"When
as a child I laughed and wept, Time crept.
When
as a youth I waxed more bold, Time strolled.
When
I became a full-grown man, Time RAN.
When
older still I daily grew, Time FLEW.
Soon
I shall find, in passing on, Time gone."
Poem from the front of the clock case in the
North Transept of Chester Cathedral, attributed to H. Twells (1823-1900).
To perform a personal examination of time,
please document a single minute of time. Using a watch with a second hand,
observe this one minute as carefully as possible. Then write as many details as
possible: the location you are in, the sounds and sights available to you, and
the 'feeling' of the time you are observing. Have you proved that time is relative?
--
Proving
whether time is relative or not is something that I cannot do. As with many
people who have a brain injury, I have lost my sense of time. I live in the
Eternal Now, with the past, present, and future merging into a singular whole.
Not only that, but now I see time as colors – blue days, purple months, green
hours. (It is a form of synesthesia.) If I focus on time, it becomes a kaleidoscope
of colors merging, fracturing, and flowing. Time, as I experience it, runs
counter to most people’s sense of time. Therefore documenting a single minute
of time is impossible.
Because
my sense of time is gone, I decided to research how others see time. What I
uncovered was that there is not agreement on how time is perceived. One thought
is “presentism” in which “time is experienced but does not pass.” The other is
“flowism” in which time flows whether people perceive it or not. “Flowism” says
that people perceive the passage of time by reflecting on their experiences.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant agreed with this. He wrote that “the
phenomenology of passage of time is a necessary condition for any experience.” For
him, time existed and was “true” whether we experienced it or not (
A priori reasoning).
Before
Kant, western philosophers traditionally defined time to be a construction of
the self, starting with St. Augustine. (“I measure my self, as I measure
time.”) Therefore perceived time is the “mental state of the beholder.” According
to this philosophy, we perceive time as we feel. For example, depressed people usually
see time as slowing down. However with a brain injury, my perception of my self
is detached from how I feel. Therefore time is nonexistent to me, and is only an
artificial construct. What exists for me is the illusion of time.
From
a psychological point of view, people may experience time in one of two ways. “Polychrons”
experience time as one continuous current much like a river flowing from the
past through the present, and on to the future. Meanwhile, “monochrons”
perceive time as discrete intervals, which are divided into fixed elements such
as hours. Furthermore, societies tend to organize themselves on either of these
perceptions of time. Since western industrial society is monochromic, the notion
that time can be proven to be relative is plausible. (Of course a polychromatic
society would not even consider the idea.)
To
gain an understanding of how time could perceived in relative terms, I compared
watching a football game to a hockey one. Fifteen minutes of watching players skating
frantically trying to score seemed like an instant. Watching the last few
seconds of a football game with the losing team trying to score seemed endless.
I suppose that in relation to me and the action of the game, time could be seen
as relative. However, sports games are usually measured in “sports” minutes,
which differs from “standard” minutes. A fifteen minute quarter in football may
result in thirty minutes of “standard” time. Therefore, proving how time is
relative in sports can be problematic.
Since
I live in a monchronic society, I have to accept the idea that time exists in
measured units. To be in sync with others, I have to develop methods of “timekeeping.”
Otherwise, I would simply follow the rhythms of my body in sleeping and eating.
Monchronic time divorces many people from natural rhythms, and forces them to
see time differently.
Works Used.
Hahn,
Harley, “Time Sense: Polychronicity and Monochronicity.” Web.
http://www.harley.com/writing/time-sense.html.
Janiak,
Andrew, “Kant’s View on Space and Time.”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 14, September, 2009. Web.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/.
Le
Poidevin, Robin, “The Experience and Perception of Time.”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009. Web.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/.
Musser,
George, “Time on the Brain.”
Scientific
American. 15 September 2011. Web.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/09/15/time-on-the-brain-how-you-are-always-living-in-the-past-and-other-quirks-of-perception/.
Prosser,
Simon, “Passage and Perception.” Paper. Web.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~sjp7/passage_and_perception.pdf.
Wittmann,
Marc, “The Inner Experience of Time.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society. 31, May, 2009. Web.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1525/1955.full.pdf.
