If you have read some of the opinion pieces here before, then you would have perhaps noted a repeating concept, which is that of time, and its ability to dictate how we feel and what we experience. It is impossible to write about destiny, or change, or memory, without eventually touching upon the issue of time itself. However, is the way we perceive time through clocks an accurate representation of the reality of living in time?
This area touches on metaphysics and chronobiology. Chronobiology examines the effect that biological rhythms have on human behavior while metaphysics asks fundamental questions about the nature of reality. In between those two fields, there’s a simple reality, time doesn’t feel the same to everyone.
In the vast scale of things time is constant and predictable. Calendar pages turn in the same order and history seems to unfold at an unmoving pace. At the scientific level this structure has been explored using theories like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity where it has been explained how time is actually linked to space and movement. In human life this shared structure of time is what is necessary for social coordination, for recording events, and even for history itself.
But that’s not how human experience sees things.
Anyone who has ever been anxiously awaiting a piece of news knows exactly how slowly seconds can feel like hours. On the other hand, minutes have seemed to melt away as one gets absorbed in an interesting and meaningful project. This would seem to indicate that besides the shared frame time, there is also a very personal side to it.
This division has been recognized by many philosophers. A well-known example of this was recognized by the French thinker Henri Bergson, who believed that while the physical world moves in distinct units, our conscious perception experiences time as a seamless and continuously flowing whole. In essence, for the human mind time is not measured, it is felt.
This means that there is a real possibility that while our universe might operate according to a grid of time that organizes physical events, each of us also has a very fluid internal grid that we navigate within that physical framework. Our own internal thoughts and feelings will always accompany us at an event, and this mental state will impact how the situation unfolds to us.
Another way of looking at this is by considering a wave and its energy and frequency. Any event gives rise to a certain ‘band’ of experience which forms our pattern of focus, thought, and emotional response. When we align ourselves to the patterns that this particular experience provides us with then time seems to stretch and contort as a natural result of our involvement with the event.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has termed this experience as a ‘flow state’, and in a flow state a person’s time-consciousness practically ceases and hours melt away unnoticed. There is a total immersion that takes place where time and event become one.
This indicates a possibility that there might be two layers of human time simultaneously at work: the shared universal measure and the subjective experience of time defined by our own perceptions. When the two come into harmony time can feel incredibly intense while if the two move out of sync time will either lag far behind or speed away at an overwhelming pace.
By recognizing this dual nature of time it’s easier to see why time is not a mere passive landscape in which life happens, but rather a dynamic experience produced by the interaction of our own minds with external events. Our unique psychological state as well as the intensity with which we react to the world creates our own personal perception of the unfolding hours.
By distinguishing the two aspects of time, we don’t change how a clock ticks but we get to understand why an experience can feel so different to two people situated in exactly the same physical place.
References
Einstein, A. (1915). Foundations of the Theory of Relativity.
Bergson, H. (1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
