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The Richness of Time

May 30, 2021
thank you thank you the topic tonight is the nature of

time

and

time

is one of our most precious possessions perhaps the most precious commodity I mean we enter the world we are given a certain amount of time we don't know how much time we have. After we exhaust that time allotment, it will all be over, so thank you very much for coming and good night. We have spent countless hours, decades, centuries reflecting on the nature of time and, as we will discuss here tonight, there are many things we understand about time, but if we even reflect on the starting point where you would imagine we begin our exploration of time, the definition of time, we still find it difficult to give that correct definition, time certainly has to do with change, that is how we recognize that time has passed, but trying to get to the heart of what time really is proves extraordinarily difficult .
the richness of time
John Wheeler, who I suspect many of you are familiar with that name. One of the great physicists of our time who passed away not long ago. He said the famous phrase of that time. It is nature's way of ensuring that everything does not happen suddenly and it is certainly a quality of time, but trying to get to the heart of what is is difficult, so what we are going to do here tonight is To address this profound question from three different perspectives, we will try to triangulate a deeper appreciation, an understanding of intuition about time, so in this first chapter, this first act of the discussion, I will focus on how physics works. is about the nature of time and when it concludes, I will bring in a guest neuroscientist who will give us a way to think about time by focusing on the biological structures that allow us to experience time, the passage of time and various other qualities that we will discuss and then, In the third part, I will bring in a cognitive scientist who will help us think about time from the perspective of language and culture and allow us to bridge these perspectives and in the fourth part We will have a joint conversation in which we will try to have a free fight to trying to see where we can find places of coincidence differences and ultimately, hopefully, giving them a richer idea of ​​the nature of time to start with the physics of time.
the richness of time

More Interesting Facts About,

the richness of time...

Time What we have done to try to control time over many centuries is come up with better and better ways to measure the passage of time now, how do we do it? How do we measure the passage of time well? It is a fairly simple procedure. We try to find processes in the natural world that are cyclical and repetitive, and if the repetition is stable, if it is something reliable in the sense that cycle after cycle after cycle are all the same, we use those cycles to count. how long has it been, of course, as we all know, in the old days we started that process by making use of the cyclical notion of the Earth's spin and that allowed us to introduce the sundial just as the Earth rotates and the position of the sun changes, the shadow that we see here will move and that way we have a means of measuring the passage of time now that is making use of an astronomical phenomenon, but we can go further and make use of a mechanical phenomenon and the passage in that direction can be seen in this image here, we consider a pendulum, so the basic physics that we learned in the 16th of the 18th century tells us that if we have a situation like this where we have a mass that is balanced on an arm, the physics basic tells us Tell us that if you know something about the length of the arm and the nature of gravitational acceleration, you can calculate how it will oscillate and it is regular and you can use it like a clock, but then you know that we went beyond this and Recognize that there are certain materials , certain crystals, quartz crystals, that if you apply a voltage to them oscillate very regularly and that gives rise to the types of watches that were very well known and used in the last 10 20 30 40 years, but even this is a technology that we can and have improved it by making use of atomic clocks where, for example, this is an example where a cesium atom can be excited by bombarding it with laser pulses and then it itself will pulse and in fact, we now define the second by counting the number of vibrations of the radiation coming out of this atomic species of cesium 133, so this is a wonderful progression in the history of trying to measure this thing called time because the device that I just showed you Atomic clocks are so precise, so reliable in their repetitive process, their cyclical process, that some of these devices will lose less than a second in a million or 10 million years, which is surprising when you think about our ability to measure.
the richness of time
This thing called time, and yet we reflect on the starting point of the discussion where I said that we don't actually know what it is that we're measuring, so there's a curious tension between our amazing ability to measure it and our lack of understanding. total. of what it is that we are measuring but we have still gone beyond simply measuring the passage of time that we have been able through certain incredible minds that our species has produced albert einstein in particular we have gained insight into the qualities of time that are Counterintuitively, they are not the characteristics of time that we experience, so now I want to move on to three qualities of time, one of which has to do with the speed at which time passes and this is where Einstein's ideas will happen. to the fore and then I will follow with a brief discussion of two other qualities of time that are within our intuition, the intuition that I think we all have that time flows correctly, I think we all have that feeling that time flows and then The third will be our intuition that the future and the past are radically different and I will give you an idea of ​​what physics has to say about that quality of time and we will see that it is not really aligned with our understanding of the basic laws of physical.
the richness of time
So for the first quality, the passage of time, I think most of us have an intuition unless you've studied physics or read popular books about these ideas, but there's certainly ingrained in our bones the feeling that time passes. the same no matter where you are. how you are moving the gravitational field that you are experiencing and Einstein was the first individual to come along and establish that that intuition is simply not correct and one way to quickly get to this idea is to remember that Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on the experimentally verified idea that the speed of light is constant the speed of light does not change we like things that do not change are the things in which we can anchor our understanding and make use of that constant nature of the speed of light we can build a very special type of clock some of you are no doubt familiar with this clock.
It's called a light clock. It consists of two mirrors facing each other and a ball of light that bounces between the two mirrors. I think I can show you an example of that here, so how do you make a watch out of this? You just count the bounces, so tick tock tick tock and you just count the ticks in conversations and that way this becomes the clock that I want. What I have to do is compare the passage of time on two of these light clocks, where in a moment I am going to set the second clock on the right in motion when they are sitting next to each other, of course, the passage of time . about them is absolutely identical the question that einstein asked is if you set that second clock in motion, what will happen and let me first describe what you will see in the next little sequence here, but just to guide your thinking imagine that I have a light clock right here this is the bottom mirror this is the top mirror and you see the ball of light bouncing up and down between those two mirrors now as I walk to the right as I walk imagine following the beam of light the ball of It lights up so start here down and as I walk it will hit the top mirror from my perspective, the clock isn't even moving so it will certainly hit that top mirror, but the trajectory will therefore be to start down here, hit the top mirror.
In this place, as I continue to move, the light ball will take a second diagonal path and hit the bottom mirror here, so as you look at this clock, if I darken the theater and the only thing you can see is the light ball. you would see the ticks going tick tick tick tick and the beautiful thing about that path is that it is longer than the straight path up and down, but the speed of light does not change and therefore if light travels a distance longer at the same speed, it will take longer to do it, so the ticking will decrease, so let me show you that in the sequence here, so now I'm going to set that light clock on the right in motion and watch the trajectory. from that photon that ball of light and you will see that it follows the double diagonal path a longer path now look at the ticking nine against eight ten against nine time is slowing down in the moving clock and einstein was the first person to realize that time is not something universal in the sense that Isaac Newton thought it was time in a moving clock from our perspective seeing it move more slowly and it is not just a clock of light, that clock of light is representative of the passage of time same, so if you had good enough resolution to observe the biological processes inside my body as I move right now, they would also slow down at exactly the same rate as the ticking slowdown on that light clock, moving time slows down now why?
