In the August 23 New Yorker, Oliver Sacks had perhaps the singularly most alarming, amazing article that I have ever read anywhere, and it addressed this topic thoroughly. I’m afraid that I can’t find a free copy on-line, but I did blog it at the time, which includes several relevant quotes.
The premise of the article is this: our brains play with our concept of time all the time. You know how sometimes you’ll be jerked awake by kicking something, in a dream, and you wake up because you’ve just kicked in real life? When you wake, you can even remember that you had a dream about, say, playing kickball, and you were throwing the ball and you struck out three people and then you got up to bat and you kicked and that’s when you woke up. OK, here’s the totally mind-blowing thing: that dream came after the kick. The kick is a physiological quirk. The kick did wake you up. Between the kick and your waking, you had that entire dream, and your mind inserted it before the kick, time-wise.
Crazy. Totally fucking crazy.
Your brain does the same thing with deja vu, says Sacks. You haven’t had that dream. You haven’t experienced that before. Your brain just likes to make you think that you have. You think that you know what’s going to happen next, but it’s only because your brain is making you think that events are happening at a time when they are not, offset by a second or two.
The article is much more extensive than this, and establishes the complete subjectivity of time, to degrees to which I hardly knew were possible. (Some Tourette’s patients can catch flies in mid-air by the wings, because they perceive the flies as being so slow. Some Parkinson’s patients, previously thought to have been staying perfectly still for hours at a time, protest that they were just scratching their nose, and it only took a second; time-lapse photos show that they’re doing precisely that, only it took eight hours.) It’s a huge mindfuck, and I love it.
Go to Source
