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The self and time prove to be especially present in boredom. They go missing in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, which results from the acceleration of social processes. Through mindfulness and emotional control, the tempo of life that we experience can be reduced, and we can regain time for ourselves and others.

 

For the perceiver, [perception] is … bound up with the necessary certainty of having to be a spatial something in time and a temporal something in space. 9 Research on consciousness inevitably shows that our concepts of self, time, and body are interrelated. Presence means becoming aware of a physical and psychic self that is temporally extended. To be self-conscious is to recognize oneself as something that persists through time and is embodied.

In essence, this means that if one has no time, one has also lost oneself. Distracted by the obligations of everyday activities, we are no longer aware of ourselves. If we rush from one thing to another and don’t miss a single event scheduled for our free time, we will accumulate many experiences. Yet if we never allow ourselves to calm down but always set out immediately for the next activity, the danger emerges that we will lose ourselves senselessly in a mad rush. In keeping with the philosophical reflections offered above, this means: no time, no self.

 

the situation proves paradoxical. All this time gained does not result in the feeling that we have more time. On the contrary, the universal lament is that we “have no time.” This is surely the result of technological advances that enable us to undertake more and more activities per day; the time we’ve freed up is filled with even more activities and deadlines. In addition to technological acceleration, the pace of life is speeding up. 28 Tasks must be performed within certain periods of time. The sentiment voiced on all sides, however, is that these periods are getting shorter and shorter.

Everything is done all at once, faster and faster, yet no personal balance or meaning can be found. This implies the loss of contact with one’s own self. 29

 

One can train oneself in mindfulness to experience the moment more intensively and learn the real reason for emotional reactions and automatic thoughts. Via the feeling of emotional self-control, we can achieve a sense of “deceleration.” The process is similar to learning a foreign language: at the beginning of our studies, when we hear the language spoken by native speakers, it seems terribly fast. Later, as our competency increases, the tempo we perceive lessens considerably. An increased feeling of control when dealing with the demands of a situation can slow down the perceived tempo of processes. Fundamentally, the key to a relaxed attitude involves controlling external demands. S

Ritualized pauses during the day’s business help one regain one’s bearing. Breaks can also function as a latency period for thinking. The best ideas always come when one is not thinking about the problem directly. Breaks offer a pause for reflecting in the back of one’s mind. It just might become clear what one’s real priorities should be. All of a sudden, the hulking mass of work becomes manageable.

 

If we put people in an isolation tank, the external senses—sight, hearing, smell—are rendered largely inoperative. Under these circumstances, only bodily presence persists. The flow of time, passing extremely slowly, is still experienced in this situation, suggesting that bodily processes underlie our feeling of time. Indeed, recent studies have confirmed that bodily functions— especially the heartbeat—are involved in the perception of temporal duration. The body functions as an internal clock for our sense of time.

 

To what, then, does the sense of time relate? The answer is not clear at all. There is also no independent sensory organ that would qualify as responsible for our perception of time.

 

One way to define the sense of time relates to the perception of change. We do not perceive time; rather, we experience change and movement. 1 Change tells us that time is passing. On the large scale of memory, autumn leaves indicate change, and looking in the mirror reveals changes that come with age over the years. On the smaller scale of seconds, music is rhythmically ordered change in sound. On the basis of changes in the world, registered by our senses, temporal relations emerge: event A comes before B. We perceive events as well as their temporal relations. But what happens when our senses do not register any signals from the environment, when no changes are perceived? Does time still exist?

 

Lilly also developed isolation tanks to bring about sensory deprivation; by this means, subjects can achieve states similar to those produced by meditation.

In other words, the sense of social isolation triggered a subjective expansion of time. This study demonstrates that it is not just rare and unusual situations that lead to changes in temporal perception. Relatively commonplace fluctuations in experience can produce the same effect.

 

That said, the feeling of temporal expansion can also occur when the body is in a state of rest—be it through meditation or in an isolation tank. In these particular situations of inner calm, when one concentrates on oneself and one’s corporeality, time passes more slowly and the duration becomes subjectively longer. On the one hand, intense physical excitement entails temporal expansion; on the other hand, extreme relaxation also makes time seem to last longer. Is there a contradiction here? Only at first glance. In either case, a heightened perception of body processes occurs—both when the body is active and when there is relaxed focus on the bodily self.

 

Many kinds of meditation refer explicitly to the bodily self (“Feel how your arm is lying on the floor”). Instructions like this lead one to concentrate on individual parts of one’s body, to experience their warmth and weight. Or one might focus on one’s breath and become aware of one’s heartbeat. When we perceive the body and its processes in this way, time passes very slowly. 22 Bodily presence thus creates awareness of time.

spending so much time on the future and the past makes one alienated from the present, and massively speeds up time due to ruminations, daydreams, worrying, planning.

