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In short, time awareness and spatial awareness are linked. Does that mean if you increase your spatial reasoning skills, you could increase the accuracy of your

In short, time awareness and spatial awareness are linked. Does that mean if you increase your spatial reasoning skills, you could increase the accuracy of your perception of time? I ask because my spatial reasoning skills suck and so does my sense of time. The possibility of increasing both of these skills at the same time instead of just the one changes the cost/benefit equation for me.

kortex 8y ago
That seems to follow. Subjectively, meds that boost my visio-spatial skills seem to also help my temporal perception/planning as well.
goldenkey 8y ago
It's all just pattern matching. I would posit that the same neurons that imagine the future, also assist in imagining areas outside of ones' immediacy. Qualia are related to information sources that are orthogonal/uncorrelated. Try this experiment and see how you fare. When you're in the shower, imagine that the feeling of the water (preferably cold), is like being in the middle of a fire. Imagine being bathed in the flames. Try to associate "wet" with smoke, dancing flames, no pain in any way. It's surprisingly hard but possible. It almost puts me in a meditative state when I try this unintuitive association excercise. Anyhow, there are learned separations between observations and qualia. I think the one between time and space is such -- learned, not so much due to actual specialization in the brain's anatomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron
Pimpus 8y ago
Interesting, have you ever had depression? Depression has been linked to low hippocampus size[0]. Would be interesting to see how the drug mentioned by the article affects spatial reasoning and sense of time. [0]: https://gizmodo.com/5874433/the-pill-that-could-cure-depression-by-growing-your-brain https://gizmodo.com/5874433/the-pill-that-could-cure-depress... (I once read about a differently-named drug which increases hippocampus size and treats depression but I'm unable to find it now)
- ropeadopepope 8y ago
  The only time I've ever been "depressed" was when I was also addicted to high reward behaviors. I know these high reward behaviors are linked to both depression and a lack of short and long term memory. It sounds like high reward behaviors (ie: addictions), small hippocampus size, spatial awareness and time awareness could all be interconnected. Or maybe they're separate causes for the same phenomena. I don't know, but it's worth taking a closer look. I wonder how much it costs to get my brain scanned.
  - Pimpus 8y ago
    > It sounds like high reward behaviors (ie: addictions), small hippocampus size, spatial awareness and time awareness could all be interconnected. Or maybe they're separate causes for the same phenomena. Yeah, I suspect these are all deeply related. Fascinating. > I wonder how much it costs to get my brain scanned. Sounds like something that could bankrupt you stateside. If you want to get it done cheaply and by qualified people, there's always Eastern Europe :)
spdionis 8y ago
I have horrible spatial awareness but I can easily keep a beat and I've been a drummer when I was younger. As with all these correlations they are probably too simplistic.
- ropeadopepope 8y ago
  I'm also a drummer. Rhythm is not the same as the awareness of the passage of time. How are you with the passage of time throughout a day? Do you know when it's morning or afternoon without having to look at a clock? Do you know what day of the month it is without having to look at a calendar? How about month of the year?
hammock 8y ago
It makes sense that our sense of time and space would be linked - how else does one perceive the discrete passage of time but by sensing discrete spatial differences in our surroundings? The hands of a clock, the position of the sun, the water level of a draining pool, etc..
martin-adams 8y ago
If they weren't linked, I don't think I'd ever be able to catch a ball thrown up in the air
phkahler 8y ago
Go to a reasonably safe area and practice the following: Stand still, look around, select a target, close your eyes, turn/walk to the target and reach out to touch it. Then open your eyes to see how close you are. To do this well you need to envision your location and movement in your head. I don't know if practicing this or a variant of it will help because you eliminate the visual feedback and rely on the brains "projection" based on dead reckoning. It does not surprise me that doing this well requires an accurate internal tracking of time as well as position because speed determines the rate of change in position. You may also want to try remote controlled toys - cars, planes, drones. Controlling them well requires that you be able to transform your position into the vehicle. Beginners tend to turn the wrong way when the vehicle is coming toward them. Now that I think of it, don't walk around at first. Just face away from a door, look around, then shut your eyes and try to turn around and reach for the doorknob. If by chance you make a real experiment of this or find a way to get better at it, please write about it!
- phaedrus 8y ago
  I think the question that has to be asked is what is the specific deficiency? What if navigation skill is like a 3 legged stool that needs all 3 legs to work? Different people could be missing a different leg. For instance in my case I'm actually better at steering an RC car or similar than I am at figuring out which way I should turn myself. To the point that sometimes when I'm lost, trying to relate a map on the wall to hallways in a building, my best strategy is to step outside myself and say, "OK if there were a mouse in a maze which way would the mouse have to turn here?" Often, the answer I get from doing that is different from what my brain tells me I myself should do; always, it is my first-person reasoning which has it wrong and the 3rd-person reasoning which is right.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    That has to be one of the most interesting things I've read. I'm going to pay attention to my own navigation skills now as there are some gaps may be similarly odd seeming. There seems to be a distinction between the map/real-world and just navigating the real world without feedback.
phaedrus 8y ago
I have problems with time and with space. I got into dance and it was hard because "random packet latency" in my senses messed with my ability to learn and keep a beat. However through the help of dance partners tapping out the beat on my shoulder, and years of practice, I was able to reduce that "sensory latency jitter". I can't say for sure if it helped my spatial sense, but now that I look back, it probably did. I have always understood that, for me, the problems were linked, because you cannot do dead reckoning without an accurate clock.
growlix 8y ago
I see a lot of child comments using "spatial" to refer to multiple distinct concepts: 1) coordination and movement in space, 2) visuospatial skills (i.e. intuition for 2D and 3D geometry), and 3) navigation. While many tasks make use of multiple of these capabilities simultaneously, there are clear behavioral and neuroanatomical dissociations between them (thought slightly less so between 1 and 2). Coordination of movement in space (for example something like grasping an object) is more dependent on parietal cortex & the dorsal visual stream (the so-called "where" pathway), and the cerebellum. "Visuospatial skill", as typified by tasks like mental object rotation, is more ascribable to temporal cortex & the ventral visual stream (the so-called "what" pathway, responsible for object recognition). However, it often requires both ventral and dorsal visual cortex. Navigation is hippocampus-dependent. However, the hippocampus is not a "GPS". I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. It is a hub for integrating and associating disparate information from across the brain in order to form representations of and the relationships between behaviorally-relevant states. This explains why the hippocampus is also involved in "navigating" abstract state spaces, for example turn-based game states [0] or auditory frequency [1], when they're behaviorally relevant. It gets analogized as a GPS because 1) most of the research involves spatial tasks, so space is the behaviorally-relevant dimension, 2) a certain Nobel Prize winner does not feel the need to update his theory, and 3) "Hippocampus = GPS" is too sexy and intuitive of an analogy, especially for the lay press. The idea of the hippocampus as an "associative engine" also helps unify its seemingly disparate roles in "navigation" and memory when you consider that a memory is just information from disparate brain areas that's been associated via temporal correlation because of its behavioral relevance. It also explains why researchers observe "place cells" and "time cells" and "head direction cels" and "eye position cells": because these variables are behaviorally relevant (i.e. important for maximizing reward) in the task the animal is performing. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hipo.22523 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hipo.22523 [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28358077 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28358077
notduncansmith 8y ago
A point in time is an (n-1)-dimensional slice through an n-dimensional space.
agumonkey 8y ago
I play drums, the sensitivity increase by detailed perception of time translates very well to kinetic sensitivity (I can almost sense momentum derivative). Not large scale space though. I do think that most of our senses are first tuned for near future and thus local interactions, not architecture-size understanding?

