Tempus Fugit

'Tempus fugit'

In the not to distant (and ever nearing) future, time will slow down.

Perhaps condradicts what the information age has been experiencing thus far. Time infact seems to be accelerating. Our Pc's go faster, clocks are more precise, and cell phones produce a bizarre omnipresence. But for all of the 'labour saving' gadgets seems to only have busied us more. Time, it seems, seems to shape our lives now, to the degree in which it restricts them.

Capitolists to the rescue! An entire industry of 'time management' has come to save the weary. Books hit the NY top lists, computer software flies off shelves, just a few of the 'productivity solutions' that are intended to better the exchange of our time for dollar bills. They have it all wrong. Productivity is the amount of work done in a certain amount of time: "P=W/t". Most time managedment has concerned itself with increasing productivity by simply squeezing more work (W) into the same amount of time (t). Thats not time management. That's work management.

This is not the answer. What if, we could leave work alone, and make time smaller? What if we could slow down time? What if we could make a minute longer, and complete more within it? That future exists inside us. Neurobiologists have slowly realized that 'real time' is simply a convention of our brains. We constantly take in masses of information through the senses, but at different speed through different senses. Our perception of time can be manipulated in ways that 'researchers have already begun to exploit' (A. Burdick).

When you converse with someone, the speech

reaches you slightly later than the visual of the person talking. Your brain can identify the time difference, but displays it to the conscious

you synchronized. If it didnt, we would live in a poorly dubbed Kung Fu movie, without the heroic combat. Your mind changes your time, to prevent distractions. 'Time is natures way of keeping everything from happening at once." Woody Allen once commented. He was right.

"The brain collects a lot of information, waits, then stitches a story together" said David Eagleman, neurobiologist at U of Texas. ' Now' Happened a little while ago. Our brains live in the past. Or rather, our brains live in the now, and we reside in the future, without realizing it. What we would consider causal reality is in fact like a live television show with a time delay for censors.

Any decent TV show, however, requires an editor with a very good sense of timing. For our brains, the same stands true. Several medical disabilities are now being thought to result from a lack of timing, a sticky minute hand in ones internal clock. The brain lesions found in Parkinsons sufferers, for example, are known to disrupt timing mechanisms needed for coherent speech. Many neuroscientists now believe that perhaps dislexia and apasia are not language disorders- they are time problems.

It was long thought that inside all of us was one clock, sending out a uniform pace to all of the human bodies functions, to keep them all in such wonderful synchronization. However the neuroscientific community is now learning that we do not have a proverbial 'biological clock'. Our body is Gepetto's workshop: a wide number of clocks running their own time, but connected to one another.

Now we can see how the future will take shape. If scientists can learn even more about how neural timing works, we can use that timing more wisely.

Not long ago, Eagleman conducted a study to this effect. We have all experienced periods of 'slow-mo', perhaps before a car accident, or first seeing the love of our life. Whats really going on? Can the human body really take in more information during those periods than it usually does? Eagleman built a screen that flashed a number, too fast for the brain in 'real time' to see. But he had his subjects look at the number while bungee-jumping for the first time. They saw it.

"It's like the brain has a reserve capacity, but like everything, it works as slowly as it can get away with" comments Eagleman. Increase the speed of the mind, decrease the time of the work. Sounds productive!

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