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how do you represent 'time' in your head?

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nontroppo:
Hm, what a fascinating topic. I'm a neuroscientist (glad to see mouser is a fellow brainalyzer), and would love to work on Time perception illusions in the future. Some of the cooler people friendly research can be seen in links from:

http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/

and a fairly recent review: http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/papers/EaglemanetalTimeJNeuro2005.pdf

Of course my all time favourite is the wonderful essay by Daniel Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer", which tries to explain the following time anomolies:

1) Libets brain stimulation in real awake humans undergoing neurosurgery -- this is really amazing stuff.
2) Color phi illusions
3) The amazing cutaneous rabbit

And more!

To give you a quick example, color phi illusions occur when you flash a red-ball at time1, then flash a green-ball moved somewhat at time2.

The brain inteprets two flashed stimuli as one moving stimulus (how movies work ;-)), but the crazy thing is this:

Time1-----------------Time1.5-------------------Time2
RED-----------------RED/GREEN-----------------GREEN

You see a red ball moving *and* morph into a green ball -- *but* how can you brain know at time1.5 that the ball will be green at time2? It needs to know this because it morphs the color from red to green as it moves to its final destination. At first pass this seems to contradict the arrow of time, their essay tries to resolve this.

http://cogprints.org/264/0/time%26obs.htm

nontroppo:
Oh, that visualize link is neat mouser!

mouser:
pdf version of the dennet paper: http://mind.ucsd.edu/syllabi/05-06/cogs200/dennett&kinsbourne.pdf

nudone:
very interesting links - which i shall attempt to read this weekend, time allowing :)

the 'abstract' section of the icastic page is probably the kind of thing i was thinking of for representing time but i still wonder how true they are.

when i think of the days of the week or months of the year i 'kind of' see an arrangement of images in sequence - but that doesn't hold true when i try to analyse things more closely. the arrangement of images are not really there - it's more a concept, like i know they should be in an sequence but the actual construction of the sequence doesn't materealise. instead there is just a very hazy representation of a single image - and that isn't really much of a picture - just a very loose image of a single moment of a day.

it's like my brain knows there is more to a day than a single snapshot image but realises there is no need to provide more information. so, i find that trying to visualise or describe time is a bit beyond human capability (or maybe it's just beyond my capability). it seems more of a low level brain thing that is just on the borderline of our awareness. habit and routine allow us to get by when thinking about time stuff but trying to articulate how we perceive time is about as easy as getting your head around infinity (and i'd be bold enough to say that such things are related and that our feeble brain just isn't wired up correctly to ever grasp such things outside of a mathematical representation).

hopefully i'll be more enlightened after reading the recommended links (Dennett hasn't really convinced me in the past, but then i was probably expecting irrefutable answers).

nontroppo:
...expecting irrefutable answers
--- End quote ---

He is a philosoper, what can one expect?!  :stars:

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