kortex 8y ago

That seems to follow. Subjectively, meds that boost my visio-spatial skills seem to also help my temporal perception/planning as well.

goldenkey 8y ago

It's all just pattern matching. I would posit that the same neurons that imagine the future, also assist in imagining areas outside of ones' immediacy. Qualia are related to information sources that are orthogonal/uncorrelated. Try this experiment and see how you fare. When you're in the shower, imagine that the feeling of the water (preferably cold), is like being in the middle of a fire. Imagine being bathed in the flames. Try to associate "wet" with smoke, dancing flames, no pain in any way. It's surprisingly hard but possible. It almost puts me in a meditative state when I try this unintuitive association excercise. Anyhow, there are learned separations between observations and qualia. I think the one between time and space is such -- learned, not so much due to actual specialization in the brain's anatomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron

Pimpus 8y ago

Interesting, have you ever had depression? Depression has been linked to low hippocampus size[0]. Would be interesting to see how the drug mentioned by the article affects spatial reasoning and sense of time. [0]: https://gizmodo.com/5874433/the-pill-that-could-cure-depression-by-growing-your-brain https://gizmodo.com/5874433/the-pill-that-could-cure-depress... (I once read about a differently-named drug which increases hippocampus size and treats depression but I'm unable to find it now)

ropeadopepope 8y ago
The only time I've ever been "depressed" was when I was also addicted to high reward behaviors. I know these high reward behaviors are linked to both depression and a lack of short and long term memory. It sounds like high reward behaviors (ie: addictions), small hippocampus size, spatial awareness and time awareness could all be interconnected. Or maybe they're separate causes for the same phenomena. I don't know, but it's worth taking a closer look. I wonder how much it costs to get my brain scanned.
- Pimpus 8y ago
  > It sounds like high reward behaviors (ie: addictions), small hippocampus size, spatial awareness and time awareness could all be interconnected. Or maybe they're separate causes for the same phenomena. Yeah, I suspect these are all deeply related. Fascinating. > I wonder how much it costs to get my brain scanned. Sounds like something that could bankrupt you stateside. If you want to get it done cheaply and by qualified people, there's always Eastern Europe :)

spdionis 8y ago

I have horrible spatial awareness but I can easily keep a beat and I've been a drummer when I was younger. As with all these correlations they are probably too simplistic.

