Notes on Time

1. From La Open Hause

Thanks, Patricia. I am not familiar with Libet, although a quick google turned up his status as a neuroscientist.

Yes, he was involved in research into neural activity and sensation thresholds.

>I was simply conveying what was once explained to me, and later experienced in the briefest of moments, and that is that the "ordinary" senses, to avoid any issues of semantics, lag slighty behind any physical event. An analogy might be live television. We think it's live, in real time, but really it has the slightest time lag due to the transmission of the signal, yet it is certainly closer to real time than if we read about what we were watching later. So it is when we "sense" via the physical body. Ordinarily, there is the very slightest of time lags to sensing via the physical body. A higher body, which we all have a possibility of having, would have a more direct perception, one not dependent on the body. Nyland indicated there was this element of time to Work, and our experience of time changes as such. And, from our level, the level of ordinary existence, it is "iffy", even my description. Perhaps it might be wiser to ask, what is
our experience of time? And to explore it that way.

I had been thinking about this in context of the unconscious being real consciousness. Libet's work implies that unconscious neuronal processes precede and may cause "conscious" acts, which are then retrospectively *experienced* as having been *decided*.


James:
It very well may be that we also calibrate time by the perceived speed of events that are happening now. What happens at (what we perceive as) the same time gives us a lot of information about the world.

A very good area of inquirer and this is an area of study that is ripe for self observation in my opinion. Thanks, Patricia.

"... a flash presented during a slow-motion sequence of a movie is erroneously perceived as having a shorter duration than an identical flash presented during the same sequence at normal speed. The time-distortion illusion is only found when the future positions of objects in the movie are predictable by Newtonian dynamics. The illusion suggests that the speed of subjective time can be modulated by sensory feedback. That is, predictions about future positions of a moving object are compared against sensory feedback, and the difference can modulate the nervous system to speed or slow perceived time to match the physics of the sensory feedback. Thus, the brain may ease its task of consistent timekeeping by constantly calibrating its time estimation against physical laws in the outside world"

"The order of action and sensation is essential for determining causality. Accordingly, the nervous system must be able to recalibrate its expectations about the normal temporal relationship between action and sensation to overcome changing neural latencies. A novel illusion in this domain shows not only that the perceived time of a sensation can change but also that temporal order judgments of action and sensation can become reversed as a result of a normally adaptive recalibration process.

When a fixed delay is consistently injected between the participant's key press and a subsequent flash, adaptation to this delay induced a reversal of action and sensation: flashes appearing at delays shorter than the injected delay were perceived as occurring before the key press (Stetson et al., 2005Go). This illusion appears to reflect a recalibration of motor-sensory timing that results from a neural previous expectation that sensory consequences should follow motor acts with little delay."
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/25/45/10369