During 2020, the longest year ever, scientist have discovered the smallest unit of time ever. And it was Steve Martin, yes that Steve Martin, who recently summed it up best on Twitter:
“Just FYI: Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever: the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule. That time is 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or a decimal point followed by 21 zeroes and a 1.”
Thanks for the info, Steve!
In related news, scientists also recently announced a new discovery relating to how our brains perceive time in regards to how some events seem to speed up while others slow down. As any kid comparing gym class to math class can attest to.
As Quanta Magazine puts it:
“Our sense of time may be the scaffolding for all of our experience and behavior, but it is an unsteady and subjective one, expanding and contracting like an accordion. Emotions, music, events in our surroundings and shifts in our attention all have the power to speed time up for us or slow it down. When presented with images on a screen, we perceive angry faces as lasting longer than neutral ones, spiders as lasting longer than butterflies, and the color red as lasting longer than blue. The watched pot never boils, and time flies when we’re having fun.
Last month in Nature Neuroscience, a trio of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel presented some important new insights into what stretches and compresses our experience of time. They found evidence for a long-suspected connection between time perception and the mechanism that helps us learn through rewards and punishments. They also demonstrated that the perception of time is wedded to our brain’s constantly updated expectations about what will happen next.
“Everyone knows the saying that ‘time flies when you’re having fun,’ said Sam Gershman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. ‘But the full story might be more nuanced: Time flies when you’re having more fun than you expected.'”
I’ve always had a hard time accepting the idea that there’s no such thing as time. Even if we invented seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years to match the rise and fall of the sun during our planet’s yearly orbit around our star there should still be a standardized concept of time regardless of how we define it or what we name it. Time clearly exists. Things have a beginning and an end. Living organisms age and then die. Clearly something is happening between point A and point B, that something that we call the passage of time.
And yet perhaps there really is something to the idea that time is just a construct of our brains. A coping mechanism of sorts that helps us make sense of the world around us. A mechanism that our minds may be able to twist and distort depending on what we’re doing and what our expectations are.
If that’s the case I wonder if this fact can be exploited. I remember reading about a character in the book Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything who was trying to live longer. Not Ray Kurzweil style mind you. But, rather, by gaming the system. In theory, if one was more mindful of the passage of time it would more slowly, or at least appear to, as so therefore you would feel like you lived longer even if you still lived as long as you were otherwise going to anyway.
And so I’m wondering if, based on this new research, we can take that approach to an even bigger extreme, on a larger level. Creating, in a way, a new form of meditation, specifically designed to tricking our brains into thinking time is moving more slowly as we manipulate what our expectations are of a given situation.
Of course, not everyone is going to like this new form of meditation. Right now, a lot of people are wishing that they could speed up time, not slow it down. Wishing that 2020 would just end already. But I’m in no hurry. I want to savor every zeptosecond of every day.
Can we trick our brains into thinking time is moving more slowly than it really is so that we live longer?
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