Jo Marchant

creating you are exploring you are meeting the world you are interacting you are making that sensation it's like a joint project if you like it's it's not a question of we're just sitting back having the world beams to us and so yeah it is kind of exhausting but i think it's also really liberating to realize that how much agency and control we have over what we are perceiving within each moment

Yeah, well, this is one of the really intriguing things about time and about now is how malleable it is.

Like you say, we've all had experiences of time racing by, going so fast, even when we're having a great time and we wish that it wouldn't, or time really dragging.

And you can see examples of very different kinds of time with different disorders and mental states as well.

There's a disorder called echinotopsia,

where people don't perceive smooth movement, but their now is kind of chopped up into these sudden jumps.

There was a lady in Germany who had echinotopsia, and she complained that when she poured a cup of tea, she would see the liquid just frozen in the air, like going from the spout to the cup, and then the next moment the cup would have overflowed, or she'd try and cross the road and she'd see a car in the distance still, and then all of a sudden it would be right on top of her.

So she had this sort of sudden jumping kind of a now,

And then, of course, you've got examples when we're in a flow state or people take psychedelic drugs where it almost seems like time just stops completely.

And I think this feeds into what I was saying earlier about how we never experience clock time directly.

So physicists looking out in the world don't find a kind of...

flow of time that's happening out in the world.

So we only ever experience events, interactions, and then we kind of glean clock time from that.

It's a really useful tool to help us to coordinate our interactions.

But it doesn't seem like abstract linear mathematical time is actually a thing

on its own that's ticking by independently.

And we don't have any sensory organs for time.

There is no area in our brain that's dedicated purely to sensing the passage of time.

What we sense is change and events.

And that explains why clock time is so malleable because we're not experiencing it directly.