Dr. David Eagleman

And that's all that's happening.

And the way the pruning happens is based on what you're experiencing in the world.

The world is what prunes your garden and strengthens particular paths and lets other paths go.

I love that.

I think that's brilliant.

One of the things that is so striking about time perception is that you don't have a single part of the brain that deals with that.

You actually have different mechanisms that deal with thinking about long eras of time and seconds and sub-seconds

Totally different mechanisms going on here.

And we can demonstrate this in the laboratory.

So time perception is something I've been studying since graduate school.

And I'm happy to say I've got papers in science and nature and the top journals on this topic.

Why?

Because it's such a weird thing that's so understudied about why we perceive time the way we do.

So let me say a few things about it.

One is that it is a –

These longer timescales, what you're referring to, thinking about being far away in space and time, this is a cognitive development.

Children can't do this well, and they learn better and better.

So, for example, if you talk to a seventh grader and you talk about the Roman Empire and what was happening 2,200 years ago, it doesn't mean anything.

It's like, okay, that's the past and whatever.

But as you get older, if you become, let's say, a professional historian, you get better and better at understanding that.