Don't we know this because we travel at speeds that are very slow compared to the speed of light? How fast is the speed of light? We circle the Earth seven times in a single second at the speed of light, since our speed is very slow. we don't realize this intuitively in our bones Einstein discovered this now he also discovered something else he discovered that gravity has an impact on the passage of time this is his general theory of relativity 1915 he writes the equations and realizes that in a certain sense I'll speak a little metaphorically to get the basic idea that gravity in a sense attracts not only matter but it also attracts time, which means that the stronger the gravitational field you are in, the stronger the gravity attracts. in time slows down its pace gravity the stronger time slows down it passes at a slower rate, so just to give you an example of that, we can consider saying the Empire State Building imagine you have a clock of any variety, it doesn't matter what The ground is sitting over here and it is moving at a normal pace, but now let's imagine that we go to the top of the Empire State Building where gravity is not as strong as on the ground and the stronger gravity on the ground means that the clock on The terrain will move more slowly and you will be able to start to see the time difference between them now again, not at correct scale, the time difference would be minuscule, billionths of a second, but it is not the size of the time difference that really matters for our attempt to understand. the nature of time is the fact that time is not the same, it is not universal, it depends not only on how you move, it depends on the gravitational field that you are experiencing now, having said that the reason it is so small is because The gravitational pull Earth's surface is relatively weak, but if you were to get close to the edge of a black hole where gravity is much stronger than the time warp associated with being closer to the black hole versus farther from the black hole, it could result. in a significant time distortion. difference between the clocks that tick in those different places and of course there have been ingredients, there have been examples in popular culture that have made use of that scientific fact, what is the most recent and perhaps the most famous movie that made use of that? of this interstellar fact? so an interstellar, if you remember, there is a black hole and some of the astronauts get relatively close to that black hole and that affects their passage of time and just to remind you of Kip Thorne, who was the scientific advisor and I think he had the idea initial of this.
The movie made sure everything was as scientifically accurate as possible, so this is an example where, you know, a few hours next to the black hole, according to Matthew McConaughey and Hathaway, translates into 23 years on the ship. nurse because time passes very slowly. in the powerful gravitational pull of a black hole relative to the speed at which time passes in other places and you know, I've known these ideas now, I don't know, 35 40 years may never stop being absolutely impressive because they are so different from what our brain intuitively thinks about the nature of time, two other qualities of time that I told you I would talk about not only the passage of time but also this intuitive feeling that time flows just when time somehow It is taking us away from the second. second by second in a relentless manner that is often described poetically as, for example, the flow of a river, the flow of time and to have aidea of ​​that, here's a rough way to think about how we think about movement in the world.
Because in a sense they are a series of snapshots, I show them discretely, but really you would imagine them to be continuous and it is moment after moment, and these snapshots continue to advance as time passes into the future and this often gives us the feeling that the only real thing is the present moment, the present moment is what is real and somehow the past is gone and the future is yet to be and there is something very curious in that way of thinking about time because a moment in time It represents a quality of time that is its most basic ingredient.
It is only observable by comparing one moment with another moment. A moment in itself cannot change by definition. It is the ingredient by which we can see change by comparing one moment with the next. So if we think in the present moment whether in this snapshot metaphor or an equivalent metaphor that is often used as a kind of projector, so it is as if time passes and the only real thing is the moment that is illuminated, the now is illuminated by the projector of time and all the frames that are. before or after the one that is being projected in some way those who have not yet been illuminated are gone the future those who have already been illuminated or the past but if you think about this it is strange because this is saying that a moment in time is real by virtue of being enlightened but not being enlightened in this way of thinking things would mean that that moment is changed, it is as if you were saying that the moment exists in two varieties when it is enlightened and when it is not, but if a moment can't change so that's an incoherent notion because it suggests that there are two versions of that moment, the enlightened and the unenlightened, and this kind of thinking, when really combined with Einstein's relativity, gives a very different way of thinking about time in the one we live in. imagine that each moment is as real as any other moment it is not just that the present is real and the past is no longer the future yet to be each moment is as real as any other past still exists the future exists the present exists and this is which gave rise to Einstein's own poetic description where he said that the difference, the distinction between past, present and future, is just an illusion no matter how persistent and part of what we will do in the second part of this discussion is try to have an idea of ​​that distinction between our intuition.
The past has become the future and is not yet present is real and what science from the point of view of relativity and even logic seems to tell us about the reality of all time. Alright, the final quality of time I'll focus on is our intuition. We feel that time has a direction. Time has what we call an arrow. We are so familiar with the fact that when you look at physical events in the world, they always seem to unfold in a temporal orientation. The canonical examples we would like. to use, you know, if you drop an egg, it splashes but it never falls apart, you know, if someone jumps off a diving board, it goes into the water, but you never see someone jumping out of the water, falling down and landing on the diving board and, fact, you laugh and that's an important fact because when you watch movies in reverse, the reason you laugh is because it's so ridiculous in relation to your understanding of your intuition about the nature of time, but here's the surprising fact when you look at the laws of physics as they are currently set up. laws of physics when interpreted correctly, so I won't go into the nuances of that, but all laws of physics have the quality of treating the future and the past symmetrically identically on equal terms, which means that when We physicists study the laws of motion, any sequence of events that can develop in one direction, the reverse sequence is allowed by the laws of physics and, in fact, there is an algorithm to ensure that, if it has, for example, some development physical, if you want to reverse it, all you need to do is reverse the movements. of the particles that are involved and there is a little clip that I will show you that also has a certain temporal quality, it shows me as a young man, so I will disappear for a moment, but this illustrates this. point about the arrow of time actually being reversible, we all know what will happen if I drop this glass of wine.
Now the idea that this disaster can somehow be reversed and become a solid glass full of wine again seems absurd, but according to the laws of physics this can happen, all I need to do is reverse the speeds of everything. , every piece of glass, every drop of wine, every molecule and atom on the table of liquid glass and air, just reverse all their speeds and voila, ah, if only we could reverse time so easily. but the point here is a very basic quality of experience in which things seem to develop only in one orientation, we only see things develop in one orientation, but that is really an environmental effect, it is actually the fact that We can't reverse all those speeds like I did in the little clip there simply because it's too hard to do, but if we could, the laws of physics would say things would work the other way around, so this gives an idea of ​​the disjunction between our intuition for both the passage of time and general relativity with gravity our sense that time flows and our sense that time has an arrow our intuition is at odds with these fundamental qualities of time and we go to explore the tension between what we understand about time from physics and our perception of time with some of the world's experts who can give us insight into the nature of that disjunction, so to do that, let's bring in a neuroscientist from the Institute of Brain Research and the UCLA Integrative Center for Learning and Memory. researcher on how the brain tells time and neural computation please welcome to the stage dean guanamono okay so you saw in that discussion there and you know from your own knowledge of the physics side of this discussion that There is this tension between what physics has. found and our intuition about how the world works and I deduce that part of the explanation must lie in the fact that our brains evolved to survive and to survive it is not necessary to know these curiosities about the nature of time, but you can take us to your understanding of how the brain processes time, how it keeps time, so I think there is a big difference here between physicists and neuroscientists in the sense that neuroscience tends to implicitly accept the notion that only the present is real and the future it is not yet. real and the past is no longer real, that is because the brain is an inherently temporary organ in many ways.
