12 ms·

Reasons Revealed for the Brain’s Elastic Sense of Time

140 points by nnx 6y ago

vondro 6y ago
I recommend episode #1513 of JRE with Andrew Huberman. They discuss, among other things, exactly how this works.
- rebelos 6y ago
  Unfortunately, Huberman was frequently cut off and redirected, so he didn't get a chance to fully expound on his ideas. I wish Joe would have just given him the floor in that interview. He seems oblivious to the fact that his interviews with scientists and other highly intelligent personalities are listened to in their entirety mostly by people who are very curious about the subject matter. His usual stoner meathead schtick - interjecting with nonsense about monkeys, aliens, telepathic communication, etc - really needs to take a backseat. Lex Fridman is somewhat better though still very imperfect.
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    And yet people watch Joe Rogan instead of Lex Fridman.
    - darepublic 6y ago
      Lex's guest list has broadened recently to more closely resemble Joe's, with recent interviews on UFO's and MMA. Which seem like organic interests for Lex but I don't care for when he interviews on these topics
      - bonoboTP 6y ago
        I'm a big fan of Lex, but we have to see that he basically kickstarted his podcasting career by using his MIT cred then made it into a personal thing. Basically it started as the accompanying podcast for the Artificial General Intelligence course at MIT, given by Lex. Given that it's a podcast for an MIT course, he managed to get a very highly esteemed AI guest list, because who would refuse to give an interview as part of MIT lecture materials? In the beginning it had less to do with Lex as a person I think. With that ex-guest list, he managed to continue after the course as "AI podcast", now not connected to a specific course. But if you tell people this podcast had X and Y top expert in it, you can get many more top people. Again after some time he rebranded it all under his name as Lex Podcast and is slowly entering culture war territory and is becoming a second Joe Rogan. I guess he used good tactics, but I'm not sure the initial guests would all agree that their interviews are now part of the Lex-branded podcast. He started tame and uncontroversial, gained "fuck you money" (his phrasing) and is now using it to spread his broader views. Smart, but a little distasteful.
        gvhst 6y ago
        I've listened to a number of his recent episodes in full and haven't really heard any culture wars topics addressed. Is this related to his recent episode with Joe Rogan?
        specialist 6y ago
        "...then made it into a personal thing." His interview of his own father is just about the best thing ever. One surprising reward from my recent addiction to podcasts are the fresh looks at people I thought I knew. Roger Penrose, Malcolm Gladwell, others. So rewarding. The long dialog format of podcasts is a much welcome relief. Allowing people to finish a thought, the unhurried back & forth. I recently watched "I Am Not Your Negro" on Netflix. The footage of James Baldwin on programs like Dick Cavett Show is so much like today's podcast. Made me hungry for more.
        bonoboTP 6y ago
        I definitely love the long format as well. But I predict there will be a strong backlash against him as he reveals more of his culture war views and how he agrees with Jordan Peterson on some issues etc. I think over the next months many previous guests will disown him.
        abnercoimbre 6y ago
        Isn't it inevitable for Lex to want to try? If he's into a group's approach -- you mentioned Joe Rogan , Jordan Peterson, guess I'll vaguely add Sam Harris, etc. -- and they all make money being independent podcasters, then surely he wants to compete in that space.
        bonoboTP 6y ago
