"It's a cool result," says Eagleman - but he wonders whether click trains may simply "perk the person up a bit, like a little shot of caffeine," rather than having anything to do with time. If that is the case, it may be little more than a close relative of the "Mozart effect". In 1993, researchers observed that students' performances improved if they listened to classical music before taking a test, but later studies showed that many sounds, including traffic noise or speech, can provide the same benefit. "It seems that any external auditory stimulus has this excitatory, or arousal effect," says Edward Roth, who teaches music therapy at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and has studied the Mozart effect.
Weardon and Jones, however, doubt that their observations arise from simple arousal. For one thing, white noise had no impact on their subjects' performance in mathematics or memory tests, nor on their time perception. Nor did the subjects show changes in heart rate, skin conductance or muscle tension associated with excitation. "We don't get any increase in autonomic arousal," says Jones.
So how else might the click trains alter time perception and information processing speeds? Edward Large, a neuroscientist at Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton, has found that rhythmic sounds can entrain gamma brain waves, causing the beginning of each sound to be accompanied by a burst of several especially strong wave peaks. The click train may entrain other types of brain waves too - perhaps those that correspond to the discrete snapshots in our perceptions.
VanRullen and Jones agree that this may be the answer. "When you have faster oscillations, you have more snapshots per second," says VanRullen. "You may be more efficient at particular cognitive tasks, and because there are more snapshots in a given time, it may seem to last for longer."
If this theory is correct, the click train is literally resetting the brain's frame-capture rate. It's an intriguing possibility. Who hasn't wished for a little more time now and then? And you won't need to fall from an 8-story tower to get it.
By upsetting the brain's clock, you can recreate some of the delusions seen in schizophrenia
Delusions on demand
Schizophrenia has many symptoms: tormenting voices which emanate from windows or walls; delusions in which those affected lose the sensation of controlling their own bodies and thoughts; and occasional clumsiness or a jerky gait. Could all these problems stem from a faulty internal clock?
Schizophrenia certainly seems to affect people's perception of time. If someone with schizophrenia is shown a flash of light and a sound separated by 1/10th of a second, they typically have trouble discerning which came first. Such people also estimate the passing of time less accurately than most others. Now a flurry of studies has shown that if you upset the internal clocks of healthy people, you can create some of the symptoms and delusions associated with schizophrenia.
In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane's response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. After the modification, the players' performance initially worsened; but in time their brains compensated for the delay, to the extent that they actually perceived the movement of the mouse and the movement of the aircraft to take place simultaneously.
But the subjects' strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That's uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.
It's not the only experiment to demonstrate that these eerie feelings can arise from a faulty understanding of the timing of events. For example, we cannot normally tickle ourselves; somehow the intention to make the movement also suppresses the response. But when people were asked to brush the palm of their hand using a robotic probe that introduced a 200-millisecond delay between the intended movements and the actual movements, they felt the same sensation as they would if someone else were tickling them.
"That gets to a core issue in schizophrenia - the question of whether you are in control of your own body," says William Hetrick, who studies the brain's timekeeping and schizophrenia at Indiana University in Bloomington. "The ability to attribute actions to oneself versus others, to perceive one's own thoughts against thoughts generated from external sources, perhaps requires a tight coupling in time [within the brain]."
The idea could explain many of the experiences reported by people with schizophrenia. By muddling the order of thoughts and perceptions within your brain, for example, you might move your hand before you are conscious of the decision, making it feel as if someone else is controlling your movements. And when an advert appears on TV, your brain might picture the product before it consciously registers seeing it on screen - creating the disturbing illusion that your thoughts are being broadcast on television.
If poor time-processing really does underlie many psychotic delusions, it could point to a single culprit in the brain: the cerebellum. For decades, the cerebellum has been seen as a centre for timing the movement of muscles, but some neuroscientists now reckon that it might coordinate thoughts and the processing of sensory perceptions too.
That would fit with the neurological evidence. "During a broad range of mental tasks, people with schizophrenia have lower rates of cerebellar blood flow than healthy people do," says Nancy Andreasen, a schizophrenia researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
The idea has sparked plenty of interest. David Eagleman at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, has studied people with schizophrenia using a video game similar to the aircraft game, which lets him manipulate delays between volunteers' actions and their outcomes.
When he alters time delays, people with schizophrenia find it more difficult to compensate than healthy controls. "Schizophrenic brains seem to be temporally inflexible," he says. "They don't recalibrate." Eagleman hopes such games might be useful in the future to measure the severity of schizophrenia, or patients' responses to treatment and drugs.
Douglas Fox is a writer based in San Francisco
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Have your say
reading this article reminds me countless time I have looked at the clock and the second hand it not moving and then it starts, I am sure this takes longer than a second
Not a lot is said directly in the article about focus.
The essence of the human perception of time is focus. To identify and choose those external stimuli which are relevant to the situation pertaining at any particular time. To identify the rate of change of the most salient stimuli and organise the response of the body and brain to those stimuli. Different filters must be clicked in to exclude irrelevant stimuli.
Thus exciting events may be perceived more slowly because unnecessary detail is removed from the perception of the event itself. When the event occurrs more time is available to concentrate upon the salient feature of the event and so respond to it.
Thus the missing phrase in the above article is 'a priori'.
Our a priori perception allows us to focus upon particular events. - the brain effectively having an inbuilt lens for detail.
More time is thus available to focus upon relevant detail in any particular circumstance.
