The Greatest Science Books of 2016
3.FELT TIME
A very
different take on time, not as cultural phenomenon but as individual psychological
interiority, comes from German psychologist Marc Wittmann in Felt
Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time — a fascinating inquiry into how our
subjective experience of time’s passage shapes everything from our emotional
memory to our sense of self. Bridging disciplines as wide-ranging as
neuroscience and philosophy, Wittmann examines questions of consciousness,
identity, happiness, boredom, money, and aging, exposing the centrality of time
in each of them. What emerges is the disorienting sense that time isn’t
something which happens to us — rather, we are time.
One of Wittmann’s most pause-giving points
has to do with how temporality mediates the mind-body problem. He writes:
Presence means becoming aware of a physical
and psychic self that is temporally extended. To be self-conscious is to
recognize oneself as something that persists through time and is embodied.
In a
sense, time is a construction of our consciousness. Two generations after
Hannah Arendt observed in her brilliant
meditation on time that “it is the insertion of man with
his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer
change … into time as we know it,” Wittmann writes:
Self-consciousness — achieving awareness of
one’s own self — emerges on the basis of temporally enduring perception of
bodily states that are tied to neural activity in the brain’s insular lobe. The
self and time prove to be especially present in boredom. They go missing in the
hustle and bustle of everyday life, which results from the acceleration of
social processes. Through mindfulness and emotional control, the tempo of life
that we experience can be reduced, and we can regain time for ourselves and
others.
Perception necessarily encompasses the
individual who is doing the perceiving. It is I who perceives. This might seem
self-evident. Perception of myself, my ego, occurs naturally when I consider
myself. I “feel” and think about myself. But who is the subject if I am the
object of my own attention? When I observe myself, after all, I become the
object of observation. Clearly, this intangibility of the subject as a subject
— and not an object — poses a philosophical problem: as soon as I observe
myself, I have already become the object of my observation.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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