Introduction
This book is about the perception of time. It concerns our subjective feeling of the passage of time and our sense of duration. Ever since human beings first became self-aware, the phenomenon of time has posed a riddle. What is subjective time? How does our sense of time come about?
However, the book does not just ask questions. It also offers many answers, explaining how our feeling of time arises—whether for a moment or in terms of life as a whole. In recent years, scientists have made an array of discoveries that, taken together, yield a new picture of subjective time. Through patient efforts, researchers have accumulated psychological and neuroscientific insights that provide a new—and, more importantly, a convincing—answer to the age-old question of how we become conscious of time.
If time is the thread running through this book, the matter involves many fundamental processes anchored in daily life. Time comprises a net in which phenomena suddenly appear in a wholly different light. These phenomena include feelings, memories, happiness, language, scholastic and professional achievements, one’s sense of self, consciousness, stress, mental illness, and mindfulness of one’s own self and body. The net of time involves, among other things:
Why time speeds up as we grow older: increased routines in life and memory play decisive roles.
How a fulfilled life depends on our ability to choose freely between savoring the moment and deferring gratification; why impulsive people are more easily bored is a matter of time.
Whether every person has a particular brain rhythm that sets quicker people apart from slower ones—an object of scientific research; does the brain rhythm speed up in fearful situations?
What we actually “need” time for—judgments about time often serve as error signals indicating that something is taking too long or was much too short: this is important for everyday decision making.
Whether it is possible, through mindfulness, to reduce the speed of life we perceive and thereby gain more time; meditation is one way to slow down subjective time.
How emotions and our senses of time and body are strongly related; evidence is accumulating on how body signals are part of our experience of existing in the “here and now” and provide the basis for feeling the passage of time.
The functions of brain systems that underlie our experience of time and the conscious self; ongoing studies on time consciousness will help us better understand the conscious self.
What does a fulfilled life look like? Ultimately, the way we manage the dimensions of our past, present, and future proves decisive in this. One way of putting it is: we must accept the past as it is. What is past can no longer be changed, but one can learn from experience to better face the present and future. It is not by chance that personal unhappiness often derives from unwillingness to come to terms with the past, when we cannot let go. We also tend to worry too much about the future and develop exaggerated ideas about what could happen. Yet we are always living in and experiencing the present. Accordingly, our task is to cultivate presence. What belongs to the past and future always bears on the lived presence that we are experiencing—now.
It is worthwhile to take a closer look at the dimension of time, for it is inseparably tied to our experience as a whole, to our self-consciousness—to life itself.
We are time.
What precisely this means, the following pages seek to show.