On the Subject (and Subjectivity) of Time
Some time-related articles from the vault...
1. "Timing is Everything"
<http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/723/full>
"The subjectivity of our experience of time is widely acknowledged. As
we get older, time seems to go faster - or is it that we seem to move
faster in time? "
"Time is the stuff of music: music manipulates our experience of time;
it plays with the rhythm of experience; it stretches and complicates
our relationship to the passing of time. If the world of physics is a
space-time continuum, music is a pitch-time continuum."
2. "How Your Brain Can Control Time"
<http://discovermagazine.com/2008/aug/11-how-your-brain-can-control-time>
"These days, new kinds of experiments using everything from computer
simulations to brain scans to genetically engineered mice are helping
unlock the nature of mental time. And their results show that the brain
does not use a single stopwatch. Instead, it has several ways to tell
time, and none of them seems to work like a conventional clock."
"Even in a healthy brain, time is elastic. Staring at an angry face for
five seconds feels longer than staring at a neutral one. It may be no
coincidence that the pulse-generating neurons are directly wired into
regions of the brain that handle emotionally charged sights and sounds.
And recent experiments by Amelia Hunt at Harvard University hint that
we may actually backdate our mental time line every time we move our
eyes."
3. "Why having fun makes time speed"
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3532195.stm>
"Scientists have come up with a theory for why time flies when you are
having fun - and drags when you are bored."
"It is thought that if the brain is busy focusing on many aspects of a
task, then it has to spread its resources thinly, and pays less heed
to time passing."
