The Time Stone in Marvel Cinematic Universe

I love thinking about superpowers. Among them, time-based superpowers are my favourites. Mainly because they are overpowered to the point where they often become deus ex machina of a story. One evening I had this burning desire to create a map of the coolest superpowers. It was a lot of fun looking up past TV shows, cartoons, movies, video games, comics, anime and sci-fi books. A splendid trip down memory lane. As I was listing them, I started to see similarities between them. So, I wrote them in coloured categories like energy-based powers (purple), time-based powers (black), fire-based powers (orange), weapon-based powers (blue), illusion-based powers (red), movement-based powers (green) etc. I mapped them on an A3 paper and put it up on the wall of my bedroom. What a serious effort for such a silly thing. Anyway, I didn’t pay attention to it anymore. Two weeks later, I found myself looking at it again and had an epiphany. The powers were just extensions of human sensory perception. Let me explain.

First of all, superpowers are the product of human imagination. If the creator can imagine it, that means he/she can feel it on some level. Each of our senses detect different natural phenomena of the universe: electromagnetic radiation, movement and vibration of particles, gravity, mass, space and time. Superheroes can detect more of what our senses already detect. For example, Superman has X-ray vision, an extension of light that we can see. He can hear faint sounds from far away, an extension of hearing. His flight and super strength are extensions of human kinaesthetic capabilities. When I come across a weird superpower like the Force in Star Wars universe, it is because George Lucas came up with a new natural phenomenon that doesn’t exist in our universe. The Force is the ever-present energy in which the Jedi and the Sith can harness. They can sense this dimension while everyone else is ignorant of it. The Force is no different from other spiritual energy concepts from Eastern Philosophy like ki, chi, chakra, willpower, spiritual pressure, vital energy etc. In the Matrix universe, Neo can perform superhuman feats because the virtual code limitations do not affect him. In fact, he can directly see the code. This matrix digital rain is a new natural phenomenon of the matrix virtual universe that doesn’t exist in ours. And then there are Lovecraft monsters whose powers are so far beyond human’s existence that even the writer barely knows what they are. Cosmic horror makes use of the fear of the unknown as its primary superpower.

This guy has the power to stop time. It is overpowered to say the least.

However time-based superpowers exist between the extension of the human senses and the weird energy concepts. Time powers are often very confusing. What happens when a hero or a villain has the power to freeze time, to loop time, to go forward in time, to go backward in time, to erase time, to speed up time, to slow down time, to reverse cause and effect, to teleport through time, to steal money from the future, to know all of history, to summon the parallel counterpart, to reverse aging, to restart a new universe? Like I said, stupidly overpowered. The explosive proliferation of time powers in all forms of fiction occurred after the discovery of special and general relativity. For the first time in human evolution, we could measure the true nature of time in the universe. Since the speed of light was the only constant, time became a flexible unit. This was very difficult for Einstein to accept because as a human being he intuitively felt that time cannot be changed. Unfortunately, there was no objective time in the universe. Before this discovery, time powers were relatively scarce in ancient stories. No heroes in mythology used time powers to solve his problems. Heracles never went back in time to prevent the family tragedy that forced him to perform the gruelling 12 labours. Odin couldn’t stop time to prevent Ragnarök, the end of the world. Not even the Gods could meddle with fate. The understanding of time had gone through many iterations throughout human history. Some believed time was immutable. Some believed it was like a river flowing into the eternal ocean. Some believed it was cyclical: repetition of history, the endless cycles of reincarnations. Some believed it was a network of parallel worlds. Some believed it was the fourth dimension of space and so on. ‘Time’ as a word was part imaginary part reality part biology.

OK, let’s go back a few steps. What is time, really? It turns out this is the most important mystery in physics. It holds the key to solving the theory of everything that holds all the contradicting physical phenomena in a nice coherent picture. This is a wrong way to think of this problem. The universe itself has no contradictions or paradoxes. It is existing just fine before humans come along to measure it. Contradictions are generated because of the limits of human cognition and by extension our measuring tools. According to the second law of thermodynamics time has a direction. Entropy has been increasing everywhere in the universe since the big bang. We can see this in our local environment when we study the ecological pyramids. More energy is wasted as heat in every step of the food chain. The sun has been increasing entropy since its formation via nuclear fusion. Shouldn’t entropy decrease if you turn back the wheel of time with a time machine? No. The universe is moving from low entropy to high entropy state. Even if you go back in time, entropy will increase even more. The past you enter is still your future. Entropy is ‘locked’ the moment it happens. It is irreversible. Time travel is nonsensical because going back in time is conceptually wrong. When you think of time as having a past, you mistake it as still existing. Only traces of the past remain as memories, documents or data. The past as you lived with its infinite complexity no longer exists. That is why the traces are lacking in richness. Time on the most fundamental level have no interval nor duration. On the quantum level, it doesn’t flow. The reason why we confuse the flow of time with space metaphor is because the brain recycles the special areas for processing space to understand time. It even reflects in language. Although I must acknowledge that the second law of thermodynamics is an empirical observation based on statistical models that shows what happens in the universe most of the time. Therefore, it is a blurring image, an approximation of the true state of the universe.

