Ever wondered if there's some way to quantify the subjective experience of time passing quickly or slowly? Here's a fascinating article about the experience of time and how it relates to the brain. It has some answers, and they're pretty cool. There's also talk of gaining the ability to tinker with how you experience time. We are talking major science fiction reality.
An excerpt:
By understanding the mechanisms of our brain's clock, Eagleman and others hope to learn ways of temporarily resetting its tick. This might improve our mental speed and reaction times. What's more, since time is crucial to our perception of causality, a faulty internal clock might also explain the delusions suffered by people with schizophrenia.
But first, the basics. Perhaps the most fundamental question neuroscientists are investigating is whether our perception of the world is continuous or a series of discrete snapshots like frames on a film strip. Understand this, and maybe we can explain how the healthy brain works out the chronological order of the myriad events bombarding our senses, and how this can become warped to alter our perception of time.