If we can say that the brain has a main function, its main function is to store information about the past in order to predict and prepare for the future. By acting on the present, the fact that we talk about memory and future means that we are assuming that we have the ability to change the future and that is the currency of evolution, the degree to which I can anticipate what is going to happen. It sure gives me a powerful evolutionary advantage, so from that distinction, then the question is okay, how does the brain get that right and then the brain learns that we have?
We form memories, we store information from the past and the implicit idea there is. that that past no longer exists except within our neural circuits and then we predict the future um and to predict the future you need to tell the time it's not enough for your meteorologist to say um it's going to rain it's useful if they tell you it's going to rain it'll rain tomorrow or past, so the question of how the brain tells time is key and Brian, is there a structure in the brain that is specifically geared toward keeping time? That was a theory decades ago that maybe you have some central clock in your brain. something like a computer has a clock chip that controls all the temporal processing done by the computer, so that was a theory, but the point is, because time is so important to everything we do right now , you are paying. pay attention to the timing of my speech, but you're also paying attention to the time on that clock over there, oh, you saw me look over there to time the pace of this, so yeah, the brain is trying to predict what's going to happen.
It happens when telling time and let me give you an example, right now your brain is unconsciously trying to predict what is about to happen and by pausing my speech I created a temporal prediction error in your brain because you were unconsciously trying to predict what was happening . for it to happen, it didn't happen, then you became aware of um and Brian started thinking uh oh, he forgot what he was going to say or the audience said, man, this guy is boring, but and another thing happens there, Brian is because it was kind of an awkward silence you probably became more aware of the passage of time and this is the fundamental point that you just approached, which is the flow of time, the notion that time is not a static frame in the film but that flows and that's where, as you mentioned The clash arises between physics and neuroscience and neuroscientists tend to blame physicists for not understanding time and neuroscientists and physicists expect neuroscientists to explain where this illusion comes from and I think That will be a topic that maybe we can talk about.
About this in brief, but in regards to how the brain tells time, you mentioned that throughout human civilization we have been inventing more and more powerful ways of telling time and today we don't measure anything as well as we say we measure time, so actually measuring space by telling time, a meter is defined by how far light goes in a specific period of time, so all of these man-made clocks tend to rely on a fairly simple conceptual concept, which Brian mentioned, that's just the count of these. oscillations, whether the oscillation of a pendulum, the oscillation of a quartz crystal, or the oscillation of the vibrations of a cesium atom, the brain, the stopwatches, or the clocks created by the brain are fundamentally different from those within the brain. brain, so the brain does not tell time. counting the ticks of an oscillator, so yes there are oscillators, for example your circadian clock is an oscillator that tells you when to get up and when to eat, but the neurons in your brain that are oscillating have no idea how long many times they have oscillated, so something Brian didn't mention was that a key feature of using a quartz crystal is that something has to count the ticks, yes, and the same with an atomic clock, so while the circadian clock neurons oscillate We have no idea if they have oscillated a thousand times, ten thousand times or a hundred thousand times, so the other amazing thing about man-made clocks is that the same atomic clock can count picoseconds, microseconds, milliseconds, seconds, days, years, etc., so the brain is also able to tell time across large scales, but they are fundamentally different mechanisms, so your circadian clock does not have a second hand.
Timers are the circuits in his brain that allow him to pause my speech. second hand but I don't have a time clock so the brain has many clocks so the answer to your question is no there is no centralized clock that tells time on all scales and solves all our temporal problems and I mean from to to from From an evolutionary perspective, it is clear that having the ability to keep track of various temporal durations has survival value, right, I mean the internal processes that need to coordinate protein production and the different processes need to happen at a certain rhythm , you know, we have to know it to get up.
You know, if we didn't get up, that would be the end of it, so this being the case, is it true that, say, all animals keep track of time in the same way or are we different from the other members of the group? In the animal kingdom we inherit many of the clocks from our mammalian ancestors, so the ability to tell time, the circadian clock, is very similar. You don't even need to have a brain to have a circadian clock, which is why bacteria and plants have circadian clocks. and by the way, something you mentioned is a very good point: we call it the circadian clock, but even the circadian clock is actually a predictive mechanism because, as you said, it's not necessarily about waking up, but preparing the body to activate the correct rhythm. proteins and hormones, so it's more of a prediction device than an actual clock, and animals also have ways of telling time on the millisecond scale, so it's very similar between species.
What is different is our ability to conceptualize time in ways that humans and animals are different, so if you look at human evolution, all animals try to predict what is about to happen. You know, the simple act of throwing something at you is an act of predicting that you're going to catch it or something, like that.that you have to look to the future or a cat. That's jumping in the air to catch a bird, right? It's predicting the future. Humans did something incredible: they went from predicting the future to creating the future, so the simple act of planting a seed to say "it's okay" instead of foraging for food.
I'm going to make food and that food will come to me, so this is what we call mental time travel, so at some point our ancestors were able to engage in the ability to travel short or long periods of time in the past. and in the future. and this is totally in your heads, totally in our heads, so the fact of the matter is, as a physicist, I don't know where you stand on time travel, but you probably agree that it's not a practical issue. , making the best time machine we have. What we have is our brain and our ability to stimulate you and I'm simulated in our brain being here to prepare for tonight, it may not seem like that but we did it and so that capacity indicator and mental time travel to plant the seed and reap the products of that is beyond the cognitive ability, as far as we know, of all other animals and what about the phenomenon that I mentioned that is probably the most familiar quality, the intuitive quality of time, that feeling that all these moments are somehow coming together?
Is there evidence that we have a minimum amount of time that will constitute something we are aware of? I guess it exists for that and given that can you tell us something about the process in the brain that ties all those moments together into something that feels continuous, no thanks, so there are two aspects to that question, first there is what is happening unconsciously, so unconsciously our ability to detect differences in small periods of time is actually quite amazing given that neurons are so slow, for example, localizing sound from my right ear to my left ear takes maybe a hundred microseconds. and you can easily grasp it, but that is now unconscious, at the conscious level, the question of whether there is quantum time exactly, um.
This is a little bit different and there really isn't, but it's very flexible, so I think you're referring to the question of our conscious perception of time and that's a much deeper question, so first of all, of course, There is a delay, so when we process speech everyone lived in a sense in the past because it takes any computing device with your computer or brain, a finite amount of time to process that information, but that's natural, so It's just a consequence of physics, now there is a deeper question here is: when do we become aware of something?