The gravity of a supermassive black hole causes catastrophic time dilation effects.

Let’s turn to another angle of the nature of time. There are two groundbreaking observations from Einstein’s theory of relativity. I have already mentioned the first which is the constancy of the speed of light. The second is that time is experienced differently for different observers in the universe. It depends on who is watching who. If you are riding a rocket that is travelling near the speed of light, you live the duration of time normally within the bubble of the rocket. Outside this bubble, time on earth is moving faster. But your family on earth is also experiencing the flow of time as normal from their perspective. You cannot contact them while traveling at near light speed to check in on them. Only when you decelerate and return to earth, will you see the difference in time experienced. A similar effect of time dilation happens with gravity. In this instance, you are in a spaceship that is orbiting a supermassive black hole, the duration of time you feel doesn’t change. The closer the rocket is to the black hole, the more gravitational strength and the more time dilation effect occurs. However, your family on earth feels the duration according to earth’s standards. Only after releasing yourself from the gravity of the black hole via acceleration, you are able to compare the dilation effect with them. They would have aged significantly while you have barely aged. There I spoiled the plot of the Interstellar movie. Anyway, time dilation is happening to the astronauts in the International Space Station, the atomic clocks in the GPS satellites and the Mercury orbit albeit at a much smaller scale than orbiting a black hole. Time dilation provokes very real challenges for space technologies.

Here is an interesting thing. Time dilation effect does not apply to light itself. First of all, light is not a conscious entity and it doesn’t have subjective feelings of time. In fact, it does not feel duration of time at all because time dilation is infinite at the speed of light. Mathematically, it is meaningless to see from the light perspective. But let us imagine it anyway because it is fun. The instant that light is released from its source let’s say a distant star, it travels through the distortions of space like what happens in gravitational lensing. During this travel, light exists outside of time. We cannot see light while it is travelling through space in a vacuum. Electromagnetic wave form makes it impossible to determine its location. As far as photons are concerned, it feels no duration. (This is why light particles can never be a living being like some science fiction stories claim. Life requires a duration of time and a frame of reference to evolve.) When light is absorbed or reflected by something like a telescope, its position becomes known and time is ‘recorded’ for that photon. We can see it. The moment time is recorded, it has already happened. The order of the interaction matters. The recorded photon has a spacial vector because we know where it hit. We can also track where it comes from. In its wave form prior to recording, photons exist outside of time. This is eerily similar to how entropy is ‘locked’ as I mentioned earlier. Are they part of the same process? Entropy is a blurring image of the indeterminacy of the quantum wave variables. The flow of time emerges from a universe without time.

This is wrong since there is no inertial frame of reference for light. Plus we cannot see light when it is travelling in space until it hit something. The video feels more like the game Pong.

Oh my gosh, I realised something incredible. Before the light of Andromeda Galaxy reached the eyes of Edwin Hubble through the Mount Wilson Observatory telescope in Los Angeles, it left the galaxy 2.5 million years ago. This is when hominids have barely started evolving in the plains of Africa. In 1924, this light arrived into his eyes while dodging and weaving through vast stretches of space. It was a remarkable event because Hubble developed the consciousness to notice it and formulated a groundbreaking theory that the universe was much bigger than just the Milky Way.

You may be surprised to learn that time dilation is a very old idea. The Indian Naraka hell for example has multiple layers where each layer has different duration markers. The deeper one goes the slower time gets the harsher the punishments. The worst of the worst believed to end up in the deeper layers, suffering for ‘almost’ eternity. The sense of time is itself a punishment. With the hope that they would leave one day, the sinners embrace the punishments more willingly. Similar ideas have popped up in other religions such as Dante’s Inferno of nine concentric circles of hell. The movie Inception dream within a dream is inspired by these concepts. We subconsciously understand the discrepancy between the duration of time we feel and the recorded time in the world marked by biological and astronomical cycles. Sense of time is present at every layer of the biological process. We have multiple cellular and neural mechanisms to detect different magnitudes of time.