 

if you spend most of a holiday sitting on a beach or in bars, relaxing and reading novels and chatting, you've exposed to so little unfamiliarity that there's no reason for time to go any slower.

 

Time starts to speed up again after 6-8 days once one's in a new place.

Set up an "unfamiliarity index" for next experiences

 

"time slowing effect of inactivity, time speeding effect of frenetic activity"

 

We spend most of our lives in "medium" states of absorption, which blinds us to the speeding up of felt time.

 

computer games are among the most time devouring activities as they require extreme absorption

 

In such absorbed situations we forget ourselves, forget our surroundings, and forget clock time.

 

-in a study, participants where were ABSORBED in COMPLEX tasks had less felt time.  (not non-absorption in complex tasks)

 

-When subjects are LESS interested in reading an article, they experience MORE felt time than if they were highly interested.

Little difference in Felt Time between active and passive absorption.  Active absorption = Flow, and is much better than passive.

 

pasttimes make time pass faster but it doesn't make sense.  We want to live as long as possible but when we "kill time" we are shortening our lives by making felt time pass faster.  

 

time flies when you're having fun = absorbed

 

Why is absorbed felt time slow in new experiences while absorbed felt time fast in routine ones?  PECEPTUAL INFORMATION.  IF you narrow your focus on one object,  the rest of the phenomenal world is screened out.  But if you are SURROUNDED BY UNFAMILARITY your attention is open to everything, a wide ranging spotlight of attention rather than a narrow beam.  This allows you to PROCESS A LARGE AMOUNT OF PECEPTUAL INFORMATION.  

 

It's probably better to call this state attentiveness or mindfulness rather than narrow absorption.

 

 

Time is slow in states of non-absorption: 1. we don't focus our attention on anything around us  2. our minds aren't occupied

 

an unhappy, boring life is much longer than a happy and busy one.

 

Children live in the world much more than adults do.  We live in the world in a physical sense but in a mental sense we don't as we pay very little attention to our surroundings/phenomenal world.

 

Children are the opposite.  For a lot of time they give their FULL ATTENTION to the world.  Children have problems concentrating because they LIVE IN THE WORLD TO A GREATER EXTENT.  In childhood we experience " a vision of the primary miraculousness of creation" and our perceptions of the world are "suffused in emotion and wonder".    

 

Adults only reach this wonder in their highest moments, such as being awestruck by beauty or by the wonder of the physical world.

 

As we grow older we "repress" this intensity of vision and no longer perceive it as raw experience.  The childhood vision which enabled us to see all things "apparelled in a celestial light" begins to "fade into the light of the common day".  

 

 

 

"Information theory"

 

-Sense of time speeding up as a retrospective illusion created by memory

 

-memories tend to "shrink" periods of time in which very little happens, whereas it magnifies hours or days where a lot happens

 

-if lives get more routine and less exciting with fewer thins, our memories shrink over the years and we feel that time is moving faster

 

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"In youth, we have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day.  Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long drawnout.  But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse""

 

"It's not so much the number of experiences but the newness of them"

 

"larger amount of new memories= expanded time"

 

"a week of travel and sightseeeing may be worth three weeks of memory"

 

"speed of time determined by how much perceptual information our minds absorb and process- the more information there is the slower time goes"  The more information there is the longer felt time is.  This applies to complexity as well, the more complex the more felt time.  

 

Time contracts the more we get used to stimuli.  Familiarity lowers felt time.  

 

All of this is measurable in music experiments. 

 

 

"The whole point of this mechanism (withdrawal from mindfulness/attentiveness)  is to conserve energy.  IF all of your surroundings and your experience is intensely real to you, you spend a lot of time attending to them, taking in their reality, which uses up a great deal of energy. " 

 

So the mind shifts away from mindfulness and into absorption.

 

Away from is-ness (BEING) in order to save on mental energy in perceiving them.  IT made experience less intense so they wouldn't focus attention on it, and so enabled energy to be redirected to the ego which thinks and deliberates.

 

-The desensitizing mechanism isn't active in children's brains (due to being underdeveloped) so the world is always full of strangeness and wonder.  They don't get used to these sights, no matter how many times they see or experience these things, their reality never fades.  AS a result time passes very slowly for them.

 

-the longer we live, the more familiar the world becomes so that time speeds up.  

 

-eventually the grey, shadowy half-reality of the world as seen through a filter of familiarity becomes our normal vision.