Although you might think you are perceiving my speech as a continuous flow of the river, it is actually not, it is a meta-illusion or a mental construct in the sense that your brain processes things in chunks and then puts them together, but the amount of that stitch actually it is variable, it is not fixed, let me try to give you an example by saying two sentences here, the mouse pad and the computer are new in the second sentence, the mouse was eaten by the cat, okay, so I hope you understood that both sentences had the word mouse and they had different meanings, but you only knew the meaning because of the word that came after, well, so if I say that the mouse pad and the computer are new, you don't know. what I was going to say until what comes next, but I assume that most of you did not edit back in time to readjust your interpretation of the mouse.
I don't know, I'm just assuming they didn't, so clearly your brain is chunking things up over time, so the way to think about this is that your unconscious brain is continually processing information in a more or less way. linear, but consciousness, which is actually a small fraction of what happens in our brain, is generated once the unconscious brain arrives. in some reasonable narrative, some reasonable story of what is happening in the external world and it raises awareness sometimes that most of the time, fortunately, that story is correlated with that of the real world, sometimes it is not and that is an illusion or hallucination.
Now we talk about illusions or hallucinations. I know that some friends have told me about psychoactive drugs and these friends have described their experiences so vividly that I almost feel like I have had those experiences, so I wonder: do they describe situations in which the effect of psychoactive drugs? The psychoactive drug was going to radically change your perception of time in a variety of different ways, so you clearly know that a chemical flowing through the brain can radically change everything you're describing as normal neurological functioning, yes, and You will be glad to know. that you can feel this without having to do the same thing that your friends take those drugs by simply participating in something that is really boring or an exciting experiment or near-death experience or jumping out of a plane if you don't want to do the drugs and then you are using your drugs themselves, literally the neuromodulators that do that, so again there are two levels to this question: what is happening at this unconscious circuit level and the neural modulators and the chemistry in your brain, whether they are altered by pharmacological compounds or No.
We modulate the neural circuits within our brain so that they can speed up the processing of neural dynamics or not change our perception of time, so if we accelerate neural dynamics through some pharmacological means, then our internal clock goes faster and the external, which means that in a relatively short time. Speaking, the external clock slows down, so we are left with the perception that time is slowing down. That doesn't really explain consciousness, which I think is what your friends were referring to conscious awareness there and that's a much deeper question because it's tied to consciousness and in some ways I think that's the wrong question and let me If you give me some leeway here, I'm going to make an analogy, so there is an illusion about body consciousness and the illusion is a ghost. limbs or phantom pain, so people who do not have an arm often feel that that arm is still there and this is very paradoxical and strange for us who have never felt how you can feel something that is not there and the reason why We can know that the sensation of the body is not happening in the body, it is happening in the brain, so if I hurt my finger, my brain projects that pain here, so the mystery of phantom limbs is not the phantom limb.
They are our normal limbs, so it is a mistake to ask what causes phantom limbs. The correct question is what causes our body's normal perception. My point is that the same thing happens in time, so observing time distortions is really the least mysterious. The most mysterious questions are what is our normal perception of time and that is inextricably linked with consciousness and it is a difficult question, given that you know, a thought that is always in the back of my mind, a somewhat disturbing thought actually is than us. As physicists have spent a lot of energy and effort trying to discover the qualities of time, and I described some of them in the first part of the program here tonight, of course everything we discover we do with the same sticky gray structure. inside our heads that perhaps for evolutionary reasons gives us a certain type of temporal experience of reality, could it be the case that a different architecture could have led to a radically different way of experiencing time and a different way of thinking about the weather out there? in the real world absolutely and I believe, but here it is, as you said, the brain evolved to survive in a world governed by the laws of physics, so this is a pretty strict test, but the laws of physics act in ways very limited. domain of experience, so our intuitions about quantum mechanics are horrible and our intuitions about general relativity are horrible because those domains are not particularly important for survival, although time is correct, so time is not a limited property from quantum mechanics or, um, general relativity, it's very mesoscopic. so I would say that we have to take very seriously the intuitions about the past not being real, the present being real and the future um uh not real yet either because it was hard for me to see, but why I don't want to interrupt, but that's A key point right there between the physical and biological perspective because when I think about the biology of the brain I always think, hey, this thing had a goal which was to survive long enough for the carrier to reach reproductive maturity and pass on the genes. to the next generation and my view has long been that that is a radically different goal than discovering the true nature of reality; in fact, my opinion has long been that those of our ancestors who may have been prophetic and knew about the strangeness of time that came safely from Einstein when they were on airplanes thinking about time dilation and general relativity , they ate them, they were not focused on the objective which was survival and, therefore, when you say that we have to take ourselves seriously that type of past is gone. the future is yet to be I wonder why you say that so I say it because unlike our ancestors who thought about quantum mechanics they would be um and luckily the same with general relativity luckily Einstein didn't get eaten but over time It is critical for survival. because as I said, the brain is a device that stores information about the past, that is, the memory, to predict the future and that is what you are doing, so I think the question that we have to try to solve is whether the temporal component of our conscious experience is real or not, let me try to give you an analogy, another in terms of color, okay, yes, surely we know that in physics color does not really exist, what we have is the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation , the brain, the color is from evolution. hack to build a spectrometer and it's imperfect but it's pretty good, so Newton used color perception from it to make very valid influences on the physics of light.
Now I think that for the same reason color is adaptive because it tells us about its correlation. with the real world, I believe that our sense of the flow of time would not have evolved if it were not correlated with the real world from an evolutionary perspective. Now my question for you, Brian, is this, if an omniscient being descended and for you. personally and assured him that the past, the present and the future are different, that the present is, in a certain sense, more real than the future, obviously, we know that the absolute present does not exist because it has been well proven because we know that clocks they change at different speeds, but that doesn't really say that the present is different from the past or the future, so if that being came to you and told you that, you would have to go in there and rewrite any of the laws of physics or even you could use them. the same laws well that's a good question and it's actually relevant because I've been visited by the omniscient thing with your friends no, yeah, so here's my point of view, my point of view is that a lot of what we're talking about This night is absolutely vital from a human-scale perspective because we are beings who live in the world and we want to have a deeper understanding of this quality that accompanies us in every moment of every day.
I can barely utter a sentence that doesn't. It has no temporal quality, which is why it is so vital to everything we do that we want to understand it more deeply from the point of view of fundamental physics. Much of what we're talking about simply doesn't matter whether you look at the equations of relativity or quantum mechanics, you can use those equations to make predictions about what will happen in various experiments without having to commit to whether the past has already happened or whether the future is yet to come, so it's an interesting situation that I don't believe in. that I would need to rewrite the laws of physics given this information, assuming it were true because ultimately this is a layer of human interpretation that sits on top of the more fundamental understanding now, that doesn't mean that our current understanding down here is the final. history, I don't think that's the case.
