welcome to see if you go visionaries me sophie shevardnadze closing round drags and flies and it's never enough how does our brain keep track of time joined by dean one of the models you see when you were scientists and author of your brain is a time machine. name one and i know he's a near a scientist author of your brain it is a time machine great to have you with us on our show today welcome it's my pleasure sophie thank you so much for having me sitting let's start with looking at how we perceive time if you look at the traditional depictions of time to write down these nothing clock or perhaps it is this concept of time being the river that you cannot step twice into wearing we get this idea that time is fluke is there any

scientific explanation to yeah that's an interesting question i think for most humans there's few things that are as dominant as the notion that time is flowing 'd right that the past is evaporating into miss an accessible experience and opening the doors 'd to the future so this flow of time this fluid motion of time is one of our most profound subjective experiences no doubt right we feel like we're losing the current the past is no longer under our control and we're opening new doors to the future so that's tightly coupled to consciousness so consciousness creates this narrative of things changing things flowing in time and that's probably shared with many other animals but it's a bit of an illusion so if 'd. you feel we all feel that time is flowing linearly me like a b. c. d. e. and that we're sort of creating this percept as one continuous flow but that's

a bit of an illusion because in reality we process the world 'd in a bit of chunks and jumps and at the past and at the future let me give you an example of that if i say the sentence the mouse was broken. or if i say the sentence the mouse was hungry the mouse has 2 different meanings there one is the computer mouse and one is a rodent but you only know what mouse i meant by what came after. so you only know the meaning of the word mouse by the next word but your brain didn't stop and say oh we edit that that was the mouse the wrote in or mouse the computer so your brain is sort of waiting a certain perspective specific amount of time and then creating a narrative that is sensed a consciousness that creates your conscious awareness so consciousness in a way is a creation a narrative a construct of our unconscious brain that sent to our conscious brain. how does our

brain calculate where is time or in our brain case that tells as ok 7 minutes must have passed spaghetti must be just there right conditioning day or in must be new nobody needs time to go to bear where or how to worry where does it happen so cumin beings have been inventing clocks for it since the dawn of civilization but really the 1st clocks of course were in our brain and were very good and that sort of determining speech some speech music knowing when more hungry knowing when we should get up knowing when the food might be or any. unlike the clocks that we've built it's amazing right when most technological achievement in that we have one of the biggest technological achievements that we have is that same clock the clock on your digital on your smartphone for example can tell

a millisecond seconds days hours weeks minutes and so forth but the brain can also tell those times but it doesn't have a master clock as many many many different clocks so you have one clock that's your circadian clock that helps you with the hours when you should get up when you're hungry and that clock doesn't have a 2nd and doesn't know how many seconds have gone by you have other clocks or timers that are in other at parts of your brain that know how many seconds have gone by that help you play the piano 'd or help you determine the cause of the of my speech and those are different types of mechanism so the brain is many many different clocks unlike our technological manmade clocks and each one is a bit different and you think of something like the circadian clock you don't even need a brain to have a circadian clock plants have circadian clock bacteria have circadian clock. so

that's a very relatively well understood. biochemical mechanism that involves. d.n.a. and proteins in a feedback loop that happens to oscillate every 24 hours so the sim we have near and south there is loss of over telling us microsecond time wait for playing and then another cell they're responsible for telling mockridge time i might apply different harmony. so. we have clocks that tell us the beat of the music. as well as the time of the day now humans are very unique in that we also have the ability to conceptualize time so that's the planning for retirement that you mention so we don't really have a good clocks that operate at that though humans are very unique in our ability to conceptualize time to plan for the future there's this great quote by

a party louise barr his saying that man is the only animal that is not immortal because all other animals are ignorant of death so we're we have the curse of seeing the future as well as the gift of seeing the future and we have the gift of seeing the future because that allows us to plan for the long term to plan for retirement to invent things that take a long time to build build the pyramids travel to the moon but the curse there is that we get to see that we're ephemeral that we will 'd die. so it's both a gift and a curse. is it possible to train your brain in a way that it can tell time with clock live accuracy. we we can certainly improve our ability 'd to tell time and musicians do that athletes do that but it's very specific to the scale so if you have

a really good clock and atomic clock it's very good at telling microseconds millisecond seconds hours and days but that's because it's one clock humans have many different clocks so if you get much better as a musician the believe it to time seconds that doesn't mean you're going to be better at knowing when you're postell dainty is ready so you do you know you do this wonderful interview and you probably have a good feeling of time on the scale of 20 minutes 30 minutes which might be your general duration of a show approximately i don't know so so that means you've probably become good at determining those periods of time that are the duration of your show but that doesn't mean you're very good or necessarily but better than other people at determining that the beat of a song or whether it's a half note or