        Yes, add to that Bret and Eric Weinstein. Essentially he's joining the "intellectual darkweb" as Eric Weinstein calls it. But I guess the initial big name AI people will be pissed off that they are associated with him, because of gender and race issues. For example at this point I wouldn't want to share his interviews in an AI related company on informal internal corporate communication channels even if relevant workwise, because Lex will be (or already is) known as "problematic" regarding his broad views.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Both serve a useful function. Some of us might find Joe frustrating, but he's a genial and entertaining interviewer. He's further on the entertainment spectrum than Lex, who is probably a better bet for most of us because we're probably more interested in the content. That's not a knock against Joe though. The fact he's so entertaining and relatable attracts in a huge audience his interviewees would otherwise never reach, and that's fantastic. OK maybe they don't get to expound their ideas as broadly and deeply, but the fact that they get exposure to so many people at all is a huge win.
  - ahartmetz 6y ago
    Yeah, I occasionally watch some Joe Rogan interview and it's never because of Joe Rogan. Rogan often just lowers the level of discourse with his contributions.
    - pc86 6y ago
      That's intentional (as hombre_fatal points out) but not with quite as derisive an implication as yours. The point is not for the guest to get super deep into their specific area of expertise for an uninterrupted hour. It's specifically, by design, a conversation with a layman.
      - ahartmetz 6y ago
        "Explain it to me" is good. "But what about this sensationalist angle?" is not.
        shoemakersteve 6y ago
        Why not? By asking things like that, he gives the experts the chance to address those ideas and present a more informed and/or grounded perspective of them. Honestly I think a lot of the time this is exactly why he asks things like that.
        jxramos 6y ago
        I agree, it's interesting for him to bring up the layperson superficial critiques and other ideas that float around a given subject that many people may not ask outright because of their oftentimes fringey natured questions. But they still wonder about those questions nevertheless. Joe gets all that stuff aired out more or less.
        zepto 6y ago
        Why is it not good if it’s something the audience would like to hear explored?
      - poisonarena 6y ago
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Joe Rogan is the force that keeps the interview digestible instead of getting too narrow for most people. People don't listen to Rogan interviews so that they can expect to understand the whitepaper the scientist published afterwards, they listen for the accessible conversation as if they were just overhearing two strangers meet on the bus seats in front of them. He's a comedian.
  - disown 6y ago
    > I wish Joe would have just given him the floor in that interview. You can't be serious. People don't watch JRE for a scientitic lecture. If you want a lecture or to dig deeper, go look for it. It's strange how odd people are. They go to a basketball and whine about it not being a football game. What's next? People are going to whine about how Joe didn't go over Tesla's quarterly financial statement with elon musk?
johndoe42377 6y ago
Time is a concept of the mind, like numbers. It is conditioned by the shared environment (has distinct cycles) in which mind has been evolved. There is no notion of time in the brain because it is not absolute constraint of the environment. There is no notion of time at the level of molecular biology, organs, systems, etc.
- emteycz 6y ago
  I am not sure I follow. Time is certainly an extremely important dimension in any complex biological system. The cells do not think about time, but the timing there is very precise too.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    Couldn't agree more. The whole system is based on oscillations. It's more robust than literal clockwork, but the balance of systems is dependent upon interconnected oscillators. E.g., a neuron's timing is dependent upon rhythms of vescicle production, which is dependent upon rhythms of mitochondrial transport, which is based on rhythms of kinesin movement...
  - johndoe42377 6y ago
    Please show any timing at cellular level. Thank you.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      If things happened out of order, the cell wouldn't work at all. There are a lot of different signal pathways that ensure timing is correct. You can take a look at even the most basic functionalities like DNA replication, or energy exchange. And the cell is not timed only in regards to itself, but based on the system it lives in, too - and that system is timed too, repeat x1000000. Humans (and other living beings) can work with such low amount of waste heat and intake energy only thanks to atomically precise clocking.
