Biological Clock and time theory "the real sixth sense"

SkeeOrDye

SkeeOrDye

Active member
I started writing this about an hour and a half ago when i got high and started thinking. This is a huge brain fart, but sounds real legit. check it out its pretty interesting at least.

biological clocks

theory:your brain naturally uses the ammount of information you process as a reference for time. the information you process varies based on your activity and level of concentration, or the ammount of energy being put into the brain. you can think of it as a clock in your brain. your brain processes things in waves, or bits of information. the speed of this can vary based on the level of conentration, or other outside influence. say your brain processes (4 bits) of information while you are zoned out watching TV, and time seems to be flying by. Up the activity, add concentration like a ball flying at your face, and you are going to be processing where that ball is as many times in a second as you can. Lets say that is (32 bit)s of information (to make the math simple), [the ammount of bits per second your brain processes is geared up to the clock in your head, when the clock goes faster time, as you percieve it, will be slower relative to real time] so 32 bits per second divided by 4 bits per second is 8. Time would seem 8 times slower when the ball is being thrown at you compared to staring at the tube.

evidence:

Time seems to always go by slow during a challenging task. your brain will demand more energy as you concentrate more on something mentally, allowing your brain to work faster. this speeds your mental clock, making the time seem slower.

When you sleep, 8 hours could go by in what seems like a second. you brain generally has very low activity while you sleep. this means that the brain will be processing little to no information. if your brain didn't process any information for one minute, that one minute went by literally feeling like no time.

If you are having a bad week, and it frusterates you, not only do you have to worry about the normal load of processing, but you are also frequently thinking and/or worrying. this extra load over a long period of time, will make a week seem like a month relative to another week, or real time.

adrenline pumps up your brain and gives it extra energy when you are under high stress. This could explain the feeling of someone telling you something that sets off a stress button, it almost sounding in slow motion. This could also explain the feeling of sports where time seems to slow down at high stress times. The most obvious times I have experienced this were skiing. As your come around spinning and landing a large jump, there is a lot of adrenline pumping so you can process everything into a complicated movement that will allow you to stay on your feet. all of this makes time seem to go really slow, which actually helps you out a bunch not to get hurt.

experience/efficiency: as you practice something, you store away a motion, or a method to do something in your memory. eventually it takes less processing and your brain becomes more efficient at accomplishing tasks with patterns. eventually you will be able to do it mindlessly. When you were concentrating on a task for the first time, time would seem to go slower, because you are concentrating hard, and your mind is moving faster. As you become more efficient at the task, it will take less brain power to do it, and time will seem to go faster. And to explain the boring repetative job you have that just drags on, you are probably processing bits of information like "i hate this job", or thinking about other things while you are stuck alone with your imagination.

Theoretically we are all in control of how fast we percieve time. It is the sixth sense, and works like the other five senses in the way that it is all relative from person to person, or situation to situation, etc... so nobody really knows what the definate speed of time is, only what our brain tells us. just like your sense of taste change, or your sense of hearing can change, your sense of time can change.

 
im not saying time actually slows and you go into another time of someone else, I am saying your body could percieve it differently from some one else. its not a matter of what time it actually is, but how much time does each persons brain think has gone by in the last minute. we all say a minute because we know of it as a minute through our experience. but one persons experience might be slightly different from anothers. Its like color blindness. some one who is color blind could see red as gree. thier whole life they grew up and what they saw as the stimulation of red in our brains, was called green. im too tired, mabe ill pick this up later
 
I see what you're getting at. But the good ole ball and chain wants my laptop, I'll give an explanation sometime.
 
Interesting theory for sure.

I'm not going to debate your point at all just ask for your opinion on this example.

A 50 minute lecture at school where you may not happen to be paying particular attention. you check the clock every 10 minutes or so and you're bored. The time drags on and it seems as if you've been there forever. (Low concentration however time seems slow)

Now take the same 50 minutes but this time you are writing a mid-term exam essay answer which you're trying to squeeze into 50 minutes. You're writing all your main points, check your watch and before you know it you only have 15 minutes left. Where has the time gone? Its been the same 50 minutes but it has flown. There has been more concentration involved but contrary to your theory the time has flown by (High concentration however time seems fast)

opinion?
 