I suppose there will come a point and it is starting to emerge right now in fundamental physics where we will recognize that time is not as basic to the laws as we once thought. evidence to suggest and these are things that come from quantum gravity and string theory that are certainly bordering on speculation, but there is reason to suspect that time is something that arises from a more fundamental starting point. The analogy I like to use is temperature. We all know what it means when something is hot or cold. Completely intuitive, we learned many decades ago that there is a more fundamental basis forThat's it: when something is hot, its molecules move fast.
When it's cold, its molecules move slowly and the temperature just is. a measure of that average kinetic motion, which says that temperature arises from a more basic starting point that has to do with the motion of atoms. Now I think this is not iconic to me, there are many in my field who feel the same way. So there is an analogous notion of atoms but not for matter but for time that there is some more basic fundamental ingredient that when it is in the correct configuration time arises but when it is not in that configuration there is not even a conception of time and it is That is why these ideas are of a very high level, no matter how much they matter to us as human beings.
I don't think the fundamental laws of physics matter, so to me your answer is that you won't have to rewrite the current laws. Physics is very interesting because maybe that gives us room for the present to be different from the future in the past and let's say it's an interpretation. Let me say one thing, in the end humans and this could be a good transition to incorporate. Lara, in the end, humans are literally unusually intelligent apes. We really have no right to think that we should understand the laws of the universe. What is surprising is that we have gone as far as we can, given that the brain has many flaws. many limitations, many errors, the most powerful debugging tool we have, I think, is mathematics, yes, and once a genius conjures up these sets of equations, the rest of us can put numbers in those equations and predict what is happening in the external world now, once.
You are able to do that, you have the power of the underlying science, but once we start interpreting them, the word interpret means that it is being filtered through your brain, so I would raise the possibility that, given the way in which the brain was built, let's evolve, we We have a tendency to interpret those equations in the context of the spatialization of time, because that is the best way to make sense of those equations, given the little, very ephemeral, very limited, computational advice that we we have at our disposal to interpret them. equations yes, yes, and I agree with that and that is a great point for us to transition to the interpretive quality of language that we humans impose on time, from one intelligent ape to another, uh, thanks for the conversation, we will introduce them in a moment after this, thanks dean bonamano, okay, let's now introduce a cognitive scientist from the university of california at san diego whose research focuses on the relationship between mental world and language named one of the 25 visionaries changing the world by the utne reader please welcome lara voraditzky thank you for being here thank you for inviting me so we just finished that discussion about the note of mathematics as a language well, we didn't stop at all At all, that's why you're here, like this that we think of mathematics as a language, but that perhaps it gives us a deeper insight into the nature of reality than natural language, which is our attempt to describe in a way that we can make intuitive sense of. world around us, so when it comes to language and the language we use to describe everything, not just time itself, where do we stand in understanding where language came from, the origin of language, we know a lot, you know about the origin of the universe?
I can tell you all kinds of details about that, how did you guys go about discovering the origin of the language? Well, we're still waiting for the time machine in which they were supposed to deliver that work that would actually help, yeah, um, the reason why What I'm saying is that language is a soft historical artifact, it leaves no trace in the record fossil, so it's actually very, very difficult to know much solid data about the history of language after going back more than, say, 10,000 years. Well, the beginning of written language of course helps, but we only have written records from a small handful in just a few thousand years and then beyond that we can make some inferences from the patterns of interrelationships between languages , but once you get past a few thousand. years, we are actually making a lot of correct guesses, so the time machine would be very useful, okay, we will keep that in mind.
My order is in. You will absolutely be the first to get a great one. So, when, when. We think about language, although I think many of us, well, maybe I'm speaking for myself. Language is a means of abstracting our experience. I mean, when I think about you, you know I have a couple of dogs at home. Smart dogs, but they more or less live in them. In the moment I mean, they know certain things about you, they know when it's time to eat and they know to behave a certain way when they want to go out, etc., but for the most part, the way they live is in the moment. . and everyone else, through the power of language, seems to be able to rise above the moment and that is when we can begin to think about the past and imagine the future, so in that sense, language is the rubric within which our intuition of time occurs, or is it?
On the contrary, it is our experience of time that guides the language we use to articulate it. Certainly humans are capable of harboring ideas about the deep past and deep future that are unlikely to happen in other creatures, but many creatures can predict things that will happen. This happens and you may even be able to remember or replay the experience. Really remember well, certainly, if you make a rat run a maze, for example, and then measure the activity in that rat's hippocampus as it runs through the maze and then measure it while the rat sleeps for a bit, the same things will be repeated. patterns of activity that are specific to that geometric pattern of the maze, so if you want to interpret that as reminiscence or correct dreaming, do you think that's stretching our usual notion of remembering a little bit?
Do you really think there are rats there? Wow, it was fun to run through the maze one last time. You would love to do it again. Well, I think all these words we use for mental processes are a bit metaphorical, right, the brain isn't necessarily. broken down into words, we have English for things like remembering or predicting, there will be lots and lots of different neural processes that won't necessarily be exactly the set of words we have in English right now, so how does it affect language? our way we mentalize time, I mean, has this been studied to figure out the interrelationship between the two?
Yes, well, let's start with the simple observation: there are about 7,000 different languages ​​in the world and each of them. They all offer a different perspective not only on time but on all other aspects of our experience of reality and with things like time there is a particularly interesting puzzle to solve because, on the one hand, time forms the very fabric of our experience, we cannot experience anything outside of time, so it is fundamental, it is central, but on the other hand we do not have no sensor for time directly, so we can't smell time, we can't touch time, we can't see time, we can't hear. time and yet we construct this notion of time that we all agree to live with, so how do we create this abstract entity in our minds and worse yet, how do we create ideas that go beyond what is physically possible or experienceable?
With a notion like time travel, it's a crazy thing for humans to think about because as we walk around the world we have physical sensors on our skin, we have photons in our eyeballs, we receive pressure waves in our ears, You know, we clench our toes. and bending your knees just the right amount to defy gravity and then we end up with ideas about quantum mechanics and time travel and goals and love and principles, all these fancy ideas of how they come out of that physical experience. Well, that's a great question. So this is where I think we can turn to language because language is a wonderful way of taking some of the most basic experiences that we have, things that come from the senses, things that come from what we can observe about the physical world and then build on them. those things, so in language you can recombine things infinitely and you can make many analogies and build on those analogies and that's why language allows us to recombine infinitely and create new ideas, new thoughts by simply taking old elements and putting them together in these different ways they allow us to go beyond what we can experience, but different languages ​​have different.