      - 6y ago
bananaface 6y ago
Reasons hypothesised. Not "revealed".
- TaupeRanger 6y ago
  Yes, nothing is remotely "revealed".
  - kubanczyk 6y ago
    Well, the hypothesis is "revealed".
fn1 6y ago
There is a good paper which gives an overview over the many ways and areas in which a brain perceives time. TLDR: It is complicated. Tasks like creating synchronized drum-beats use different brain-areas than, for example, estimating whether 10 minutes have elapsed. > "For example, the estimation of a 1h interval seems to be related to the duration of wake time of an individual, whereas the estimation of seconds and minutes is related to body temperature" https://www.academia.edu/32463432/The_inner_experience_of_time https://www.academia.edu/32463432/The_inner_experience_of_ti...
abhayhegde 6y ago
"Everyone knows the saying that ‘time flies when you’re having fun. But the full story might be nuanced: Time flies when you’re having more fun than you expected." Is it such a new concept? I mean if I am just enjoying playing a game, sure I am not so engrossed in the process and might be thrown out of the mood and focus elsewhere. Time does not really appear to be "flying". I understand the common feelings too have to be checked by science, but if it rings true already, is it a big revealation?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cowboysauce 6y ago
I wonder how the perceptual distortions of time that some psychedelics can cause play in with this hypothesis. Psilocybin mushrooms, in particular, can make time seem to pass incredibly slowly. They do have a tendency to make things more interesting and salient than usual which would tie nicely into the presented hypothesis. Though they could also just directly cause neural fatigue as well. There could also be another mechanism at play.
gavinray 6y ago
This was an interesting read, but to me felt like a focused/narrowed view on very specific phenomena. If you've ever taken psychedelics, you are familiar with time dilation. In a dose-dependent manner, (external) time ticks slower and slower. The classic joke is "Two friends are tripping together, one puts on music, and they listen. At the end, one says to the other 'Hey that was great, what album was that?' To which the other replies 'Huh? That was just the first song.'. It's possible to experience time dilation so intense on psychedelics that external progression of time halts completely and you're sort of "suspended" in a moment in time. (I know it sounds ridiculous and completely impossible) So I'd be really interested to see research on how it is that psychedelics impact time perception and what the brain activity looks like.
- emptysongglass 6y ago
  I once had an experience of "time-looping" on acid where I returned to the beginning of the same scene over and over. After four or so rewinds I would say the words of whoever's turn it was to talk before they said it. I'm a pretty rational guy but that experience shook me to the core. There's a Midnight Gospel episode I saw recently that portrayed it in animation dead-on. So I can't be the only one.
  - gavinray 6y ago
    Nope, same here, twice. I made it worse by opening my phone's stopwatch and starting a timer. The time was in the format 00:00.00, and I could see the milliseconds creeping by, slowing more and more, until the numbers stopped moving entirely and that's the point when I was like "Welp, I made a big mistake here tonight." Got pretty traumatized from that. You assume linear progression of time to be a given truth of the universe, and when you loop in time or it stops, it's as if gravity had been reversed and you can float now. Cracks the fundamental assumptions you had about everything and you are left trying to put the pieces back together afterwards. If drugs always wear off in a finite amount of time -- but the drug has subjectively halted YOUR movement of time, you can now logically be in this state for an eternity/infinity. And that's when you get chills down your spine and start to panic haha.

