Most of us
have experienced the phenomenon of ‘time-dilation’, that is when an hour seems
endless, longer than what you’re used to, say while enduring a boring movie -or
the opposite, ‘time-contraction’- time flees and an hour seems to be over in a
jiffy, say in the company of the beloved. It’s definitely not on account of the omission of divinity to replace the ageing battery-cells of the Godly cosmic
clock…
We just
discovered that another temporal phenomenon that bugs us often, usually
ascribed to the advance of years, is but a manifestation of the same
time-ductility.
Suppose you
are reading the morning newspapers, say two or three of them, one after the
other. After the session, lasting maybe an hour, you have the urge to revisit
one of the bytes that you came across. I for one have to wrestle with the
broad-sheets in the replay, and usually the item surfaces further back in the
sequence of reading than the impression I carried. That is, it is buried under
a greater debris of time than one imagined, so to say. It may even involve
misremembering the particular newspaper you assumed carried the article..you
think it was the ET while it turns out to be the Express, which in our case
precedes other papers in the pecking order. Lots of our friends also have confessed
to that nagging feeling, though some have reported the reverse- lesser actual
time-debris than the perceived one.
Cut to
Alfred Nobel. As we all noje, the 2017 Nobel for Physiology and Hygiene (he,
he, he) went to Michael W. Young, Michael Rosbash and Jeffrey C. Hall for their
discovery of molecular mechanisms controlling our circadian rhythms, or put
simply, the biological clock. They isolated a gene (christened as the Period
gene) that controls the biological rhythm in the fruit fly, which was simply
the causa est in manibus, i.e.
case in hand, nothing special about fruit fly. The ‘Period’ gene in the fly’s
cells creates and accumulates during night, a protein named the PER, which
decays linearly, or may be exponentially, to almost ‘nil’ during the following
day, thus marking the passage of time. This is essentially the same principle
on which carbon-dating works. The accumulation of PER varies exponentially- the
rate of production of the PER dwindles as the protein accumulates in the gene,
ceasing altogether at the pre-determined full-tank level. Thus the process is
self-regulating. That in a nut-shell is what the discovery is about. Such a hullabaloo I sayyyy...!
Allied with
the discovery, we find, should be an explanation to the phenomenon of
‘subjective time’ vis-a-vis ‘objective time’. The latter is also called
‘external time’, such as the time kept by a clock, while the former is
progression of time as perceived by you, me or the humble fruit fly. The
process of decay of the PER can be affected by various extraneous factors,
impacting subjective time-lapse perception, and a possibility arises of a
divergence of the two ‘times’, for the march of external time is relentless and
unalterable. That is, for instance, why a boring college period seems to last
say an hour, when actually it was half an hour long. As college students we’d
think an Einsteinian time wave struck Don Bansal’s Determinants period, making
the passage of time so excruciatingly slow.
This shenanigan lies at the heart of the freakonomic discovery recounted
in this edition of our blog. Experts being experts call the phenomenon the
‘temporal illusion’. Literature on the
subject of TI lists illusions such as:
Ø Telescoping
effect, wherein people tend to recall events further back in time that they actually
were (backward telescoping), no prizes for guessing what’s forward
telescoping,
Ø Vierordt’s
Law- shorter intervals tend to be overestimated while
longer intervals tend to be underestimated,
Ø Time intervals encompassing numerically more
changes may be perceived as being longer
than those covering lesser numbers,
Ø The
perceived time often shortens with motivation- boring tasks may appear longer
than they actually are,
Ø A
task may appear longer if the progress thereof is interrupted,
Ø Between auditory and visual signals, the
former seem to drag on more,
Ø Chronostasis,
where the first impression following the introduction of a new task appears to
be extended in time. An allied effect is the Oddball Effect- humans
perceive duration of the initial event as greater, in a stream of identical
events,
Ø Emotions
like awe, empathy, depression fear, or even age, drugs or diseases such as
Parkinson’s, tend to affect subjective impression of time elapsed.
The above
elegantly explains why the to journey always seems longer than the fro
journey- check Chronostasis and
Oddball effect.
We come back
to where we began. Our freakonomic streak suggests that in case of the
newspaper reading business, when the subjective time-continuum is projected or
mapped onto the objective time, what really happened, say, an hour back appears
to have occurred maybe a quarter hour back. Forward-telescoping at work. The
timespend on reading shortens in the imagination. Going by the fourth of the
foregoing bullet-points, we are relieved at the vindication of our ancient
belief that we enjoy reading papers and time has not yet taken toll of the
motivation and excitement of reading the morning paper, even though R.K.Laxman
is no more! So when trying to locate the article to be revisited, we should
rather begin at the beginning. People who look upon the task as WORK, will be
the ones succumbing to backward-telescoping, and will find the article closer
at hand! Here is a pictorial depiction of what happened:
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