Out of Sight...

Prepare yourself for an unusually well researched blog post. I literally googled the subject I’m about to expound upon and have decided that most of the first page of google results were pretty disappointing but, also, fortunately, not entirely what I’m about to hypothesize while concurrently lending a certain amount of colloquial credibility to the following dribble. In sum, I kinda looked this up, decided everyone else was wrong, and am pitching forth a variation on the general consensus.

As a general rule, I don’t generalize. But the idea that time speeds up is becoming more and more real for me. This translates into a willingness to bend my own rules on generalization to state that time speeding up with age is, probably, an apt sentiment to generalize about. I’m no physicist, but I do believe in the delicate nature of relative speeds and am by no means postulating that time is indeed passing at different rates for different people. I am postulating, however, that time is perceived as passing at different rates by different people.

My question is, like a good biochemist that's never seen the paid side of a lab bench, how do we mark the passage of time in the first place? Is a complete cycle of the planet around the sun broken up into 31,536,000 bits and store with equal determination in our brains? Well if that's true, why does the 25th set of 31.536 million seconds feel like they ticked faster than the 10th set? Why do I remember being in the middle of a summer vacation when I was 10 thinking, "this is endless. I don't even REMEMBER the third grade anymore." And yet now, it's August and yet I could very clearly (and perhaps with the helps of my Outlook calendar) tell you precisely what I was doing in April. Is it because novelty bits were far more frequent back then? We store 'firsts' with greater determination than we store 102nds?

In a conversation with my coworkers, we agreed that the perception of time is as equally neurologically driven as a human perception of anything else. That perception, then, is driven by what’s actually, neurologically, happening. There are plenty of blogs out there (highly scientific, I know) that posit a concept of linear time being exacerbated by spates of same-ness and argue that spates of same-ness make time seem to pass more slowly than spates of activity. However, I think time, perceived in the moment, is actually diametrically opposed to time perceived in memory. Those spates of same-ness are less apt to be stored. And in retrospect, a 'long weekend' is usually referencing a weekend wherein one attended a club, a picnic, a wedding, a roller derby, a bon voyage, and a blockbuster movie. That's a weekend that passes quickly but is reflect upon as a long weekend. Whereas the weekend I'm having right now, demarcated by nothing more exciting than 10 hours of sleep and a blog post, is going to happen (slowly in the moment) and then pass to be reflected upon as having flown by. Because what's worth storing this weekend? There's one 4 hour period that I've managed to cram all the activity in and will forever remember. And... So far... That's it.

What I'm saying is pretty straightforward. How we translate time into memory is one of those things that made me NOT want to be a neurologist. Imagining how a brain stores 31 million bits of information, annually, is like trying to envision the combination of an endless universe and then picturing a substance so dense that a teaspoon of it weighs as much as an elephant. Infinite information subjected to outrageous compression. I just don't get it. And the worst part of it, I think, is that only obvious solution is that the brain has a bouncer and only the interesting parts get let in.

How annoying is that? Does that mean we're apt to repeat the same-ness because, in the moment, it seems like something novel? Am I prone to hiding in my apartment every fifth weekend because it seems like something I've never done? Because it's never interesting enough to get stored? Maddening. And yet necessarily vague. Because if we knew HOW we were remembering things, wouldn't that be like knowing about the smoke screen? How the wizard does magic? Could we manipulate it if we know how it was done? Could we recreate it artificially? I'm might be ok with this shortcoming. I mean, I might call some friends and head out of my apartment just so I can reflect back on a long-ER weekend... But I'm certainly no more tempted to take up the pipette than I was at the beginning of this rant...

I'm gonna save the weekend and go play outside. I'm sure there's something out there worth compressing.