I am not positive, but to me it feels like it takes more energy to be unhappy, or bored, because you get in a mode where you are uncomfortable, and your brain is trying to think of things to pass the time, or thinking of how much it sucks what you are doing, or mabe even just concentrating hard to stay awake. When you do something that you enjoy, you don't think about it as much, and you dont have the other activity going on inside your head. even though you are sitting in class bored, a lot more is going on in your head than you think. Next time you are sitting bored in class, you will notice you definately aren't thinking about nothing, you are probly thinking about what your gonna do after class or something. If you ever just sit down and think alone, like day-dreaming in class, you will notice time does drag on.

about the test. there are a lot of dimensions of your brain, and how you control it. you can choose to concentrate hard on something, but you can also choose to ignore other things. chances are when you were taking the test, you weren't lookn around, or out the window, nor were you worrying about what is going on later. if you block out all of that other stuff, and you are writing an essay, there is only so fast you can write, and it certaintly isn't as fast as you can think. so your brain may think in spurts, then shut down the short time you are writing, since writing is something you do instinctively and by memory, it takes little brain activity.

 
I dunno that seems a pretty like a pretty legit inference. Despite that though, our brains have a general sense of chronology, which is why our lives dont feel infinite or tiny.
 
id say when you are waiting for something it goes slow for instance the drive to the ski hill seems longer then the drive home at least to me but like when you are skiing the first chair of the day seems slow but then it seems to get faster. I think it is just like they say time flys when you are having fun
 
when you drive to the hill you are anticipating and thinking about the fun you will have. at the end of the day, you are tired, and you don't have the energy to think as fast...
 
and what you said about you body having a chronology is accurate too, there are a lot of things in our brain that will make it work faster, and also natural instincts, like the sun coming up or going down that set off things in our brains to tell it to start working. After reading about it more, this seems like the base of other theories, and supports them well.
 
rem sleep happens during dreams. your brain can percieve dreams as time, when you have dreams the night may not go by as quickly as a good restful sleep with little REM
 
While time does feel to move differently, it is just a perception. When you have a longing for something to be over, then time 'feels' like it slows down, but it really doesn't. When you don't want something to end, or have a deadline, you want time to slow down, so time 'feels' to go faster.

Despite how time may feel, Time, in itself, is one of the few, never changing constants of the universe. It neither slows down, or speeds up, nothing your brain can do makes it any other way. If you could focus on time as well as doing work on a deadline, or waiting for a lecture to end, it would still tick away exactly the same as it does in any other situation. The only thing that makes time 'feel' different is the fact that you aren't paying attention to it (consciously or subconsciously).
 
thats basicallly what i am trying to explain. we don't even know what true time is, just what our brain tells us what time is. we have a references that keep track of it differently like clocks, but someone could be on any time scale at a time.

you need to remember that your brain relates things, if you want something to go faster, your brain will relate it to the time frame you are experiencing and skew it.
 
Except we DO know how time works, and can measure it. Yes, it does depend on your reference frame. Look up Einsteins theories on special relativity. Time is a constant for the person, but it has nothing to do with how your 'brain' perceives time. Your brain does nothing to change how time works.

Your brain also doesn't skew time, at all. The only reason you 'lose track of time' is because you aren't consciously thinking about it. If you are so absorbed in something else, you won't be paying any attention to Time and it may feel like the last hour has only taken 5 minutes, but that's because you are engrossed in something and aren't giving 'time' any thought.
 
thats weird you made this thread cause i was thinking about this sitting in class, bored as hell. but your theory is spot on to what i was thinking.
 
Short and sweet as possible...I'm not Einstein so this is sorta rough, but it should be interesting...

We are always here.

We are always now.

Now, I am typing. I know what the next few sentences will be. This is from imagination - creating something out of nothing...

...

Well, I imagined a ball flying at my face, dude. Now, I have a few seconds of memory of a ball flying at my face. Thanks, dude. Create your memories. If you find the Earth spinning around you and your Suns rising and setting just as fast as you can hussle, I'm right there with ya bro.
 
When you sleep, 8 hours could go by in what seems like a second. you brain generally has very low activity while you sleep. this means that the brain will be processing little to no information. if your brain didn't process any information for one minute, that one minute went by literally feeling like no time

^^are you fucking serious!!, the function of sleep is to process information
 
"Many scientists believe that memory depends on sleep. REM sleep appears to help the consolidation of spatial and procedural memory, while slow-wave sleep helps with the consolidation of declarative memories.

