Various and Sundry

Time is Not on Your Side. It is Your Personal Rashomon

As the year draws to a close, people invariably muse aloud about how fast the year has gone. Strangely, November was far longer for me than October. I’m not sure yet how December will shape up.

I decided to do some Internet digging about time and how people perceive it. I suppose I could go ahead and read some Marcel Proust since no one can properly summarize his masterwork, but I wanted something more on the scientific side.

I read about how time itself isn’t real certainly that time is subjective to each person. I tend to think of it as a lovely intangible. I was very interested to learn about how music affects our perception of time — and in general, I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading more about the study of time perception in the near future. It seems it often explores the nature and limits of what could be termed the Rashomon effect.

Eventually, I found a satisfying piece by Alan Burdick in the New Yorker that is, in the end, far more personal and philosophical than what I originally intended from a scientific assessment. So perhaps I’ll seek out that Proust after all.

 

 

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