140 points by nnx 6y ago

vondro 6y ago

I recommend episode #1513 of JRE with Andrew Huberman. They discuss, among other things, exactly how this works.

rebelos 6y ago
Unfortunately, Huberman was frequently cut off and redirected, so he didn't get a chance to fully expound on his ideas. I wish Joe would have just given him the floor in that interview. He seems oblivious to the fact that his interviews with scientists and other highly intelligent personalities are listened to in their entirety mostly by people who are very curious about the subject matter. His usual stoner meathead schtick - interjecting with nonsense about monkeys, aliens, telepathic communication, etc - really needs to take a backseat. Lex Fridman is somewhat better though still very imperfect.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  And yet people watch Joe Rogan instead of Lex Fridman.
  - darepublic 6y ago
    Lex's guest list has broadened recently to more closely resemble Joe's, with recent interviews on UFO's and MMA. Which seem like organic interests for Lex but I don't care for when he interviews on these topics
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      I'm a big fan of Lex, but we have to see that he basically kickstarted his podcasting career by using his MIT cred then made it into a personal thing. Basically it started as the accompanying podcast for the Artificial General Intelligence course at MIT, given by Lex. Given that it's a podcast for an MIT course, he managed to get a very highly esteemed AI guest list, because who would refuse to give an interview as part of MIT lecture materials? In the beginning it had less to do with Lex as a person I think. With that ex-guest list, he managed to continue after the course as "AI podcast", now not connected to a specific course. But if you tell people this podcast had X and Y top expert in it, you can get many more top people. Again after some time he rebranded it all under his name as Lex Podcast and is slowly entering culture war territory and is becoming a second Joe Rogan. I guess he used good tactics, but I'm not sure the initial guests would all agree that their interviews are now part of the Lex-branded podcast. He started tame and uncontroversial, gained "fuck you money" (his phrasing) and is now using it to spread his broader views. Smart, but a little distasteful.
      - gvhst 6y ago
        I've listened to a number of his recent episodes in full and haven't really heard any culture wars topics addressed. Is this related to his recent episode with Joe Rogan?
      - specialist 6y ago
        "...then made it into a personal thing." His interview of his own father is just about the best thing ever. One surprising reward from my recent addiction to podcasts are the fresh looks at people I thought I knew. Roger Penrose, Malcolm Gladwell, others. So rewarding. The long dialog format of podcasts is a much welcome relief. Allowing people to finish a thought, the unhurried back & forth. I recently watched "I Am Not Your Negro" on Netflix. The footage of James Baldwin on programs like Dick Cavett Show is so much like today's podcast. Made me hungry for more.
        bonoboTP 6y ago
        I definitely love the long format as well. But I predict there will be a strong backlash against him as he reveals more of his culture war views and how he agrees with Jordan Peterson on some issues etc. I think over the next months many previous guests will disown him.
        abnercoimbre 6y ago
        Isn't it inevitable for Lex to want to try? If he's into a group's approach -- you mentioned Joe Rogan , Jordan Peterson, guess I'll vaguely add Sam Harris, etc. -- and they all make money being independent podcasters, then surely he wants to compete in that space.
        bonoboTP 6y ago
        Yes, add to that Bret and Eric Weinstein. Essentially he's joining the "intellectual darkweb" as Eric Weinstein calls it. But I guess the initial big name AI people will be pissed off that they are associated with him, because of gender and race issues. For example at this point I wouldn't want to share his interviews in an AI related company on informal internal corporate communication channels even if relevant workwise, because Lex will be (or already is) known as "problematic" regarding his broad views.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Both serve a useful function. Some of us might find Joe frustrating, but he's a genial and entertaining interviewer. He's further on the entertainment spectrum than Lex, who is probably a better bet for most of us because we're probably more interested in the content. That's not a knock against Joe though. The fact he's so entertaining and relatable attracts in a huge audience his interviewees would otherwise never reach, and that's fantastic. OK maybe they don't get to expound their ideas as broadly and deeply, but the fact that they get exposure to so many people at all is a huge win.
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  Yeah, I occasionally watch some Joe Rogan interview and it's never because of Joe Rogan. Rogan often just lowers the level of discourse with his contributions.
  - pc86 6y ago
    That's intentional (as hombre_fatal points out) but not with quite as derisive an implication as yours. The point is not for the guest to get super deep into their specific area of expertise for an uninterrupted hour. It's specifically, by design, a conversation with a layman.
    - ahartmetz 6y ago
      "Explain it to me" is good. "But what about this sensationalist angle?" is not.
      - shoemakersteve 6y ago
        Why not? By asking things like that, he gives the experts the chance to address those ideas and present a more informed and/or grounded perspective of them. Honestly I think a lot of the time this is exactly why he asks things like that.
        jxramos 6y ago
        I agree, it's interesting for him to bring up the layperson superficial critiques and other ideas that float around a given subject that many people may not ask outright because of their oftentimes fringey natured questions. But they still wonder about those questions nevertheless. Joe gets all that stuff aired out more or less.
      - zepto 6y ago
        Why is it not good if it’s something the audience would like to hear explored?
    - poisonarena 6y ago
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Joe Rogan is the force that keeps the interview digestible instead of getting too narrow for most people. People don't listen to Rogan interviews so that they can expect to understand the whitepaper the scientist published afterwards, they listen for the accessible conversation as if they were just overhearing two strangers meet on the bus seats in front of them. He's a comedian.
- disown 6y ago
  > I wish Joe would have just given him the floor in that interview. You can't be serious. People don't watch JRE for a scientitic lecture. If you want a lecture or to dig deeper, go look for it. It's strange how odd people are. They go to a basketball and whine about it not being a football game. What's next? People are going to whine about how Joe didn't go over Tesla's quarterly financial statement with elon musk?

johndoe42377 6y ago

Time is a concept of the mind, like numbers. It is conditioned by the shared environment (has distinct cycles) in which mind has been evolved. There is no notion of time in the brain because it is not absolute constraint of the environment. There is no notion of time at the level of molecular biology, organs, systems, etc.