When experimental subjects are asked to memorize academic material,

especially if it involves organized, systematic thought, their

retention is markedly increased after a night's sleep.[3] On the other hand, the effectiveness of mere rote memorization is similar with or without an intervening period of sleep. Some memory theorists argue that saving memory directly into long-term memory

is a slow and error-prone process, and propose that cerebral input is

first saved in a temporary memory store, and then encoded and

transferred into long-term memory during sleep (Zhang, 2004). But

although many findings support these ideas, many sleep scientists do

not believe that sleep's primary function is related to memory. They

point out that many of the studies cited by proponents of this theory

are contradictory or confounded by the side-effects caused by the

experimental manipulations. A more salient issue is that only a handful

of studies have shown that sleep actually influences brain plasticity, the mechanism underlying remembering and forgetting (Benington and Frank, 2003)." quote from wikipedia

ok i fucked up, but i looked into it...

but your brain processes things faster with REM sleep than it does with slow wave sleep. I figured your brain would need some sort of consistent tick that helps you know what time to get up besides REM sleep, and i guess thats what slow-wave sleep is. to be honest, i looked up zero facts when i was writing this, and i know there were a few things i planned to look up after and forgot to. that was one of them, thanks for pointing that out. let me know if you see any other bs in there so i can look up the answer.
 
Well, there is a 'biological clock' in your suprachaismatic nucleus, which is in the hypothalamus (in your brain). It controls what's known as the Circadian clock, which controls your sleep patterns pretty much. The Circadian clock is reset by bright lights (i.e. morning sun). It's really interesting if you go into depth about it, you'd probably enjoy reading it up. Your thoughts in general are pretty cool and thought provoking, and if you have the chance you should really look into taking Psychology, because we cover a lot of what you are hypothesizing about and explain it on a biological basis. OF course, it isn't all exactly what you were saying, in fact a lot of in contradicts it at point, but when you really think about it we can only know some much about the mind through observational studies, and can never be 100% sure about everything especially since we do most of our research on animals (biological research and experimental at least, many observational studies are on humans).

And I didn't read that full except that you have about REM cycles and sleep, but I'll just note that in a general night, a person will sleep for about 2-3hours of deep sleep (if they go to bed at the same time every night) before having "emergent stage 1" cycles of REM sleep (we usually go through the first 4 cycles in 90min periods during REM) where our muscles are inhibited to ensure we don't act out our dreams and hurt ourselves, and our mind and heart rate levels increase and so forth. Interestingly enough, most fetus' spend a majority of their time in REM sleep, and one hypothesis of REM sleep it that we have it to keep our neurons and synapses active so they don't begin to decay from lack of use. ALSO, another cool fact, when you've been studying a lot or taking in a lot of information about something, you often spend more time in REM sleep, as your brain processes all of the new information. Cool, eh?

Yea I know, I'm a neuroscience nerd. Deal with it. (N.B: If I explained things poorly, or wrongly, please feel free to add on and such, as my mind is a bit all over the place lately after writing exams, especially Psyc).

 
Actually I do. Time is one of the few things that is always constant. I realize there are many constants in math and science, but in reality, there aren't many. The different with time, however, is that it is constant to the Individual, and it depends solely on it's reference frame. I could go more into detail, but I really don't feel like it. But please, prove me wrong.
 
I didn't read the whole thing so i'm not going to say your whole argument is wrong. But the claim that when you're asleep your brain doesn't do that much is definatly wrong, your brain is processing a ton of information from your day as you sleep and its actually doing a good amount of work.

and besides that i have definatly experienced times when i have been very concentrated and time flies by so fast, like when writing a paper right before class or something like that. Really its all relative and its all about how you individually perceive it.
 
"Most everyone knows that Einstein proved that time is relative, not absolute as Newton claimed. With the proper technology, such as a very fast spaceship, one person is able to experience several days while another person simultaneously experiences only a few hours or minutes. The same two people can meet up again, one having experienced days or even years while the other has only experienced minutes. The person in the spaceship only needs to travel near to the speed of light. The faster they travel, the slower their time will pass relative to someone planted firmly on the Earth. If they were able to travel at the speed of light, their time would cease completely and they would only exist trapped in timelessness. Einstein could hardly believe there were physicists who didn’t believe in timelessness, and yet the wisdom of Einstein's convictions had very little impact on cosmology or science in general. The majority of physicists have been slow to give up the ordinary assumptions we make about time."

http://everythingforever.com/einstein.htm

This has been proven. The experiment went something like this

Two very accurate stop watches, one staying at the same place, one on a plane, where started at the same instant. The plane flew around the earth and when it reached it's starting point both stop watches where stoped at the same instant. The time on the stopwatches was different, only by a few hundreths or even thousandths of a second. however the speed of a plane is in reality not very fast, and the "time" that it took to travel around the earth was not very long
 
Did you not read what I just said? Time is a constant to the INDIVIDUAL. I said it is one of the few constants relative to the REFERENCE FRAME of the individual. I summarized that whole thing in like a paragrah.
 
oops missed that haha

That being said though I was thinking more about your first post

"Time, in itself, is one of the few, never changing constants of the universe"

That's not really true then
 
I suppose that is true. An oversight on my part. But it really depends how you look at it. It all depends on the reference frame.
 
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