a full no so yes the brain improves the believes tell time but it's very specific to the task at hand does every person see time differently i mean let's say you and i are talking real time right now ray. does turn to the differently for you than for me or let me give you a hit and other suggestion if we arrange to me in 2 hours and neither of us has a watch does that mean that we want mean time because your 2 hours will be different from my 2 hours. so for that task our subjective sense of time absolutely it can be very different it can feel i might be excited to meet you so time might be going very slowly. and maybe you're very busy some time might be flying by but it's more than that right so fix so it's not only time is different for me and for you it's different for you at different points of your life so depending on what you're doing if you're engaged in task time might be

flown flying by if you're having fun with friends or if you're in the hospital undergoing a procedure time might be seen be going very slowly so time is not only individuals for each of us a subjective feeling of time of course subjectively time is determined by external events but for each of us time flows differently depending on context or you can take psychoactive drugs that will shape here your feeling of the flow of time and winds into the times as we get older i mean if this offical question on one hand but only after her and it's objective reality desk peeta. you mean it feels like it speeds up is that what you mean yeah i mean when you're younger it just you know why slow flow a piece of time and then when you get older it's les you know

ears terry turned to months and months tared 2 weeks and weeks turned to days and they stare into one hour and then minutes it but it's really like that it's almost like you're always running out of time where the hell did it go yes. so in that context it's important to make a distinction between 2 types of subjective feeling of time one is prospect of time sort of where we feel time flowing right now as we're having this conversation and the other is retrospective timing so that's when you look back at the past so this is very a lot of people notice this during the pandemic particularly when they're in lockdown right so they look back at back in last year maybe the month of april seemed to disappear because nothing was happening so that's retrospective time so retrospective time is closely 'd coupled to memory so if you have many

many experiences during the last months new memories were formed. then it seems that it lasted a long time but. if you don't have many memories formed if you didn't do anything interesting you didn't meet new many many new people you didn't do many of your interviews it probably feels like it flew by so part of the question one of the answers one of the hypotheses that answers your question is that as we become older we have lived more and we form less memories and so we feel that time has been going retrospective me more quickly because we're forming less memories so here's an extreme example imagine somebody you know you've heard. oh people with temporal with. a lesion to their temporal lobes in the brain make the campus and they lost the ability to form new memories in the extreme case that person is living in the present they don't know what they did yesterday they don't know what

they did the day before so they're continuously living in the present and think that time is always flying by because they don't have any memories of the past so memory and retrospective timing are closely related and i think that's one of. the reasons for this impression that we all have that time seems to be accelerating if you will retrospect agree as we get older dealing educational great great now when we're back we'll continue talking to dean one of the who he's even a neuroscientist and author of your brain is a time machine stay with us. stand

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is a time machine talking about how your brain copes with the notion of time. with time when wintery i mean you can dream of a wonderful weekend in venice during the 2 are nap after a live trade or elating nolens. inception sleep for 5 hours real time the characters spend 50 years in a dream world no. subjective experience is very flexible right we can we can taste a 1000000 different take a 1000000 different flavors weekends have to see different forms of art our conscious experience is incredibly flexible and that includes our feeling of the flow of time so even consciously you can play a song in your head very quickly or very slowly right if i ask you what are the last words of your favorite song of the lyric of your favorite song you might have

to start at the beginning of a song to reach the end but you can do that probably very quickly to reach them and so time subjective time is can be dilated or contract it or compressed. as a result of the neural 'd mechanisms as a result of the brain processes that underlie timing so so in the dreams presumably the brain has these ways to accelerate or d. accelerate the passage of time it can run things quickly and slowly we don't understand exactly how that happened sophie we don't understand the nature of the subjective feeling of time but it is clear that the brain can just like you can accelerate a piece on the piano that you're playing you can play it quickly or you can pay it slowly you can compress or excel or a time and there's interesting parallels here with the physics of time. you know it's easy to say why every mission has taught us to proceed space in the old days

right it would help us i don't know look a predator's move your say hideout for ourselves or. for our offspring's. and evolutionary purpose for this sense of time. new. so there's certainly a very profound evolutionary purpose for why we need to tell time and why we need to conceptualize time and in many ways the brain's main function is temporal in nature right because we store information about the past in order to predict the future in many ways that's your brain's main job is to predict and prepare for the future so the animal that's capable of predicting where the predators were being where the food will be where the prey will be where its mates will be is obviously more likely to survive and reproduce so the ability to predict

the future is in my opinion probably the main evolutionary drive or for their dilution of the brain and for a relationship with time now to feel that time to have a subjective sense of time that's a much harder question and why we have to feel that going feel it flowing is an open question but what's clear is that humans unlike most animals have the ability to conceptualize time long term so most of what we do is aimed not for the next minutes but for the next days weeks months and years ray we go to school because we want to become a doctor or even on to become a lawyer or a journalist and that takes time we need to dedicate ourselves to an activity for the next year in order to achieve something in 10 years if you look 'd at what was probably one of the most significant technological advances in humankind was the

invention of agriculture so in agriculture you plant a seed. and year from now you reap the fruits of that seed to have food to eat to survive that simple act is beyond the cognitive ability of most animals ramos animals are unable to see the connection between cause and effect separated by long periods of time so. this ability to conceptualize time gave humans a very very unique power rather than just trying to predict the future we were able to create it rather than look for a few food we were able to create food by planting it rather than looking for shelter we were able to create shelter by building houses and building. habitats and so forth so evolutionary it was it's one of our best weapons the billy to conceptualize time and without that ability homo sapiens would not be very