Understanding how living beings perceive and manipulate time has the potential to solve the mystery. Life has somehow overcome the problem of time billions of years ago without explicitly knowing either the theory of relativity or quantum field theory. Practically all living processes are grounded on the unseen tapestry of time. Inside of living things, all particles are controlled in an orderly fashion. It’s scary to witness the precision in which the DNA is copied in mitosis for example. How is it doing so precisely? Well living systems may be controlling time on the atomic or even subatomic level. It is using time as a way to create localised order by suspending entropy temporarily. This is why we cannot create a living entity from scratch. All of our previous attempts to create new life is just playing around with artificial DNA which is inserted into surrogate cells. The living entity which is the cell and its corresponding protein network cannot be created from scratch because we still don’t understand how the protein network controls time.

With that in mind, let us examine the first layer of Chronoception, on the level of the protein. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in medicine is awarded to three chronobiologists: Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for discovering the mutation of the period gene that can disrupt the circadian rhythm in fruit flies. You might be thinking, why is this discovery about insignificant flies be so important that it warrants a Nobel Prize? It is the first definitive molecular evidence for how living things track time. It is rather ingenious. The period gene codes for a specific protein that builds up within a cell over night time and then they are taken away during the day. This creates a protein network cycle that is coincidently synchronized to a 24-hour day. Obviously, it is not a coincidence. If life was evolved on a planet with shorter days, the protein network would evolve to fit that time. In fact, according to astrochronology, earth did have a history of shorter days because the moon was closer than it is now. The stronger gravity from the moon made the earth spin faster. So, the protein network could mutate to fit the planetary changes. What this means is that, all living cells can tell time. Every cell on our body, every bacterium, every plant cell. It is not always accurate and the interval varies with each cell type. In the human brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the thalamus region serves as a master clock via a light source. This way, the body sleep/wake cycle is always synchronized with the time of day.

Can you recall that weird feeling in the morning when you wake up a minute before an alarm clock? The body somehow knows when it is that you will wake up. However, this may not be the case for someone who has a late chronotype. Late owls have a detrimental relationship with morning routines because their body is not ready to wake up early regardless of how many hours they have slept. This is nothing to do with lack of discipline. Due to genetic reasons, each individual has an inherent cycle of hibernation and wakefulness. Many successful entrepreneurs, scientists, inventors and artists have expressed the benefits of waking up early to partake in creative endeavours. But this advice is useless for more than half of the population who have late chronotypes. The role models I look up to such as Albert Einstein, George Orwell, Carl Jung fit the description of early larks. The modern society is planned around the premise that people wake up in the morning and so all productive activities should take place early. As a result, people who are lucky to possess the early chronotype are able to do things that fit the society’s requirements. Because of the small advantages of the early chronotype that build up over a lifetime, they end up in leadership positions where they can influence the planning of the work, school and society. It is a positive reinforcement loop where people who possess late chronotypes are discriminated as being lazy, undisciplined or stupid because they are too tired to perform any complex tasks in the morning. Past geniuses who possess late chronotypes such as Nikola Tesla, Winston Churchill and Rene Descartes are treated as odd due to their crazy sleeping and working habits. Yes, they don’t fit the normal mould of society but that doesn’t make them any less brilliant. In fact, they thrive because they have acquired the reputation and power to dismiss the social limitations that would affect a normal person. This needs to change.

In order to maximise the economic potential of a society, the planning of social time must be flexible around the personal chronotype. In other words, the scheduling of all work related activities should be personalised to the employee’s biological nature. This is why working from home is becoming more popular. Even if the society cannot change immediately, you can take small steps to plan the time however you please. When you have control over the time you possess, you have the ultimate freedom. Do not let anyone impose their will on your time! It doesn’t matter when you wake up as long as things get done on time. It is not financial freedom you should strive for but the freedom of time. It is infinitely more valuable.

Next, we will investigate the second layer of chronoception on the level of hormones. The circadian rhythm is not the only cycle in the body. There are many more running in parallel. In fact, cycles are all over the living world. The shedding of leaves in autumn is an obvious example. Maybe you have also heard about animal mass migrations and mating seasons. The astronomical cycles such as Milankovitch cycles create climatic shifts over thousands of years. Day and night cycle and seasonal cycles provide a rhythm to all life on earth. Plants are moving and behaving in cycles. By speeding up the life cycle of a plant on a video, we can see that they do move quite a bit like a living being. I have always wondered why the animals have mating seasons and yet we humans don’t. Are their hormonal cycles different to us? Not surprisingly, we humans have seasonal patterns as well. One look at child registry data or condom sales data, we can see that child-rearing and sexual activities are not uniform. It predictably varies with season. Not only that, patterns of violence and criminal activity, patterns of consumption, patterns of disease, even patterns of mood vary throughout the year. This is common knowledge for police officers and ice cream sellers. However seasonal behaviours are beyond cultural. They are caused by hormones which control cycles of the human body. It is more of the case that cultural rituals are selected by biology over many years.