emteycz 6y ago
I am not sure I follow. Time is certainly an extremely important dimension in any complex biological system. The cells do not think about time, but the timing there is very precise too.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  Couldn't agree more. The whole system is based on oscillations. It's more robust than literal clockwork, but the balance of systems is dependent upon interconnected oscillators. E.g., a neuron's timing is dependent upon rhythms of vescicle production, which is dependent upon rhythms of mitochondrial transport, which is based on rhythms of kinesin movement...
- johndoe42377 6y ago
  Please show any timing at cellular level. Thank you.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    If things happened out of order, the cell wouldn't work at all. There are a lot of different signal pathways that ensure timing is correct. You can take a look at even the most basic functionalities like DNA replication, or energy exchange. And the cell is not timed only in regards to itself, but based on the system it lives in, too - and that system is timed too, repeat x1000000. Humans (and other living beings) can work with such low amount of waste heat and intake energy only thanks to atomically precise clocking.
    - 6y ago

bananaface 6y ago

Reasons hypothesised. Not "revealed".

TaupeRanger 6y ago
Yes, nothing is remotely "revealed".
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Well, the hypothesis is "revealed".

fn1 6y ago

There is a good paper which gives an overview over the many ways and areas in which a brain perceives time. TLDR: It is complicated. Tasks like creating synchronized drum-beats use different brain-areas than, for example, estimating whether 10 minutes have elapsed. > "For example, the estimation of a 1h interval seems to be related to the duration of wake time of an individual, whereas the estimation of seconds and minutes is related to body temperature" https://www.academia.edu/32463432/The_inner_experience_of_time https://www.academia.edu/32463432/The_inner_experience_of_ti...

abhayhegde 6y ago

"Everyone knows the saying that ‘time flies when you’re having fun. But the full story might be nuanced: Time flies when you’re having more fun than you expected." Is it such a new concept? I mean if I am just enjoying playing a game, sure I am not so engrossed in the process and might be thrown out of the mood and focus elsewhere. Time does not really appear to be "flying". I understand the common feelings too have to be checked by science, but if it rings true already, is it a big revealation?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cowboysauce 6y ago

I wonder how the perceptual distortions of time that some psychedelics can cause play in with this hypothesis. Psilocybin mushrooms, in particular, can make time seem to pass incredibly slowly. They do have a tendency to make things more interesting and salient than usual which would tie nicely into the presented hypothesis. Though they could also just directly cause neural fatigue as well. There could also be another mechanism at play.

gavinray 6y ago

This was an interesting read, but to me felt like a focused/narrowed view on very specific phenomena. If you've ever taken psychedelics, you are familiar with time dilation. In a dose-dependent manner, (external) time ticks slower and slower. The classic joke is "Two friends are tripping together, one puts on music, and they listen. At the end, one says to the other 'Hey that was great, what album was that?' To which the other replies 'Huh? That was just the first song.'. It's possible to experience time dilation so intense on psychedelics that external progression of time halts completely and you're sort of "suspended" in a moment in time. (I know it sounds ridiculous and completely impossible) So I'd be really interested to see research on how it is that psychedelics impact time perception and what the brain activity looks like.

emptysongglass 6y ago
I once had an experience of "time-looping" on acid where I returned to the beginning of the same scene over and over. After four or so rewinds I would say the words of whoever's turn it was to talk before they said it. I'm a pretty rational guy but that experience shook me to the core. There's a Midnight Gospel episode I saw recently that portrayed it in animation dead-on. So I can't be the only one.
- gavinray 6y ago
  Nope, same here, twice. I made it worse by opening my phone's stopwatch and starting a timer. The time was in the format 00:00.00, and I could see the milliseconds creeping by, slowing more and more, until the numbers stopped moving entirely and that's the point when I was like "Welp, I made a big mistake here tonight." Got pretty traumatized from that. You assume linear progression of time to be a given truth of the universe, and when you loop in time or it stops, it's as if gravity had been reversed and you can float now. Cracks the fundamental assumptions you had about everything and you are left trying to put the pieces back together afterwards. If drugs always wear off in a finite amount of time -- but the drug has subjectively halted YOUR movement of time, you can now logically be in this state for an eternity/infinity. And that's when you get chills down your spine and start to panic haha.