Jo Marchant

And if you take those things away, there isn't really anything left.

A pure present would have nothing in it.

And it's when we are in different mental states where we lose our sense of time, we also tend to lose our sense of self.

Those two things are very entwined together.

together, whether it's in psychosis or people who've taken psychedelic drugs or even just in flow states where you're really immersed in the moment.

When your sense of time falls away, your sense of self falls away.

So I think it's a balance.

We do need to be able to not just always be obsessed with the past and the future and appreciate what's happening right now.

But I think that what's happening right now, everything in your moment around you is

that you're experiencing depends also on your past and your future.

It's all of these rich threads of experience that make you you and that make your experience what it is.

We're not just passively observing the world.

There's lots of research showing how much we actually bring to how we're perceiving and what we're perceiving.

Yeah, exactly.

There's a lot of work in neuroscience showing that we're not just passively receiving signals that are arriving.

Often we think about now or, you know, what we're experiencing any particular moment is there's just objects out there in the world and sort of the light signals beam to our eyes and we experience that.

And we're, you know, if you and I were in the same room, we'd be experiencing pretty much the same thing.

But it seems that that is not actually what's happening at all, partly because of what I said before about if we did that, we would always be living a fraction of a second in the past because of the time it takes for the signals to get to us.

And all the signals that are arriving will be all jumbled up because the sight and sound from a speaker, say, would arrive at different times.

And it would be this chaotic jumble of sensations that wouldn't make any sense.