Hormones are mysterious biological molecules that control all cycles of living processes. They are in an infinite loop of time. Hormones are blind to the bigger picture. They don’t know how many cycles have passed since the first activation. Everybody knows about the monthly cycle that all women on earth have to endure. A healthy woman will undergo an average of four hundred menstrual cycles in her lifetime before she hits menopause. That is a lot of pain and suffering. We know this number because the biologists consciously counted them. The hormones themselves don’t give a damn. When the time is ripe, ovulation will come and the woman’s body will prepare for the incoming baby regardless of fertilisation. During this time, new behaviours emerge. There is an overwhelming urge to seek out new social contacts. Staying at home feels like a prison. Moreover, women become more competitive with each other. They are not looking for any man. They desire the ONE with good genes. Selectivity is key here. Even her preferences of smells change during this time. These estrus behaviours activate regardless of the woman’s relationship status. Of course she can use her willpower to subdue these desires when they are inappropriate. Hormones are intelligent and can adapt to local circumstances. They are not as rigid as genetic learning or as flexible as neuroplasticity. Seasonality can enhance the estrus behaviours or suppress them. During the winter, many people are susceptible to seasonal affective disorder. As a result, their roaming behaviours are suppressed. Local businesses and services suffer during the winter because not many people feel like leaving their house due to inconvenience. That feeling is important because it is generated by the hormone levels.

Men are also influenced by hormones. In fact, more often than women. Men’s testosterone cycle is on a daily basis instead of monthly. They don’t change their behaviours during certain times of the month. More like certain times of the day. Testosterone tends to be higher during the morning than in the evening. It is also affected by immediate factors. If a beautiful woman is physically close to him, testosterone tends to shoot up. If he is near his children, testosterone is inhibited. If he is watching cute cartoons, it is lowered. If he takes a nap in the afternoon, it is restored to high levels. When testosterone levels are high, it is similar to women in estrus mode. His roaming behaviours increase. The world feels more colourful for some reason. He feels like he can conquer any challenge. His mind becomes sharp and creative. He takes more risks than necessary. He becomes more competitive with everyone he sees (even pets) to establish status. When the levels are low on the other hand, he doesn’t feel like exploring new things. He also becomes more attentive to his children and other house duties. Again, these hormonal patterns are affected by seasons. Cold weather tends to suppress testosterone to reinforce staying with the family when the times are tough. Warm weather tends to increase testosterone related activity including crimes. We would be wise to be more aware of these changes.

Since I understand the time loop of the hormones, I plan my productive activities and family activities that take them into account. But that’s not all. There are hormones that control the hunger response, the thirst response, the stress response, the sugar response, the temperature response, growth, sleep and metabolism. Each of them has their own feedback loops and time loops. Some loop multiple times a day. Some loop once a month. There are a few hormones that only activate due to a specific sensory trigger like fight or flight response. Remember they are all operating in parallel and are also interdependent with each other. The stress response can disrupt the hunger response for example. The sex hormones can trigger the temperature response which is why you feel hot when you are attracted to someone. The blood is the main transporter of these hormones around the body to activate them when it is the right time. The most important emergent effect is the feeling of ownership over one’s body. You don’t feel each and every hormone loop separately. You feel all of them at the same time. This is the consciousness of the body. Emotions arise from this system. For example, hunger is a very simple emotion, the desire to eat. You don’t directly perceive the hormone ghrelin. You feel hunger. Hunger can even change conscious sense of time which I will explain later. Complex emotions are a result of complex feedback interactions between the hormones. Therefore, I would encourage you to take note of the emotions rising from your body. What is the emotion trying to tell you? Maybe you can adapt your behaviours accordingly.