"the desensitizing mechanism filters out a little more of the reality of the experiences, so that you give slightly less attention to them and absorb less information from them.  Each passing year converts some of this experience to automatic routine.

 

So time continues to speed up between 40 - 60.

 

There might be certain events in a person's life which bring a flood of new and unfamiliar experience and expand felt time.  These might be major life events like war, divorce, or bereavement.  Or taking many different courses/hobbies and learning about many different things.

 

Some have "childlike vision", sense of strangeness and wonder about things that most of us take for granted and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions.  These are free of the anesthetic of familiarity, so struck by the strangeness and wonder of phenomena that they feel a desire to understand and explain them.   Felt time expands.

 

 

Before their ego develops, Babies are outside of time and as it develops they fall into the world of linear time.  

 

The amount of mental content determines the speed of Time: total amount of experience (sensations, perceptions, cognitive process, emotional process, etc)

 

Absorption speeds up felt time; PROCESSING INFORMATION slows down felt time.

 

Children process a very high quantity of information bits per hour as they are so "awake" to the world around them.  The purpose of the desensitizing mechanism is to reduce the number of information bits.  

 

A sign of "newness" is that it's so "real" to you that you couldn't keep your attention fixed to your daydreams or distractions even if you wanted to.  Raw experience of the world, you stop thinking and doing and experience BEING IN THE WORLD.  

 

"It's possible to live through several hours of time in a dream in just a few minutes of clock time. "

 

This time expansion is caused by the dissolving of ego in sleep.  

"watching TV isn't so different from sleeping.  Often when we watch TV we aren't really awake or alive; we experience an intense state of absorption that is almost a suspended animation, similar to hypnosis. We forget ourselves and our surroundings and slip outside of time, so the hours pass by almost without us noticing."

 

If as if when the "real world" disappears to us, then time disappears as well.  The degree of information absorbed by TV is only a small trickle (small number of bits of information) compared to the wealth of sensory impressions and experiences which the phenomenal world offers.

 

Mental activity ceases when absorbed in TV.  So we don't process information from this source either.

 

Time passes quickly in states of absorption because we process very little perceptual and cognitive information.  We lose touch with the phenomenal world.  We absorb so little perceptual information that hours pass like minutes.

Even an interesting lecture or book will only bring a small input of information compared to say, walking through a city for half an hour, or sitting on a bus watching buildings pass by.  When our attention is narrowed to a specific source we don't have myriad sensory impressions flying at us from all directions, and the low input of information we do receive hardly affects our sense of vanishing time.

 

Busyness can lengthen time provided that it is non-absorbing.  Non-absorbing = challenging rather than easy.  Things don't run smoothly , too many demands, too many things to think at one time. 

 

Busyness that expands felt time:  Non-absorbing.  Situations with a lot of demands, unforeseen problems occurring, your attention constantly flirts around and you don't focus on one particular object long enough to get absorbed by it.  It's the very fact of non-absorption that expands felt time.  This is a high volume of perceptual information.  

 

 

egoless state: endless chattering thoughts (surface thinking mind of the ego and conscious thinking mind) are withdrawn.  Felt Time expands

 

normal ego structure- chattering thoughts, beliefs, memories, and self worth fade away, leaving AWARENESS/MINDFULNESS

 

you can stop thinking and still "Be"- awareness that occurs outside of your thinking ego

 

in moments of timelessness the Ego-self fades way, but our observing consciousness is still there.  

 

left side (verbally and logically) is where Ego is and it moves right to the intuitive, creative, holistic side.  Left side controls sense of time, right side is "time free".  

 

Intense/extreme concentration can delete the Ego, leaving pure awareness without thought.

 

Our personal sense of time is relative to 1. information processing 2. Ego

 

 

 

-Children/some  native groups have a "fuzzy" sense of time due to their small egos; they have little sense of the future/past because their minds are largely free of thought chatter.  The larger the chatter, the larger the ego.

 

-In studies, Native groups, like Children have much expanded felt time and heightened perception of their surroundings.  (this is noted from white experience of native americans).  

 

The perceptions of natives are much more "vivid and sensuous", fullness of detail, color and vivacity of image..their sense of reality is heightened to the point where it sometimes seems to blaze.

 

-In studies, these native groups have lower verbal abilities than whites but they have a far higher level of visual and spatial skills.  This is why whites are amazed by the wealth of detail that indigenous can read from their surroundings, apparently able to see, hear and smell phenomena which are imperceptible to them.  High ability to notice and recall visual detail and high drawing ability.  Heightened perception = surroundings powerfully real to them.

 

-like Buddhist monks.