sapient or wise. you know when we study anything on the brain and of time in the brain we are concerned about the present moment ray but with time passing is there even such a thing as a present moment i mean you react to my words which are already sad and he already in the past like star way came with their 1st say that the present moment is an illusion lake you know the buddhists would have believed us i think yeah absolutely in a sense we live slightly in the past so my brain takes some time to process the words that you are speaking so so there's certainly a delay there but it's a very short delay and it's a delay that doesn't seem to have a significant impact on how we interact with the environment but absolutely we're we have this processing delay just like a computer has a delay or we're in

a zoo meeting there can be a delay because the signal is going up to a saddle and back down so sometimes you can feel that delay or perceive that delay but generally speaking the present is thought of as a as a bounded amount of time maybe a half a 2nd maybe a 2nd and we sort of process information that's happening within that period of time all at once so i think. our sense of time is absolutely focused on the present and that's what we mean when we say we have a sense of the flow of time but most of our time we can also be thinking about the future in the present or think thinking about the past while we are in the present . system is how does our brain differentiate between various degrees of the past what i mean is where does that marker come from in our memory that says when this happened yesterday. and about another bit of the knowledge this happened

5 centuries ago near. so when we're talking about our memory of the past there's an interesting distinction between semantic memory and that factual knowledge about history i know that. there were the olympics games. and 1980 in the united states but that's historical that's something i didn't rest necessarily experience but then when i talk about my birthday or my meetings with my family and then i have an autobiographical memory i have knowledge of that so you have experiences that you know from history and you have experiences that you know from your own autobiographical experience and so those. they are autobiographical experience seem to be stored in order they seem to be sort of you know what

happened 1st year your college graduation or your 1st. meeting your 1st boyfriend you have a some order of that and that's things are stored in some sort of. temporal sequence but the other information is really just knowledge doesn't have we don't know what it means that america is where discovered and 15 hundreds which just a fact is just not it's just a piece of information it's just a number that we have that not too different from saying that the speed of light is 300000 kilometers per 2nd there's just. knowledge so i don't think we have a good subjective feeling of historical time so does understanding more about the subjective assessment. move us any closer to understanding what consciousness is in general really 8th. so this is a very deep question and it's fascinating in many ways time is one of the most.

deepest questions that humans. deal with right because it relates to consciousness it relates to freewill it relates to this question of can i make a decision the decisions that i make are they predict term and can there possibly be predicted or is the future truly open and it also relates to physics is our perception that time is flowing that time is changing. real or is some people believe in physics is it the case that in some ways we live in a universe in which everything has already played out the past is still sort of. exists in some sense in the future exists in an in one sense but we just happen to be here in the present so it's a very deep question of what our perception of time tells us about the reality and

about consciousness so regarding consciousness i think consciousness tells us more about time than time tells us more about consciousness so i think that. consciousness is the real mystery here. and we have evolved ways to perceive our environment and that allows us to create these subjective experiences . and unlike unlike taste like sight or unlike hearing the brain doesn't have an organ for time right we have no organ for time nor could we because time isn't material physical substance like matter or like light so the brain has to create that perception of time and how it does that is tightly coupled to consciousness and we don't really understand the nature of consciousness yet why

is this connections important the connection needed them between the perception of time and consciousness he has and he can't someone just be conscious and have a total in this a perception of time i think case of the media is something new so and one wonders so humans are unique in our ability to perceive time a long time scales about maybe animals maybe our fellow mammals have a different way a different perception of time in that they're very locked into the present so yes if you're absolutely correct if you had very severe amnesia or maybe a lot of maybe maybe my dog perceives time just as an amnesic patient that it just wore it about the present it's just feeling the present whether i'm hungry whether i'm sleepy and so forth so i think the question of consciousness is a very deep one in that allows us to try to understand how the brain creates

any perceptible or it's conscious whether it's temporal or not whether it's space right you can have a feeling of you're in a big space or a small space or claustrophobic 'd or agoraphobic so simple concepts in this is the real mystery here and then how that gives. different actually be it such as the flow of time is i think something that we'll only understand truly understand once we understand consciousness hopefully if that ever happens if that ever happens sophie it's a question is can the brain understand itself you know are we smart enough is the brain smart enough to understand itself and that's an open question maybe we're not in it's been such a pleasure talking to you and discussing the concept of time with her it's really to their brain and i hope we get to do this again. good luck with everything thank you so much sophie and thank you for your time thank you and have a great day thank.

you taster unlike sight or unlike hearing the brain doesn't have an organ for time right we have no organ for time nor could we because time isn't material physical substance like matter or like light so the brain has to create that perception of time. to the summit in alaska representatives from china and the united states will be for the 1st time since the advent of the bike ministration what can she expect washington demand can the 2 sides agreed to disagree what would be a meeting of low expectations. the

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