Thirdly, let’s look at the sense of time on the level of neurons. While I was researching for this chapter, my mind was transported to a memory (more on memory sense of time later) when I was in middle school. It was during either Math or Physics class. I can’t quite remember. The same teacher taught both of these classes so it didn’t matter. Anyway, we had to do a mathematical problem that asked how far it took for a car that was travelling at 120 km/h to stop in case there was an obstacle on a highway. We had to do two different calculations. One for thinking distance and another for stopping distance. I couldn’t understand why we had to make this distinction. Stopping distance, I understood. The time it took to stop a car once the brake was pressed depended on the design of the car and the wind resistance. Thinking distance, what was that? After all, thinking felt instantaneous to me. So, I asked the teacher why we had to calculate the thinking distance? She was a middle school maths teacher and not a neuroscientist. She explained what she could to the best of her ability. She said it took a split second for the mind to recognize the obstacle. Since the car was moving so fast, this reaction time could become a significant factor in causing the accident. If you were distracted, the thinking distance became longer and increased the likelihood that the car would hit the obstacle. (Nowadays there are many technologies that circumvent the thinking distance like the AI detector that will automatically brake if it senses something in front of the car.) I wasn’t satisfied with the explanation but I got the gist of it. A few years later when I was in high school, I started playing Mass Effect 3 a lot. It was my favourite game of all time. When I was playing it, I noticed something remarkable. (I have to explain a little bit about the mechanics of the game so bear with me.) Mass Effect 3’s third-person shooter mechanic was balanced around the gear weight of the avatar. I could use powers like telekinesis, electricity etc but they took time to recharge. If I carried a heavy weapon like a sniper rifle, the recharge time took longer. If I carried a light sidearm, the recharge time was shorter. I had to strike a balance between weight and recharge time based on the character build I was going for. (We are talking in the range of 0.2 to 2 seconds. It is very fast objectively but within the fast-paced combat of ME3, long recharge time is a nuisance. You got that? Ok good.) So, what I discovered from trial and error of testing different builds was that my brain only noticed the recharge time when it was above 0.3-0.4 seconds. If it was lower than 0.3 seconds, the recharge time didn’t register on the perceptual level. So, if I carried a slightly heavier weapon that increased the recharge time by 0.2 seconds, I felt no difference in combat. Sweet! I could use powers often and I could carry a more lethal weapon. Then I remembered the thinking distance problem I had to do in middle school and I knew then that they were connected to the recharge times somehow. The thought escaped my mind and I went to sleep.

Mass Effect 3: Weapons Weight Capacity vs Power Recharge Speed

Now I know why they are connected. The neurons can discern time due to the intrinsic nature of their networking and decision-making capabilities. The action potential of a neuron is very fast but they are not optical wires. What I mean is that the electrical transmission in a neuron is not fast as the speed of light. It cannot be because the transmission is tightly controlled by the structure of a neuron. I am generalising here for purpose of simplicity. There are many different kinds of neurons each with their own transmission speciality. Moreover, a neuron network of a human brain is the most complex living network in the entire universe. One neuron is potentially connected to 10,000 other neurons. A normal brain has billions of neurons, amounting to trillions of connections. Not only that, a neuron can inhibit other neurons they don’t like. This tug of war between connection and inhibition can be reverse engineered by each neuron to tell time in the subsecond range. A perceptual cycle is around 0.3 seconds which explains the thinking distance and the recharge times.

All neurons can tell time but there is an area in the brain that specialises this ability. For years, neuroscientists cannot pinpoint what the cerebellum does. It is involved in physical movement, balance, dancing, music, language and even mathematics, practically everything a human being does. Moreover, cerebellum has more connections than all other areas in the brain put together. Why does this imbalance exist? I believe the true specialization of cerebellum is generating the sense of time on the subconscious level. I am referring to the sense of rhythm (number of beats over time). The more connections cerebellum has, the more complex the network is, the more accurate neurons can discern rhythm accurately and efficiently. That’s why the cerebellum has evolved to contain many connections. If you have read the kinaesthetic pleasure model chapter, I have pointed out that better cerebellum prowess may be sexually selected in the human species via indicator activities like dancing. All of its subsequent involvement in motor coordination, music and language are by-products of the sense of time generated by the cerebellum. Dyschronometria is the unfortunate condition of the brain having no sense of rhythm due to failures in cerebellum circuits. It is a horrible state to live without rhythm. The patient becomes annoyingly clumsy. There is no cure for this because doctors barely know how the cerebellum works.

It is not surprising that rhythm is involved in every activity that we find pleasurable, even in the areas that you might not normally assume to be there. It is the hidden texture of the mental world. A kiss without rhythm is flat and boring. A basketball team that performs rhythmic passing is the most pleasurable to watch. The art of editing in films is the mastery of rhythm. The pacing of a movie is the most important quality to engage an audience. Hundreds of testing are required to develop a video game that establishes a unique rhythm in the gameplay. Otherwise the game feels clunky. A lecture without an established rhythm will not hold the students’ attention. This is a basic mistake made by teachers who have poor public speaking skills. Every conversation has a sense of rhythm woven into them. This is why machine voices sound like machines and not humans. Their voices don’t have human voice rhythm. It is very difficult to fake. When the conversation in a date is rhythmic and in sync, it creates enourmous amount of pleasure and attraction. In other words, rhythm is one of the primary components of consciousness.