Also when recalling such memory our a priori conceptuality predisposes us to know that in the actual reality of the exciting event we existed in the same way in detail and temporaly as we do when we are subsequently recalling the event. However because during the event we had filtered out much of the normal apriori world that existed before and after the event we 'feel' that the actual timing of the event was slower than in the normal a priori world because during recall we would have to overlay the normal a priori rate of things so as to coordinate the memory with the current conditions of recall.
Thus also the thought of time as a 'feeling' is missing from the article.
This idea is central to Damasios theory of consciousness - that time exists in consciousness and thus is in essence a feeling.
NB there is a coherent physics without time - so it is not beyond the pale that one indeed considers time as an artefact of the 'brain'
The essence of it seems to have been mentioned in the article - the neurons have to be "recharged" between firings, so what we may be experiencing is a slide show between rechargings, sight and sound showing some lack of sync because of the difference in input between speed of light and speed of sound (?), and apparent subjective experiences can be due to adrenalin influence. Schizophrenics might have a neurotransmitter problem which leaves the scrambling for integration.
Time
Sat Oct 24 01:22:33 BST 2009 by Dennis
http://freetubetv.net
I see someone is heavily influenced by Stephen Hawking's work on time. The idea of time occurring at a much faster or slower pace than human cognition can comprehend is fascinating but not sure how they can really prove that.
Thank God!!! I'm not the only one! The 'second-hand' phenomena is really weird. The harder you look, the longer it takes to start, it seems. Thanks, everyone. David.H.
Please don't stare too hard, I beg you. Time might go backwards and the effect could be catastrophic!
I have a theory that when you remember events you make time go backwards to the event itself.
Thats why a memory is never clear - because quantum mechanics precludes you remebering the exact event but rather you can actually recall information about the event which was not present to your conscious self at the time of the event. This means that this time travel backwards does not alter the present. eg when you travel backward in time to the event - you actually really do see the event again but from a slightly different perspective.
This time travel is an ability of mind rather than brain, so is very difficult to measure precisely but its affects can be felt.
It may be possible to travel back in time and reinvestigate an event.
Perhaps this is done in hypnosis.
I have done that so many times! Yes it does take longer than a second to start again or at least it seems like it.
Time
Thu Oct 22 14:52:37 BST 2009 by ben
http://www.citeulike.org/user/agcs/article/3090361
This is due to saccades.
http://www.citeulike.org/user/agcs/article/3090361
"When voluntary saccadic eye movements are made to a silently ticking clock, observers sometimes think that the second hand takes longer than normal to move to its next position. For a short period, the clock appears to have stopped (chronostasis). Here we show that the illusion occurs because the brain extends the percept of the saccadic target backwards in time to just before the onset of the saccade. This occurs every time we move the eyes but it is only perceived when an external time reference alerts us to the phenomenon."
In more 'joe sixpack'-terms. After you move your eyes fast, they are unable to collect information for a fraction of a second. When the eyes comes back 'online' the brain collects motion-information for an equal fraction of a second, and extrapolates the information backwards to create what things should have looked like and fills this fabricated visual information into your memory. Since the needle (or digit) didn't move while the brain was collecting info for the extrapolation, it won't be able to predict that it moved in the past either.
That happens with everyone, and when you think about how time has slowed or stopped, it goes again. Which makes me think (well actually i know from other experiences) that time is only constant in our concious mind, when where in a trance, not thinking, time around us slows down because of the amount of information we are processing. The more info we process, the slower time goes, almost to compensate. As we dream on the other hand, a 10 minute dream will last for hours, therefore time speeds up.
If you want excitement, you should try being bombarded by a wartime "Moaning Minnie". When one lands on the side of your slit trench, you hear the 'pop' of the detonator, followed by the bang of the main charge followed by the scream of the metal casing being rent apart, it all takes a very brief time, but you can remember each as a separate event. Have they tried the experiment with soldiers on active service??
Again the brain focusses upon a very small part of the 'a priori' world when an explosive device threatens. When this memory later is filled in with and coordinated with the current and prior conditions of the a priori world it seems as though the timespan of the dangerous event must have been longer. - because our a priori world later fills in - at leisure -data which was not available to us whilst we were focussing upon the bomb exploding.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to try the perceptual chronometer on people who had listened to the click train?
Slow Motion Attack
Wed Oct 21 19:10:27 BST 2009 by mel zimmer
http://www.youtube.com/user/iskandhar
At an anti Viet Nam war protest in NYC our small group was attacked repeatedly. When we went to leave they grabbed a frail young kid, one holding him and another began to hit him.
I slung my camera over my back and jumped on the back of the guy pummeling the kid. When he turned to come after me I tried to melt into the crowd but couldn't. As he charged at me I experienced the slow motion phenomena and was able to knock him out with one punch.
I would say it wasn't memory but the speeding up of messenger cells
Suppose that rather than thinking of memory in frames per second one should think of it in terms of information per second. This would give a measure of the intesity of focus. This might indeed give us a new view into time itself as a flow of information.
I truly believe you are on the right track with your comment that we look at time as a flow of information. It melds an understanding of time as a state of consciousness that is supported by brain structure and function, and it is measurable. The big job will be identifying all input sources and nature of their inputs.
Sounds like an adrenalin rush,and again the article doesn't mention adrenalin.
The click train effect is the same as listening to certain types of music while driving a car.As the beat speeds up so do you and the car.Nothing really new there.
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