Time Perception and Quarantine
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[Music]
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hello
i’m john k coyle and in a former life i
was a olympic speed skater and
as it turns out in the world of sports
small moments of time really matter
right the difference between the gold
medal and the silver medal and
my sport in the olympics of 2002 was 33
100th of a second
and this this this notion that small
incumbents of time
can change everything can change your
trajectory
started to sit with me as i got older in
life and i and i learned that the greeks
actually had a word for this
uh we only have one word for time it’s
called time
and we overuse it right it’s like the
inuit only having one word for snow
the greeks had two words chronos or
clock time
and kairos which is human time
the etymology of kairos is when the
archer releases the arrow
everything happens at once and the
trajectory is reset
as it turns out life is constructed
of these kinds of moments just like in
athletics the value of an increment of
time is not related to its duration it’s
related to its meaning and this actually
has a deep
deep neuroscience underpinning
because as it turns out right now you
and i are creating memories
with our hippocampus back here and it’s
writing memories about every two
seconds and it’s sweeping sweeping them
to long-term memory it might not
remember them
it may or may not but as it does it’s
going to throw away some of those
polaroids that stack of polaroids it’s
creating
throws some of them away it keeps them
some are highly recallable some are not
but the amygdala sits next to the
hippocampus
and the amygdala is what wakes up when
something interesting happens
it wants something new something
different never do that always do that
and so when there’s something scary or
intriguing or interesting or new
it changes the frame rate you start
writing memories at 10 times or more per
second
and this is where time slows down when
something
amazing or scary is happening like a car
wreck or
when you’re about to ask that girl or
guy out for the first time
so time slows down when the amygdala
wakes up because the memory sweeping is
happening so much faster
well this is the really interesting part
we’re now stuck
in this weird crisis this pandemic where
our four walls have closed in and we’re
existing in this space where everything
starts to become the same
and every day starts to blend into the
next i don’t know about you but i lost
may june and july i don’t know where
they went because i was just sitting
home
with a very similar routine and so the
hippocampus amygdala
decided to throw out all those memories
and it was like i was never alive
and this is the danger of what we’re
living in here
this is called in filmmaking the dolly
zoom or vertigo effect it’s when
the camera simultaneously zooms back
while
focusing in and it causes the backdrop
to shrink
even as the foreground grows
well we don’t want that right we want to
be present for all the details and
things going on around us
we want to learn how to slow stop
and reverse this perceived acceleration
of time that most adults feel
and have the endless summers of youth
again
so how to do that well i’ll share with
you
a poem i wrote how long did summer’s
last when we were kids
splashing into the lake riding bikes
across busy streets crushes broken
hearts bruises and dirty knees
we all know summers lasted forever when
we were kids
everything was new we really lived
everything we did
and now how long do they last in this
world so mundane
i don’t know about you but i ache to
live endless summers
again this thing here
it’s a lie we’ve been lied to sidetrack
distracted manipulated this ticking this
talking this terrible terminal tracking
of the ticking of time
teaching us trivial untruths it taught
us that each second is exactly the same
that each minute each hour each day
progresses in a linear way and that each
is the same distance from the last that
these ticks in these talks
are an accurate measure of our past
this thing here doesn’t have one of
these or more accurately it has a whole
bunch of these running at different
speeds
time in our brains doesn’t tick-tock
tick-tock with equal density
time in our brains is dependent on our
experiences and their relative
intensity but wait
time time is like a river right oh sure
time is like a river right
just not this kind of river no time is a
river that ebbs and flows from trickles
to rapids waterfalls and pools they bend
they bow the curve they dry up
and the brain is the same game the river
of time is to blame
the fact is we don’t experience time
always
the same neuroscientists tell us that
the experience of time is relative and
the drivers behind its flexibility are
by their nature
cognitive kahneman he called it thinking
fast and slow
cheek sent me high he called it flow
regardless it is a paradox we all know
that as time accelerates in the present
it expands
in retro your complacent pandemic pace
these things are the warp drive to
temporal hyperspace
you think you’re half done with life or
even less wrong you only have ten
percent of your experiential life are
left for you to save
you have one foot a torso two hands and
a watch in the grave be safe stick with
your routine be comfortable
live the routine and die in a few
temporal seconds good night
you’re dead end of scene
it is time it is time to embrace the
gift that this crisis has given
it is time to unwind the dolly zoom this
vertigo effect that we are all living
it is time to get back out there get
back in there time
to get off the hedonic treadmill time to
unclimb the corporate ladder
i want to climb the ladder of my
internal clock i want to clock the
ladder of my internal climb i want to
slow the hands of father time
and time the slow hands of my fatherhood
i want to kiss my young child’s forehead
and wake to find her still
a child i understand that this kind of
life may mean
suffering for me i will choose this
suffering
rather than let it choose me
it is time it is time to embrace
the gift that this guy crisis has given
it is time to get busy dying
or get busy really living
for those that we love most this most
sacred gift we can give
the gift of expanding time
it is time to really
live