Earlier, I have mentioned that the astronauts who live in the International Space Station experience time slower than on the surface of the earth by a tiny tiny amount. It is inconsequential but the physiologists from NASA have come to understand that the sense of time for the astronauts is a big issue not because of time dilation but because of many biological processes. The sense of time on the level of consciousness is affected by tiredness, sleep, motivation, boredom and memory. This is the fourth level of chronoception. Duration of subjective time is malleable. A good example of this is the holiday paradox where time passes quickly during a fun trip but feels longer in retrospect. The illusion of duration is real and it is nothing to do with the physical nature of time.

This pill is hard to swallow for me. As I am writing these words, my sense of time has evaporated. I don’t notice the clock ticking anymore. Because I am focused and utterly absorbed in the task of writing, I am experiencing an altered form of consciousness. This is referred to as flow experience or being in the zone. When the attention is being focused to a specific goal driven task, the sensory channels are being opened to let more data stream into consciousness than before. As a result, the perception of the flow of time is altered because there is more data to process. Or maybe the sensory data has always been streaming the same amount, it’s just the brain has been ignoring most of them while in the normal state. In flow state, the brain is fully engaged to deal with everything a person can see, hear, touch, smell etc. This only happens when the difficulty of the task matches with the skill level you possess. For many, this balance is difficult to achieve. Often the task is too difficult which leads to frustration or too easy which leads to boredom. Out of all the artistic mediums, video games are very good at bringing out the flow mode in the players using layers of incentive systems like variable reinforcement schedules. Games are constantly tracking the player’s progress and readjusting the difficulty settings behind the scenes. Flow mode is required to achieve a sense of immersion. That is why video games hold our attention for a long time. A 3 hours playtime feels like nothing. Only an outstanding movie can match this level of immersion while most games can achieve this easily.

In contrast, when you are bored, tired, hungry, frustrated or fall in love the opposite happens. Time feels stretched as you count the seconds until you can leave the boring workplace, until you can rest, until you can have a nice meal, until you can escape from the source of the annoyance or until you can be reunited with your lover. You feel like the suffering is longer. The hormonal cycles are interacting with the conscious sense of time. When we are aware of the clock, it is because the attention is diffuse and finds nowhere to latch onto. This reminds me of the sensation of fasting. Fasting is irritating because the hunger prevents me from enjoying anything. My mind is racing to find food due to the ancient evolution of food seeking behaviour and yet I have to control this desire. It does not help when I am counting down the time left until I am allowed to eat again. This is why the art of distraction is necessary to tolerate the discomfort. Most, if not all religions impose fasting rituals once a year to encourage empathy in people. With empathy comes charity. When the body is in crisis mode due to hunger, the emotional brain areas responsible for compassion are more active than usual to build social capital so that everyone can survive the harsh condition together. This is a similar effect to strangers becoming friendly to each other all of a sudden after a natural disaster. The disruption of the hormonal cycles has an effect on the sense of time associated with attention. As I look back now, the time spent fasting seems quicker even though in the moment fasting feels like forever. What is this conundrum?

Conscious perception has an interesting relationship with episodic memory. Have you ever felt like you have grown a lot as a person in a short amount of time? Conversely, have you felt like time has robbed away your precious youth? In both of these scenarios, you are remembering the past experiences and guessing the amount of duration from the memory. It is the nostalgia effect. The more life experiences you have accumulated, the more memories there are for you to look back on. You have lived a long life, filled with joy, sadness, failures and triumphs. OR like most people you have been doing the same thing day in and day out. You have given up on exploration and widening your knowledge to provide sustenance for your family. In this lifestyle, you have few memory markers to look back on. So, you will feel like you have grown old quickly with nothing to show for it. Regret is the desire to recuperate loss time.

Proust explores the nature of memory in his masterpiece book.