I mean, there are a lot of similarities between those 7,000 languages, but, of course, there are distinctions. Significant distinctions. Do those differences manifest themselves in the way different cultures approach each other? time or thinking about time, yes, there are actually huge, fascinating differences in how people think about time and it's, I'll give you a couple of examples, but let me start with this, a very simple difference is the direction in which to read and writing changes which direction you think time flows, so for a normal English speaker time flows from left to right where the past is arranged on the left the future is on the right if you see someone making a gesture, for example you will see this If you read from right to left time goes in the opposite direction so if you ask Hebrew speakers to place pictures or Arabic speakers they will place them in the opposite direction and this is an experience so omnipresent to us that we imagine things. develops in our minds in a particular direction if you just ask people, suppose I tell you that Bill is giving Mary flowers, draw me a picture that shows that people who read from left to right, like English speakers, will draw Bill on the left and Mary on the left. right, while people who read from right to left will draw the line to the right and Mary to the left going in the other direction and not only do we imagine these things but it is so deeply ingrained in our brain that if you damage the part of the brain that represents, for example, the left side of space, yes, it also alters the imagined left side of time, of course time does not have a left side, you are a physicist, you know that, so there is no such thing thing like a left side of time, but in our minds there is and it is, it should mean that if I am an English speaker and the left for me represents the past and I suspect that of many others you are saying if there is damage to my brain, which impacts that side, it will be the past that will be impacted, whereas if you know that Hebrew is my native language, it would be the future, yes exactly, so there is a very common type of stroke that you can have in the lobe right parietal that causes the left. neglect, so patients with this type of stroke may only be able to read words on the right side of a page, may only eat foods from the right side of their plate, complain that they are still hungry, you can turn the plate over to them, they may only put makeup on one side of their face or shave one side of their face, so they have lost the ability to pay attention to the left side of their visual world and if you tell them about events associated with In the past, about 10 years ago, Dean liked to eat strawberries, but in 10 years he will like to eat cherries and then I test your memory for these events.
Patients who read from left to right will have difficulty remembering things associated with the past, but those who read in the other direction will have more difficulty remembering things associated with the future, so this is an implicit example in which space It is used to represent time and you know, as a physicist in the mold of Einstein's ideas, that warms me up. heart because we learn that space and time are really woven into the fabric of space-time, so this is a resonant idea, but is it true that every culture, every language uses a spatial metaphor to describe time or are there other ways to do it?
There are some languages ​​that people have described that don't rely heavily, don't want to, don't rely heavily on spatial metaphor and then sometimes you get into semantics about what is actually spatial, so if you say the the future is in the heart and the past is in the head, it is still spatial because they are actually two different locations or it is a different type of organization, it feels different, at first glance, but going back to your thinking about how space and the time seem to be closely linked in the mind. They may be more linked in the mind and should be more linked in the human mind.
Let me give you an example. Suppose I ask you: Next Wednesday's meeting has been moved up two days. What day is it? the meeting now that has been rescheduled uh it's Friday or Monday and um who thinks Friday is okay who thinks Monday is okay well that's normal uh guys you can discuss it later um so that's it I wantI mean, it's kind of a 50-50 split when for English speakers it's about 50. 50 depends on a lot of variables, but here's why people have this disagreement. Yes, we have two different ways of talking about time in English, one way or another. way we talk about ourselves moving forward in time, so we say we're approaching the deadline, we're approaching the holidays, yeah, and the other time is moving towards us and we're stationary, so the deadline is approaching , the holidays are approaching now, if you think that you are moving forward in time, then you move the meeting forward is in its direction of motion from Wednesday to Friday, but if you think that time is moving, then the meeting should move forward in the direction of time from Wednesday to Monday, so if you have a really inflated ego, yes, Friday is that. because it's your whole thing is that approximately, uh, we haven't done that experiment, but we can, I mean, all of our participants are very humble, right, but what you can do is make people think about themselves moving in space, so if I make you imagine moving towards a goal or I make you imagine something physically coming towards you your answer to next Wednesday's meeting question will change so if you say yes you prepare my thinking by suggesting something yes, then if I say Imagine sliding in an office chair toward a goal or imagine using a rope to bring that office chair to you.
If you've just imagined yourself sliding, you're more likely to say Friday if you've been moving the chair closer to you. you're more likely to say Monday now. Here's why I say that space and time may be too related in the mind for this because if I'm approaching the deadline or the deadline is approaching me, they really should be the same. They cannot be physically different, and yet our brains treat them as different. They are in space. They are different because there is fixed ground that we are moving against, so if I approach you or you approach me, we can tell it. difference between them because there is something else that remains fixed, this is relativity, but it goes on anyway, but then over time, if it is really one-dimensional, it shouldn't, you shouldn't have this quality, but people seem to be trying time as if it's actually more dimensional than that, so they're treating these two scenarios of me approaching the deadline instead of the deadline approaching me as if they're actually different psychologically.
Is it true that indeed all languages, if they invoke a special metaphor for time, it is always? a straight line, I mean, again, Einstein's idea was to loosen that up significantly. Are there cultures that have loosened it up for some reason? Yes, so there are many variations, so of course we have circles. That time travels in both. American culture, but also other languages, use circles a lot more, of course, when you study how people think about time, if you find what looks like a linear representation, you don't know if it's just a small part of a circle you're on.
Looking to the right, there may be even bigger circles there that you're not seeing, but some people have actually broken down the idea that there should be a straight line and that you could just have a bent line, let me establish. This above there are some uhPlaces where time does not travel with respect to the body, so I have given you examples where time can go from left to right or from right to left, but there are some places where people do not use words like left and right at all, but everything. happens in north, southeast, west or some kind of cardinal direction space, I mean, a fixed orientation relative to the earth rather than relative to the orientation of the human body, yes, and in languages ​​they do well in that civilization, well, you would learn again um in In fact, children in these cultures go through some really incredible training where their parents will say, "Do you know where Grandma's house is?" and the child might say yes, it's over there and the parent will say no, no, it's over there and you get this kind of microcorrection so you can be quite precise because that's what's expected of you, in fact, in some languages ​​like this, even your body parts would be described using the cardinal directions, so you could say oh, there's a little stain on your shoe from the southwest and so if you're serious, yeah, and then if you turn like this chair like you're not supposed to, then of course it wouldn't be your southwest anymore, right, a change, imagine doing the hokey pokey in a language like that, there can be many. of mental gymnastics and so on for people who think of themselves in space that way instead of thinking in terms of left and right instead of thinking in terms of cardinal directions all the time.
