After a biological clock, which controls our time experience in a second or minute range, brain researchers have been searching for a long time. New insights show, that our physical feeling plays a central role: Self-Perception and time experience are inseparably connected to each other.
This is the fourth part of this article series. If you have missed some parts, don't forget to catch up on it:
- Perception of Time: How does our feeling for time emerge - Part 1
- Perception of Time: How does our feeling for time emerge - Part 2
- Perception of Time: How does our feeling for time emerge - Part 3
How does our feeling for time emerge - Part 4
Insight Mediation: Concentrating on the here and now
For several years scientists have increasingly researched the short-time and long-time acting effects of meditation. Another way to research subjective experience of time, cause meditation is all about attention respectively awareness, perception of body processes and experience of time. According to studies about people who meditate - among others from scientists around Ulrich Ott and Britta Hölzel from the Bender Institute of Neuroimaging of the University of Gießen in Germany - the region around the Insula gets active for a short time, if the subjects are using meditation techniques focusing on their body. The so called Insight Meditation is a technique by one should concentrate on the here (physical presence) and now (temporal presence) while breathing. Thereby experienced time feels like subjectively been slowed down.
Persons with longtime training experience regarding Insight Meditation, exhibit more gray substance in the insular lobe in which the nerve cell bodies are lying, which can be interpreted as neuronal correlate of an intensified body and self experience. First studies about perception of time also prove the reports of meditation beginners, stating that time while meditating is subjectively passing slower. That's why untrained students overestimate given short durations as early as after a ten minute lasting session while focusing on breathing, compared to respective intervals before meditating.
Control subjects that had to listen to the radio play of equal lengths, didn't experience changed perception of time. This results have been explained by the mentioned steering of attention to time in one of my former parts of this article series. Strengthened focus on physical processes intensifies experience of time. Increased perception of self experience stretches subjective time.
According to A. D. Craigs model, the Insula processes physical signals received by its back part further. Thereby it accounts signals which give information about the state of the body, step by step with information from other senses about the whole current situation as well as the ones about motivation and cognition. The ongoing integration of all accessible data flows into the front of the insular lobe, where a comprehensive representation of the current state of organism is created. Craig calls it the "global emotional moment": The felt self of you. This integrated state of consciousness of oneself describes the particular current physiologic state and delivers insofar the base of necessary adaptations and behavioral regulations. When it's very hot for example the organism adapts by sweating, aiming towards shady places, wanting to drink to compensate water loss.
Simultaneously the concept also represents a veritable theory of consciousness, which has to be proven by empirical review: Above neuronal activity which cumulates in the front of the insular lobe, as well as above downstream brain areas like the anterior cingular cortex in the median of the brain that initiates physiological and behavioral reactions, a kind of self emerges that's aware of itself regarding time and space. This felt self is inseparably connected with the gradually changing physical states and insofar with passage of time. Different states of consciousness make this linkages clear. This is why we are feeling like thrown back to ourselves while boringly waiting, feeling ourselves intensively whilst time does not want to pass...
Different to this the Flow-experience: Strong activities that could be managed by ones resources, are leading to accelerated experience of time. For example text-writing, music-making or crafting.
Besides absorption of activity, reducing self perception strongly, sense of time gets lost. Whilst often amazing results can be achieved during practicing Flow, our brain only inadequately captures duration of creativity.
Perception of Time: How does our feeling for time emerge - Part 5