To understand this phenomenon, let’s take a look at the nature of memory. In every era, memory has been compared to metaphors that are familiar to that day and age. Nowadays, people assume memory is like a computer hard-drive where past experiences are stored in an orderly fashion. They think that the conscious mind cannot access this hard drive by normal means unless one uses drugs or develop superpowers. The myth of photographic memory is a favourite cliché of Hollywood to show how intelligent a character is compared to the rest. There have been calculations being made on how much memory capacity humans can store in bytes based on the neuron connections of the hippocampus, the assumed memory database. This archival notion of memory is profound and misguided. Human memory is practically infinite because we recreate a memory every time we remember something. We are not pulling the memory out of a storage but literally creating it on the spot. Ok, then what are we creating out of? The hippocampus maps are traces of the past: emotions, feelings, sensory images, pain and pleasure. Think of these traces as compressed zip files. But they are not ordered chronologically. Most of these traces are chaotic and inactive. Forgetting is a big part of why it works. When we remember something voluntarily or involuntarily, the hippocampus activates the relevant traces to signal the entire brain to recreate the memory into a cohesive narrative. Many past moments from several years are welded together into a communicable story. In addition, the present moods and environment can have an effect on the accuracy of the memory. We are reliving the past in real time even though it is not indicative of the actual past. The new memory then replaces the older one. This Proust effect is a creative process which means some people do it better than others. Why did we evolve this inaccurate yet very fast memory recreation ability? To predict the future, that’s why. This system is not used for database retrieval but to learn from life experiences. And to learn swiftly. Life is dangerous for slow learners.

So far, we have been looking at episodic memory from an individual perspective. But humans in their normal environment regularly synchronize their memories with their loved ones. When trying to remember an important family event, everyone contributes their own version of the past, recreated from the traces they have accumulated. Each family member has a point of view. (A self-referential point is crucial in order to remember anything.) They then correct each other on the accuracy of the details like what colour of the clothes they were wearing on the day of the oldest sister’s wedding for example. A pointless detail but the process of remembering together creates a bonding effect. The truth is somewhere between the different versions of the recollections. You have to use your judgment to extract the truth.

So, where does the sense of time of the memory come in? Why does the holiday paradox exist? When we relive a memory, we can intuitively guess how much time has passed from how many traces we can weave together into an image. If the memory is emotionally rich, filled with novel sensory details and an engaged motivation, the recreation of the memory feels longer. Specific events in life have elongated duration in memory. This is a cognitive approximation which is nothing to do with the relative time dilation effects. On the other hand, if the memory is emotionally poor which takes place in a habitual and boring environment, there are a shortage of traces to recreate the memory and so the time feels shorter in retrospect. From this insight, we can come up with a way to reduce regret and recuperate lost time. If you want to live a long fulfilling life with minimum regret, do the activities that bring you meaning and joy. Take responsibility for something you believe in. Disregard everything else from your priority list. When you are in an engaged state of flow all the time, you are accumulating a lot of valuable traces of the past. By the time you grow old provided you haven’t developed dementia, there is an inner joy in reliving the past. In the end, the memories and the narratives are what shape our identity even though they are products of the imagination.

Active imagination is the final layer of chronoception. On this level, time is reconstructed as an abstract concept that float in the mind’s eye which we can then manipulate it to our heart’s content. As a result, time can be compared with any metaphor that we see in the world. In order for me to appreciate the scarcity of time, I did a simple exercise using my imagination. I chose the time of my death. I wanted to die when I am 95 years old. It’s kinda poetic since I was born in 1995. You are thinking now, what is the point of this morbid thinking? I have discovered a new comfort by doing this. (If I know the final page number of a book, I can plan ahead how many pages I would read in a day.) Assuming that I am 25 years old now, I have 70 years left to live. That is equivalent to 840 months, 3640 days or 43,680 hours. If I think about it, 840 months is not a long time. I have already used 4 months to write this chapter. When I was young, I felt invincible. Time was on my side. The future stretched to infinity. After this calculation, I realise that time is absolutely not on my side. Actually, 95 years is a best-case scenario. I can perish at any moment from accidents or disease. So, I am now more picky of spending my time, especially choosing who to spend time with. I invest more time for my loved ones. I lose patience with anyone who irritates me with their idiocy. I leave the cinema midway through a shitty movie and don’t feel a shred of guilt. I don’t finish badly written books. Every second is a resource which must be rationed to achieve my goals to the end of life. As a result, I have an immunity against sunk cost fallacy.

Time is the ultimate equality. Everyone receives the same 24 hours to live. Will you squander it for the sake of self-destructive pleasure or will you use it sparingly to fulfil your potential?

Another imaginative exercise I like to do is what I call perspective time travel. During my long reading career, I have only read a handful of biographies. When I research a particular person in depth, it’s because I respect that person a lot. I admire his/her vision, values, viewpoint and victories. However, reading a book about my role model is not enough. I need to live his life. I need to see the world as he sees it. Admiration is not enough. I need to perceive his humanity.

Churchill War Rooms. What was Churchill feeling when he was sitting in this room with his trusted advisors?

