crucial for your sense of
Speaker 1: agency and self. Yeah, and you can easily imagine too,
Speaker 1: like the the feeling of that you did something before
Speaker 1: you could consciously decide to do it, and what that
Speaker 1: would do to your you know, it doesn't take take
Speaker 1: much of a supernatural worldview lane over that to create
Speaker 1: you know, all matter of demons, and because we now
Speaker 1: know from Eagleman's experiments, if they are you know, if
Speaker 1: the interpretation of them is correct, that your sense of
Speaker 1: what's happening in the moment right now is that is postdicted,
Speaker 1: is reconstructed over a very short period of the past,
Speaker 1: then you can very well see that happening like you
Speaker 1: do actually to decide to do something, but eighty milliseconds
Speaker 1: later you have of the impression that you did not
Speaker 1: decide to do it, that it just happened. On the
Speaker 1: plus side, if there's anything to this hypothesis, and I
Speaker 1: don't know how widely this would be taken seriously by
Speaker 1: you know, psychiatrists in the field, they might say, you know,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of reasons not to agree with that.
Speaker 1: But if there's anything to the schizophrenia hypothesis, I think
Speaker 1: one positive takeaway could be that timing conditioning therapies could
Speaker 1: possibly have success in giving people with these kind of
Speaker 1: conditions relief from some of their symptoms. One last thing
Speaker 1: about the experience of now from Eagleman's research. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: that classic adage. You know that if you were spending
Speaker 1: a minute with your favorite friend or something, the time
Speaker 1: passes so fast. But then when your hand, when your
Speaker 1: hand is caught in a hot wolf trap, time passes
Speaker 1: very slowly. Eagleman did not find evidence that the duration
Speaker 1: of perception actually changes in the moment, but he did
Speaker 1: find evidence that the duration of certain types of experiences
Speaker 1: did change upon recollection. So the length of now varies
Speaker 1: drastically when you're remembering events in your episodic memory. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he thinks this depends largely on the salient novelty
Speaker 1: of events we experience. So, for example, a simple experiment,
Speaker 1: if you show somebody a flashing pattern on a screen,
Speaker 1: any initial change in the pattern gets remembered as lasting
Speaker 1: longer than the repeated iterations of a familiar pattern. So
Speaker 1: take that very simple example and apply that to your life.
Speaker 1: I think you might immediately see that, oh yeah, that
Speaker 1: does kind of happen. Like even if all events last
Speaker 1: the same amount of time in the moment when they're
Speaker 1: measured objectively, instances that introduce novelty to your consciousness tend
Speaker 1: to get stretched out in your memory. Retrospectively, this would
Speaker 1: mean we could kind of extend our lives by filling
Speaker 1: them with change and novelty. Yeah, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: the reason one should travel, one should go on vacations.
Speaker 1: One should try new things, even even if you're not
Speaker 1: actually try having to do them. You know, go go
Speaker 1: try mini golf if you've never tried mini golf, because
Speaker 1: it seems to stretch your your experience of life out
Speaker 1: out even further. Well, I mean I noticed this with
Speaker 1: um respect to like, uh, reading and watching movies and
Speaker 1: so just any kind of media. Like if I'm re
Speaker 1: experiencing something familiar, that experience kind of disappears in the
Speaker 1: memory hole, you know. But when I'm experiencing something new
Speaker 1: in media, watching a new movie for the first time,
Speaker 1: reading a new book for the first time, I'm uh,
Speaker 1: that experience gets expanded in memory, like it fills up
Speaker 1: more time. It seems like my life was lasting longer
Speaker 1: in the moment. This is why one should also go
Speaker 1: out of their way to see experimental films that are
Speaker 1: both novel and boring, because the combined energy, like you'll
Speaker 1: remember that experience for the rest of your life. It
Speaker 1: was only it was only a two hour him about
Speaker 1: a person setting in a room, but it felt so
Speaker 1: much longer. Yeah, so I like this. If so, here's
Speaker 1: one of the takeaways about the experience of the present
Speaker 1: and now. If you want, if if you're Roy Batty
Speaker 1: and you want to have more life, always try something new. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That was Roy's problem, is that all he did was saying,
Speaker 1: is that you know, he had to turn to violence.
Speaker 1: He should have turned to art and travel. I guess
Speaker 1: he did turn to travel a little bit. He's seen
Speaker 1: that most of us, uh, you know, wouldn't believe, but
Speaker 1: you'd think that all those those sea beams glittering in
Speaker 1: the in the starlight or whatever, that would have He
Speaker 1: sure did talk about it a lot. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: so it made an impression. Yeah, you know, it reminds
Speaker 1: me of I came across this quote recently, um by
Speaker 1: Staring Carcer Guard that, uh he said life must be
Speaker 1: lived forward, but can only be understood backward. And I
Speaker 1: think maybe that's the same way with the present, right,
Speaker 1: Like you can't really catch the present, you can't catch
Speaker 1: the present in in a backward looking way. You can
Speaker 1: only sort of open, have an openness to experiencing the
Speaker 1: present going forward. That's the only way to do it
Speaker 1: in the moment. But the only way you can really
Speaker 1: understand the significance of the moments, the little present now
Speaker 1: is in your life is looking back on them with memory. Alright, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna wrap it up. But again,
Speaker 1: there there's so much that came up in this two
Speaker 1: part discussion of now and time. Uh, so much that
Speaker 1: we we can and should revisit in future episodes. So
Speaker 1: obviously let us know about any particular points of diversion
Speaker 1: that you would you would like us to return to
Speaker 1: in the meantime. Check out our homepage that's Stuff to
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