What we discovered is that they organized time also in cardinal directions, so, for example. One group I studied, Cook Tire, this is an Aboriginal group in Australia, instead of making time go from left to right or right to left, they make it from east to west, so if you feel someone looking towards the south, it will organize things from left to right, and obviously this is related to the sunrise, or that must be the argument, uh, yeah, the sun is a really good organizing principle, but it's not the only one people use , so in other places you could live on a hill and then the weather could change. go uphill in other places I mean, there are cultures in which yes there is a culture in Mexico that is very high where time goes uphill there is a culture in Papua New Guinea where time goes downstream and there is one that we know in Papua New Guinea this is work by raphael nunez where time, this is the you know, time flows into the town at one angle and then it makes a turn and leaves the town at another angle and this has to do with the location of the source and the mouth of the Yugna River. so these are important places to them and time follows the exact topography of the region rather than going in a straight line or following some kind of other kind of fundamental uh and how that manifests itself, I mean everyday conversation, if you mean to the past you're like going, you know, and if I mean, are you really making use of these oblique angles in your joint?
In fact, that's exactly how he measured it. He asked people to tell stories about things. that happened in the past or things they plan to do in the future and I could measure the spontaneous gestures that people made while talking about their plans, although very often, if you speak a language that has absolute directions like this, you are unlikely to do gestures for things that are not space because your spatial gestures actually mean those things, so when I gesture in English, if I say oh, I used to live in San Francisco or I go to my grandmother's house, these gestures don't work.
Anywhere you can't, you can't follow these gestures and reach any right place, whereas in these cultures you can follow those gestures. In fact, I had a conversation with a colleague in Pomparou where I asked him what he was going to do the next day. and he said, oh, I'm going fishing and as soon as he said that he realized that he had just revealed the location of a secret fishing spot and then he started saying not to fish, he had to blur the location a little bit . A little bit like this in these cultures, when one goes inside, he keeps track of the orientation of his body in relation to the grid, the east-west, north, south grid.
Yeah, in these particular communities, people keep track when they're indoors also when they're in unknown places, um, it's just a matter of keeping a map, usually it's a top-down bird's-eye view map and keeping it spinning. in your mind and this really had this experience. I was there for a while. And I was really trying to stay oriented because people treat you like you're kind of stupid if you're not oriented properly, so one day I was walking, it was a hot day and I was frustrated. about something and I realized that this window appeared in my mind that was the landscape seen from above and I was a little red dot crossing this landscape and then when I turned the thing rotated in my mind's eye so that it remained fixed in the landscape and as soon as I saw that and it happened automatically as soon as I saw that I thought that makes it trivial now I have this little extra widget in my mind that I can read on a mental compass that is there with You and I then confessed this to someone with a certain shyness.
I said, "You know, something strange happened." I saw this and they just said, “Well, of course, how else would you do it?” So, I have no idea if any of these studies have been done. fact, but if you take a child who has grown up in this environment where they think about time quite differently than the way different spatial metaphors and so on, when they go and learn, you know, Newtonian physics or relativistic physics, do they? this impacts the way they absorb these ideas or they just leave them behind and you know, they become the way you know, they start to think the way that someone in this culture would think about time, well, I feel like relativistic physics It has no bearing on the way people in this culture think about time, I mean, you teach college students, do they come with intuitions that seem to align with relativistic physics?
Well, that's a good point, they, they, uh, I feel like everything that physics tells us about the structure of the world. It's completely like physics is telling me that this is almost all empty space and yet it would be extremely uncomfortable for me to believe it if I didn't want to go into it, right, um, absolutely almost everything, almost everything you could tell me about it. I agree that it's all counterintuitive, which in many ways is what attracts someone like me because you know I'm excited to have my preconceptions of the world beaten. I mean, there is nothing for me that is more exciting than learning that everything that For a long time I thought the world is wrong, it is a glorious moment for me, but what happens is that you acclimatize your intuition to get it as close as possible to these strange ideas, for example, the ideas with which we began the discussion this afternoon over time. dilation, motion, gravity, etc., and my intuition about time is now sort of grafted onto this deeper understanding, so there's this interaction between intuition and mathematical understanding, so there's a deep connection between them. , so the question arises as to whether my starting point was radically different due to a different cultural perspective a different linguistic orientation.
Would I think about these strange ideas differently? I think you would come from a different starting point and I think there are many different ways to start from a different starting point and so it might take you longer it might come to a slightly different understanding I'm not sure we can know that. two Western physicists actually have the same understanding of relativity probably a lot Many different representations and schemes and ways of framing and formulating happen in the mind where someone may have a more visual representation, someone else may be more symbolic or formulaic and that is perhaps Part of the reason some people come to ideas sooner or later.
More on that later, but you're raising this really wonderful point about the diversity of human thought, how many different ways we have of conceiving of even our basic physical facts around us and then how we use from that incredible diversity how we used to. Try to rise higher and higher, so one last question before we talk to Dean again about a lot of our conversation has focused on language as a rubric for understanding and organization and you know, I wonder, I mean, Wittgenstein had this view that language is kind of setting the limits, I forget the exact quote but it's kind of like you know, um, you know, you know the limits of my language, set the limits of my world, kind of like that, now There is an alternative view that is closer to my own perspective, which is that there is a whole body of understanding that goes beyond language.
I feel like I know certain qualities of the world that they don't articulate and that I don't put into linguistic form. Do you share that or someone who lives in this world? language like architects the rubric, do you feel that this is the limit of the world or that the world far transcends this small way of describing things? Well, let me say two things, one is that there are certainly some things that are more effable than others are right and Wittgenstein gives this example of uh, if I ask you how tall is Mount Kilimanjaro, if you know the answer, it's an easy answer. to give in language, language is good for that kind of thing, but if I ask you what the sound is. of a clarinet it's much harder to give that answer in language and so the question is whether it's inherently a property of language or we could somehow develop the ineffable maybe develop a better vocabulary um and the other thing you said is you know that are the limits of our world the limits of this little thing calledlanguage, for me, language is not a small thing, it is something infinite, because from a finite set of elements you can recombine and make infinite combinations, because it has this quality composition, in reality it allows us to constantly go beyond what we can imagine.
So getting back to this idea of ​​time travel, how does this physical soup of bones and flesh come about where we're inside a shell of skin? How do we come up with an idea like time travel? Here's a simple way that language could help if you talk about time as a path that you can travel, so if you can say things like we're approaching the deadline as soon as you have that metaphor, that analogy in place, the Time is a path I can travel they say wait a second paths I can travel in any direction at any speed I want, so why can't I think of myself now traveling in time?
