Last weekend but one, at the invitation of the Future Affairs Management Bureau, I took part in a forum at the “Another Planet” science-fiction convention. The forum was titled “Time, Time and Time,” and I was lucky enough to chat with several big names in science fiction about time.
Official coverage of the forum should probably have been published by now. But the Future Bureau’s official social-media account seems to have stopped updating for reasons beyond anyone’s control, so I’ll do a little “reporting” myself. The next few pieces are based on what I said at the forum, along with some research and ideas about how people perceive time that occurred to me after I received the invitation but that I didn’t get a chance to bring up there.
Point 1: The Brain Is a Time Magician
Time perception is also constructed by the brain. What we subjectively perceive as time is not the objective passage of time, but an experience constructed by the brain.
For example, when you snap your fingers, your eyes and ears receive visual and auditory information about the snap, which is then processed by the brain. The brain processes auditory and visual information at different speeds—hearing is faster, seeing slower—but strangely enough, you see the movement of your fingers and hear the snap as happening simultaneously. Clearly, this simultaneity is actually produced by the brain’s processing; it isn’t an objective physical simultaneity between the visual and auditory signals of the snap being emitted.
To borrow a line from The Hidden Self: “For animals, getting time right is important. Your brain does a considerable amount of arranging to make sure the signals are synchronized correctly.”
The brain is a time magician. It slows some moments down and speeds others up. It can even erase bits of time, for example:
You can “try looking at your own eyes in a mirror. Shift your visual focus back and forth, looking at your left eye for a while, then your right, and repeat. Your eyes need several dozen milliseconds to move from one position to another—but strangely enough, you never see your eyes move.” (Quoted from The Hidden Self.)
In other words, the brain erases those few dozen milliseconds during which your eyes move.
You might think that perhaps your eyes move such a tiny amount that the brain simply fails to notice the displacement. Not so. Try repeating the little experiment above while looking into your phone’s front-facing camera instead of a mirror, and you’ll find that you can clearly see your eyes moving.
Put more broadly, nothing you perceive is absolutely objective reality. Everything is a product of the brain constructing an experience from objective input—an approximation of objective reality.
“Seeing is believing”? Not a chance.
Note
- This series of short popular-psychology essays, “Little Lessons in New Psychological Knowledge,” was written back then to accompany content related to Zhichao Wei: A Course on New Psychological Knowledge. I published them on the now-closed platform “Fantuan,” and the original links no longer exist.
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