Let’s say I wanted to understand Winston Churchill. I imagined opening my eyes as Winston. Inhabiting his body as well as his mind. In my imagination, I reconstructed the world he lived in, the beliefs that surrounded him, the people that accompanied him, the incentives that drove him and the challenges that tested him. I needed to abandon my own egotistical perspective and wore the viewpoint of Winston as a cloak. What was he feeling when he was in Churchill War Rooms? While London was being bombed above in the Second World War, how did he reassure his strategists and generals to have faith in winning? It definitely helped to visit museums, studied the architecture of the early 20th century, watched Churchill related media and played games that took place in that era. These building blocks were crucial for my imagination. I was mentally time travelling to a past I never lived and yet it was familiar to me. After a while, I felt as though I had inherited the spirit of Winston Churchill. When I came across an insurmountable challenge that I alone could not solve, I summoned different perspectives in my arsenal to see the problem in a different way. It was seamless. What would Winston Churchill do in this situation? What would Elon Musk do? What would my grandmother do? The perspectives didn’t always have to be real people. They could be fictional characters as well. What would Batman do? My mind was a vessel for many souls.

The neuropsychologists call this skill chromesthesia: mental time travel. Normally mental time travel is the awareness of one’s own past and simulating scenarios of one’s own future. A higher level of this skill is to simulate another person’s life and adopt his perspective temporarily for solving problems. The ultimate use of the ability is to kindle empathy. It is fun to be absorbed in this imaginative activity. Try it yourself.

The last application of imaginative sense of time is creating narratives in cultural products. I have always been fascinated by film editing. During an editing session, I have to become more mindful of cause and effect. It is easy to cut and paste parts of a video into another. But where will I put them? How will the changes make sense when I watch from the beginning to the end? These are the hard questions. There are no right or wrong answer. I can make a video that shows that the egg comes first and not the chicken. Or the chicken comes first and not the egg. Or neither comes first. A narrative is a chain of cause and effect scenarios neatly placed in a straight timeline. This chain is imaginary and yet we take it for granted. In other words, video editing is a powerful narrative tool.

The best example where this causal chain was disrupted in a dramatic expression was a movie called Arrival. The short version of the plot was that unknown alien spaceships materialised on planet earth. They did not travel here but appeared out of thin air. The main protagonist who was played by Amy Adams was a linguist professor. She was tasked by the military to communicate with the aliens in order to understand their motive for arriving. It turned out that the alien’s language was circular in nature which meant the language transcended cause and effect. As she became fluent in their language, she started to perceive weird dreams and memories. Memories that were yet to happen. She was perceiving traces of her own future. It was more accurate to say that her mind was time travelling to her future self and vice versa. (This concept was an extension of normal memory sense of time discussed earlier.) The true motive of the aliens arriving on earth was to gift humans with their language which came with the ability to perceive the future as clearly as the past. The most brilliant thing was the placement of her life moments in the plot. In the beginning of the movie, it showed that her daughter grew up with her and tragically passed away during teenage years. So, the viewers assumed that this event happened before the aliens arrived. The plot twist of the movie is the realisation that memories of her daughter were traces from the future. The beginning parts of the movie belonged to the later timeline of the protagonist’s life. Knowing that her daughter will die, she still chose to embrace her future. What a brilliant story that was!

The human brain perceives time on an imaginary plane as chains of cause and effect. This is the conscious reflection of time which is subject to the laws of logic and reason. All time travel stories are violations of this logic. The movie exposes this truth with incredible artistic depth in editing techniques. After all, imagination is the birthplace of time superpowers.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate the insights that we have gained after exploring each level of sense of time.

Circadian: Sleep and wake up at regular times. Fight for the power to control your daily schedule. If you are a morning lark, you have the right to wake up early. If you are a late owl, you have the right to wake up late. When you have control over the time you receive every day, it is the ultimate freedom.

Hormones: Do the right things at the right time. When you plan your productive activities or family activities, consider the ups and downs of hormonal levels. Get to know your body inside out. Evaluate your emotions and be wary of seasonal effects on your mood.

Rhythm: Play music. Play sports. Play video games. Dance!

Consciousness and Memory: Do the activities that bring joy and engagement. Collect a diverse portfolio of experiences and challenges that will break your current limits to the next level. Regularly visit your past memories to learn from them. Remember the mutually shared events with your loved ones.

Imagination: Recreate a historical past or an exciting future in your imagination. Play around with the concept of cause and effect via video editing or writing fictional stories. Watch time travel movies and tv series.

Chronoception Pleasure Model

Further Reading:

© PEL COnsulting

Info

Action