From the IL 10th Round-Up:
Tick Tock . . .
WRITTEN by Keith Brin, 10tj State Central Committeeman
Let the countdown begin.
42 days.
That’s how long we have before early voting begins.
September 24th is the first day of early voting at the County Clerk’s Office, and the first day requested vote by mail ballots are sent. It’s the first day of the 40-day period before the November 3rd election day that allows for early voting.
The date has been on the calendar for a long time, but no one really pays much attention to it until about now in every election cycle.
It’s because time is a luxury and a resource that we often have far too much of when we least need it, but it drains away quickly when suddenly we’re up against it.
We’ve been complaining for months that the Illinois election season is too long.
Because it is.
We started this cycle last summer, contemplating whether to start a campaign, and then organizing for the proverbial starter pistol to signal the time to circulate petitions to get on the ballot. Fast forward almost a full year, and we’re looking at the start of voting.
Time is almost up.
It’s really amazing how our perception of time works, and the things that can affect it.
You may think one second is just one second, and you’re not entirely wrong.
One second is as much only as an objective measurement, not as experienced.
Our perception of time is surprisingly flexible.
Several things strongly influence how we experience time:
Attention – What we’re paying attention to matters enormously. If you’re watching a clock, time seems slower. If you’re absorbed in a movie, conversation, or task, time seems faster. If you’re waiting for something, every minute becomes noticeable.
Novelty vs. familiarity – This produces one of the strangest effects of time perception. Novel experiences often make time seem to pass slowly because your brain is processing lots of new information. But periods filled with novel experiences often seem longer in retrospect because your memory contains more distinctive events. That’s one reason childhood can seem enormously long in retrospect, while an ordinary adult year can feel as though it has vanished.
Emotion – Emotional intensity can distort time dramatically. Fear, anxiety, pain, excitement, and anticipation can make moments feel stretched out. A frightening event may seem to happen in slow motion. In contrast, pleasure and engagement can have the opposite effect: “Where did the last three hours go?”
Age – Our perception of time tends to change as we get older. A year is a much larger fraction of a five-year-old’s life than of a 50-year-olds. There’s also a tendency for adulthood to become more repetitive, producing fewer memorable landmarks.
Memory – This is critical because there are really two different experiences of time:
- Prospective time: How long does this seem to be taking right now?
- Retrospective time: How long does that period seem to have lasted when I look back?
They can actually contradict each other.
A boring vacation in Antarctica might feel painfully slow while you’re experiencing it yet seem almost nonexistent when you look back because very little memorable happened.
A vacation packed with new experiences, excitement at every turn, and maybe even a rodeo or two, can fly by while you’re there but seem like it lasted forever when you remember it.
Dopamine and the brain’s reward system – Brain chemistry also affects our internal timing. Dopamine is involved in reward, motivation, learning and temporal processing. Changes in dopamine signaling can alter how we estimate intervals and anticipate rewards. This is one reason highly rewarding activities – games, gambling, social media, exciting conversations, etc. – can produce the feeling that time disappears.
Routine – Routine is one of the biggest reasons adulthood can seem to accelerate.
Imagine two weeks:
- Week A: Work → same restaurant → television → sleep → repeat.
- Week B: New city → unfamiliar restaurant → meeting new people → hiking → concert → different hotel → exploring.
Both are exactly 14 days. But Week B will probably feel much longer in retrospect because your brain has more events to use as temporal landmarks.
Stress and danger – Under extreme circumstances, people sometimes report that events seemed to occur in slow motion. There’s an interesting debate about whether the brain actually processes information faster during those moments or whether the memory of the event becomes unusually detailed, making it seem slower afterward. Either way, extreme emotional arousal can profoundly change subjective time.
Sleep and circadian rhythms – Your biological clock influences how alert you are and how you perceive duration. Fatigue, sleep deprivation, jet lag and disruptions to your circadian rhythm can all alter subjective timing.
Expectations – If you expect something to take 10 minutes and it takes 30, the experience can feel very long. If you expect something to take an hour and it’s finished in 40 minutes, it may feel surprisingly short. Anticipation itself can stretch time.
Cool To Me – If you’ve gotten this far, there is something really cool about time: Our brains don’t appear to have a single time meter. Instead, our perception of time emerges from a combination of attention, memory, emotion, arousal, novelty, expectation, biological rhythms and neural processing.
That’s why two people can experience the exact same 60 minutes and genuinely feel that they experienced different amounts of time.
And there’s a fascinating philosophical consequence: We don’t actually experience time directly. We experience changes, events, memories and expectation – and our brains construct a sense of time from them.
I won’t take a dive into the physics of time in this column.
Ok, maybe a little, because I geek out on it.
Physics gets weird on time.
Time matters differently in quantum mechanics (the study of physics at the smallest level), but things change depending on how big the physics gets.
In fact, at the biggest levels – studying the stars and the movement of objects in our universe – time moves much more slowly as you are closer to things with more gravity.
And it gets worse.
A physics experiment proved that at distances shorter than the human body that time moves at different speeds.
Because your feet are slightly closer to Earth’s center than your head, and Earth’s gravity is a little stronger lower down, time passes slightly more slowly at your feet than at your head.
So, strictly speaking, your head is aging faster than your feet.
You can’t make this stuff up.
I’ll see myself out now.
I guess in the end, no matter how you experience the time –
- active,
- lazy,
- campaigning,
- firing off mean tweets, or
- anything else –
time isn’t waiting for any of us.
42 days until the ballots start counting.
Make them count.