It just takes that little analogy to get you thinking now. that goes way beyond what you can physically experience in your life, so hold on to that thought because that's exactly where I'd like to go, but let's bring Dean back for a final three-way conversation here so you know it's an idea Of course, it's a sci-fi trope, but it's something that I think we all have a deep emotional connection to, so from a physics point of view maybe it wasn't completely clear, but maybe it's worth being Completely direct about it. described at the beginning allow time travel, time travel is an integral part of the laws of physics as we understand them now, I must qualify that by saying that time travel into the future is what we completely understand, so If I want to travel a million years into the future there are two ways Einstein told me I can do it go hang out near a black hole long enough to come back maybe a year will pass for me to spend a million years on planet earth or get on a rocket, go out into space for six months at an appropriate speed, close to the speed of light, turn around and come back, get off that ship, I will have aged one year, a million years will have passed on planet Earth , so this is part and parcel of how the world works. is built now when it comes to the intuition that this kind of wandering through time would be possible because, after all, as you say, it is just a path and paths can meander in any direction, it is something that effectively Every culture has come up with something that matters that are important that they would focus their attention on or there are cultures for which it is so irrelevant that it would never come up because it's just not something that they care about, well some people argue that the idea of ​​traveling in time as you described it or the way it happens in science fiction is actually a relatively new idea of ​​what happens with the machine age with the industrial age and the true examples of actually going to another place and time do not begin to happen in narratives around the world until then.
Because we couldn't travel very far, that's what depends on the people. There are certainly many interesting time distortions that occur in traditional narratives, so, for example, in the Ramayana story, you can have all the roosters start crowing earlier than normal. to make the day come sooner because you don't want the prince to finish all the castles you've assigned him to build because otherwise you'll have to marry him, things like that, you know, there's a time distortion that you can create through means more traditional, right, um, so you can think of that as a kind of time travel, maybe not strictly the same kind of idea that you were talking about, but are there cultures or maybe even neurological diseases that focus in the present in a way that makes the past and future not vital to that individual's existence.
There is this fascinating book by Daniel Everett on Don't Sleep with Our Snakes and he studies the indigenous Amazonian population in which he claims that they have a very present bias, so they don't have good words for the long-term future, deep time , the deep future, the deep past, so no one would call that a neurological bias, except the There is an interesting part, so they use tools, but they don't use them frequently, for example, and that would frustrate you, because it would lend them their tools, they wouldn't store them, so they wouldn't say, "Okay, I'm going to need this." yeah, tomorrow and when you think about one of the greatest technological achievements we've ever had, we talk about okay, carving an obsidian blade, carving a knife with an obsidian blade, that's part of the story, just the other part of the story. story, say, I'm going To use this sword, I'm going to put it away because I'm going to use it for this, so it requires time travel now in relay, but it was strange and this is what Lara was referring to the real time travel time in the sense.
Going into the past and jumping back and forth apparently only emerged in literature, mainly in the late 19th century, with a couple of stories about time warping, but real time travel jumping back and forth, uh, it's a big time machine, why did he do it? it takes so long for you to know that you look at shakespeare you look at the bible you look at all these stories we look at so many very creative mythologies that, speaking of the ability of language to mix and match, there are so many entities that are not in the real world, but they are a mixture linguistics of things that are in the real world, it doesn't seem like it's that difficult to put time into the mix in a way that produces all kinds of time travel. stories that go back in time and why didn't we, yeah, why didn't we, well, you know, there are ideas about time and cultures around the world that are difficult to express in English and also difficult to understand when I'm not from those cultures, yeah, so I can try to tell you about one and it will probably make as much sense to me if I do, so I'll try.
In some Aboriginal cultures in Australia there is a belief that things don't really change, that time doesn't really pass in the sense that when you are born you are really a new version of an ancestor you had and that ancestors can relive their life , but there is also this other realm which is the realm of the ancestors or which is sometimes called dream time and that is why everything continues in that dream time outside of time now I don't know what I just said uh right, I can't tell you that I have a real realm that I can take the words that I just used and put them into my understanding of how time works, but I think that people there have some representation that makes sense and I'm not there yet, so I think that We haven't fully understood it.
I know the range of possibilities for thinking about time because it's hard to go in and really understand someone else's understanding in the same way that you have to intensely train your students to get them to understand relativity, for example, yeah. It requires a lot of training in that system, so speaking of time, we're starting to run a little short on time, but if you have another idea, jump in, because I had one last question, but go first, I was just going to say in terms of what ago, it's still strange to know why it took us so long for time travel to appear in fiction, but as you know, the end of the 18th century was a very dynamic period both scientifically and in literature, and it was kind of Era when people like Einstein and Poincaré were beginning to think more deeply about time, but some people have come to the conclusion that perhaps what was the critical event that set the stage or planted the seed for time travel It was actually the rise of photography and the ability to store. something that was the first time that you could have faithful reproductions of something in the past in the sense that it still exists and maybe that allowed us to start creating stories of going back and visiting that, but it is a mystery and it is strange that there are so many Many stories in literature where things are the same themes are repeated over and over again, but time travel took a long time to emerge, so one last question that relates to that as well, you know, I often think that we We look at ourselves as, uh, blessed.
By the ability to think about the past and imagine the future I mean that it opens up our world in a way that makes us human, if so, I mean, language certainly makes us human, but this ability to be able to roam freely in the timeline in Our minds is something that is really iconic for our species, as far as we know, at the same time, it also creates a lot of anxiety, a lot of pain and suffering. I mean, mindfulness teachers over the centuries have focused us on living in the moment versus this ability, so does this seem like a curious tension to you?
How do you manage that tension? I mean, from a neurological point of view and from a cognitive science point of view. Any advice on how to deal with that tension between those two capabilities? I think in general, remembering how small you are relative to the scale of the universe, whether in size or age, is helpful when you're worried about small things, maybe someone said something annoying in the meeting you had at a meeting. of personal. Just think about how many millions of years the earth has existed and it will seem like a tiny speck. I told you in 2016.
The most hopeful thought I had was four years to 2020 and 13.8 billion years since the big bang, so everything is going to be fine, any kind of perspective, yes, I think part of the answer to that question is that our ability to think about time is itself dynamic and, um, it is true that our ability to think about the future and think about the stress that is arising or what we should have done differently in the past is a source significant anxiety. The alternative is to simply be like your dog. I think it's like my dog ​​is very focused on the present.
The point is that, in this Amazonian tribe that does not think much about the future, the author of the book points out that yes, they seem to have less anxiety, but they also have less time to live, their mortality, their life expectancy is shorter. because they don't think about the future, so there is a kind of trap here, it is our ability to think about the future that causes anxiety, which in a way ensures that we have a future, but clearly we have to have a middle ground. fair ground in which and part of this is that there is nothing wrong with being present in the moment while thinking about the future, so as scientists, you have to do this by focusing on a problem that you want to solve at some point in the future. .
I think it doesn't take anything away from the notion of living in the moment or mindfulness. I think it's an incredibly valid approach, but that lesson is not that we should ignore the future and this is the problem we are all struggling with. with this we want to make sure that our relatives and our offspring have a future and that's why we still have to absolutely worry about that when you asked before if there are any neurological conditions or groups of people that are very focused on the present, probably the most focused on present are crackheads, I didn't think that was real, but it's a group of people who have a very, very narrow time horizon that they're focused on, so you can see that they're also falls from extreme present focus, so I think ultimately balance is one way to do it.
Thank you both very much for joining us. Please join me in thanking them.

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