ropeadopepope 8y ago
I'm also a drummer. Rhythm is not the same as the awareness of the passage of time. How are you with the passage of time throughout a day? Do you know when it's morning or afternoon without having to look at a clock? Do you know what day of the month it is without having to look at a calendar? How about month of the year?

hammock 8y ago

It makes sense that our sense of time and space would be linked - how else does one perceive the discrete passage of time but by sensing discrete spatial differences in our surroundings? The hands of a clock, the position of the sun, the water level of a draining pool, etc..

martin-adams 8y ago

If they weren't linked, I don't think I'd ever be able to catch a ball thrown up in the air

phkahler 8y ago

Go to a reasonably safe area and practice the following: Stand still, look around, select a target, close your eyes, turn/walk to the target and reach out to touch it. Then open your eyes to see how close you are. To do this well you need to envision your location and movement in your head. I don't know if practicing this or a variant of it will help because you eliminate the visual feedback and rely on the brains "projection" based on dead reckoning. It does not surprise me that doing this well requires an accurate internal tracking of time as well as position because speed determines the rate of change in position. You may also want to try remote controlled toys - cars, planes, drones. Controlling them well requires that you be able to transform your position into the vehicle. Beginners tend to turn the wrong way when the vehicle is coming toward them. Now that I think of it, don't walk around at first. Just face away from a door, look around, then shut your eyes and try to turn around and reach for the doorknob. If by chance you make a real experiment of this or find a way to get better at it, please write about it!

phaedrus 8y ago
I think the question that has to be asked is what is the specific deficiency? What if navigation skill is like a 3 legged stool that needs all 3 legs to work? Different people could be missing a different leg. For instance in my case I'm actually better at steering an RC car or similar than I am at figuring out which way I should turn myself. To the point that sometimes when I'm lost, trying to relate a map on the wall to hallways in a building, my best strategy is to step outside myself and say, "OK if there were a mouse in a maze which way would the mouse have to turn here?" Often, the answer I get from doing that is different from what my brain tells me I myself should do; always, it is my first-person reasoning which has it wrong and the 3rd-person reasoning which is right.
- phkahler 8y ago
  That has to be one of the most interesting things I've read. I'm going to pay attention to my own navigation skills now as there are some gaps may be similarly odd seeming. There seems to be a distinction between the map/real-world and just navigating the real world without feedback.

phaedrus 8y ago

I have problems with time and with space. I got into dance and it was hard because "random packet latency" in my senses messed with my ability to learn and keep a beat. However through the help of dance partners tapping out the beat on my shoulder, and years of practice, I was able to reduce that "sensory latency jitter". I can't say for sure if it helped my spatial sense, but now that I look back, it probably did. I have always understood that, for me, the problems were linked, because you cannot do dead reckoning without an accurate clock.

growlix 8y ago

I see a lot of child comments using "spatial" to refer to multiple distinct concepts: 1) coordination and movement in space, 2) visuospatial skills (i.e. intuition for 2D and 3D geometry), and 3) navigation. While many tasks make use of multiple of these capabilities simultaneously, there are clear behavioral and neuroanatomical dissociations between them (thought slightly less so between 1 and 2). Coordination of movement in space (for example something like grasping an object) is more dependent on parietal cortex & the dorsal visual stream (the so-called "where" pathway), and the cerebellum. "Visuospatial skill", as typified by tasks like mental object rotation, is more ascribable to temporal cortex & the ventral visual stream (the so-called "what" pathway, responsible for object recognition). However, it often requires both ventral and dorsal visual cortex. Navigation is hippocampus-dependent. However, the hippocampus is not a "GPS". I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. It is a hub for integrating and associating disparate information from across the brain in order to form representations of and the relationships between behaviorally-relevant states. This explains why the hippocampus is also involved in "navigating" abstract state spaces, for example turn-based game states [0] or auditory frequency [1], when they're behaviorally relevant. It gets analogized as a GPS because 1) most of the research involves spatial tasks, so space is the behaviorally-relevant dimension, 2) a certain Nobel Prize winner does not feel the need to update his theory, and 3) "Hippocampus = GPS" is too sexy and intuitive of an analogy, especially for the lay press. The idea of the hippocampus as an "associative engine" also helps unify its seemingly disparate roles in "navigation" and memory when you consider that a memory is just information from disparate brain areas that's been associated via temporal correlation because of its behavioral relevance. It also explains why researchers observe "place cells" and "time cells" and "head direction cels" and "eye position cells": because these variables are behaviorally relevant (i.e. important for maximizing reward) in the task the animal is performing. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hipo.22523 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hipo.22523 [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28358077 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28358077

notduncansmith 8y ago

A point in time is an (n-1)-dimensional slice through an n-dimensional space.

agumonkey 8y ago

I play drums, the sensitivity increase by detailed perception of time translates very well to kinetic sensitivity (I can almost sense momentum derivative). Not large scale space though. I do think that most of our senses are first tuned for near future and thus local interactions, not architecture-size understanding?