h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting to see that my entry was retained - thanks editors
Sad though that the discussions it generated were not retained - there were some really fascinating points of view - especially about how the brain handles time.
Oh well ..... ideas pass and resurface

Just a few thoughts to add to the debate.

Perception is a very subjective experience because I cannot percieve exactly what you percieve just as you cannot percieve exactly what I percieve. We can agree on a concensus, but this goes no way to describing each others actual perception of our surroundings.

Percieving time, we come across similiar problems which we hoped to solve with time pieces that measure times increments. However our perception of time over a set period of measure increments is still different. For you an hour might seem a short space of time, but to me it might seem like an eternity that never seems to end.

Our experience of time can therefore be manipulated by our own perception to stretch or contract depending on how we percieve it.

This manipulation can be forced upon us by an extenal influences such as a car accident where a few split seconds might seem like a few minutes or a short (percieved) sleep might seem like a couple of minutes when it actually fact it lasted an hour.

Or alternatively it follows that we ourselves can impose our perceptions on measured periods of time to make them seem longer or shorter if we reverse the proposition.

Taking this point further it is not simply how we percieve time that is subjectively different it is how we "choose" to percieve time that is different.

Consider this:

You have a specific period of time in which to sleep, lets say eight hours. You have to go to sleep at a specific time, for example 11pm and wake up at a specific time, say 7am.

Now the crux of this illustration is when you go to sleep at 11pm time seems to go much slower travelling away from the destination time than when you are approaching the destination time of 7am when you have to wake up, when time seems to speed up.

This has nothing to do with the time lasting any longer or shorter. Minutes just after 11pm aren't incrementally longer than minutes leading up to 7am. Neither are minutes leading up to incrementally shorter than those just after 11pm.
Its just how we choose to percieve it.
This perception is spacial and can be manipulated.

Have you noticed that returning from a destination always seems shorter than arriving? This is also a spacial perception. Understanding this will enable us to manipulate the time perception described above.

Leaving a destination to travel somewhere you are effectively travelling metaphorically up hill as far as your perception is concerned because the destination hasn't arrived yet. It therefore takes longer to travel there because you haven't percieved the journey yet. Travelling back, you are travelling metaphorically down hill back through the journey you have just perceived. It therefore seems a shorter distance of time.

Back to the point:

Lying in bed just after 11pm when you need to get up at 7am with only a very specifc time to sleep just imagine this little mental exercise to get a much better nights sleep that seems to last as long as you want.

Going to bed and knowing that time seems longer when you first go to bed than when you wake up is the first step. You are therefore short circuiting your immediate spacial perceptions of time seeming to run out and go quicker towards the destination time by realising you are having them.

The next step requires you to concentrate and imagine in your mind time stretching so that seconds, minutes and hours "seem" much longer a space to travel and choosing to percieve it that way.

NB the seconds do not actually change only your perception of them.

Please note, that this might take practice and an open mind to accomplish successfully because you are going against an inbuilt need to go along with the concensus of what you are told you should believe you are percieving.

Anyway the final step is to relax and fall asleep with this new perception of time, knowing that a minute or second can seem as long as you want them to be. You just have to choose to percieve it that way.

The real test of this subjective perception manipulation is when you wake up in the morning and the minutes no longer seem to wizz by until 7am.



Of course don't take my word for it. Try it for yourself.

Yep - and isn't it interesting how you can train yourself to wake at a particular time?? I find that if I want to wake at say 8 am, I simply repeat the time to myself as I fall asleep and, sure enough I wake right on time.

You may be interested in the thread called "The Mechanics of Brain Time" - the wonderful editors restored it for me from an old post - it's all really fascinating stuff and leads one to consider time and all its relative aspects from all sorts of different philosophical points - like, if time is the fourth dimension how do all the idiosyncratic measurements of it effect its use in scientific calculation (if you know what I mean)