Our Associative system allows us to make predictions. It could be as simple as: what’s around the next corridor; who’s that knocking at my door; or what are my career goals for the next five years? It does this by rapidly lining up our patterns of knowledge and experience and drawing those lines out into the future.
What’s curious is this system doesn’t track the tick-tock of temporal time. It helps us know Event A happened before Event B which happened before Event C, but it doesn’t track the distance between those events. This can produce the experience of being fully focused on a task; two hours go by, and it feels as though ten minutes have passed.
By contrast, this phenomenon occurs in opposite when people fully engaged in a surprise or the unfamiliar describe time as having moved in slow motion.
In early spring, I was traveling up I-91 in Massachusetts heading home to Vermont. It was raining hard so traffic was proceeding cautiously. Shortly after entering Vermont, I saw brake lights ahead. I touched the brake. At that point, it became apparent the rain had become freezing rain, and the wet road surface was now ice. My associative processor went into overdrive to try to find something from Driver’s Ed or maybe something from a movie. Hadn’t Tom Cruise hit black ice in Top Gun? While all this went on, my vehicle went into an inexorable drift toward the roadside. I noted my fellow travelers ahead of me were also searching for insight into strategy, but I could discern no pattern of success in their movements. The deep snow bank allowed for an acceptable rate of deceleration, but absorbed the vehicle beyond self extraction. It had to have unfolded in nanoseconds. However, my brain has left me with a powerful experience of all those events without a memory of the distance between them. My memory has expanded those events into a full-length motion picture feature.
“How fast were you traveling?” demanded the trooper providing escort to the tow truck separating one after another of us from the snow. “About 45 mph,” I responded. “Too fast for conditions,” he scolded. But officer, it felt so slow.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman is getting subjects to bungee-jump and to participate in amusement park free-fall rides to reproduce this experience in an experimental setting.
Understanding time as depth and distance appears to occur in the sequential processor. The sequential processor activates when we think, “Ten minutes: can I write this email in ten minutes; can I complete this phone call in ten minutes. It activates when we contemplate, “I have a two-hour window of time tomorrow: what of all the things that have my attention and focus can I most effectively move forward within that two-hour window of time.
A recent hypothesis suggests we have set of neurons in our frontal lobes, which our sequential processor activates for much of its work, which pulse on a regular basis the way a quartz-crystal does in a digital clock. Our brain appears to use this pulse as a way of tracking time as depth and distance. When we activate our sequential processor, we also appear to activate our ability to track time accurately and to remember how long it takes to accomplish our tasks.
Management consultant, Julie Ireland, evinces well-developed access to her sequential processor. One way this manifests is as her very clear understanding of how long it takes to accomplish her routine tasks and to estimate how long it will take to accomplish upcoming tasks.
Ask many of us how long it takes us to get to work, we say something like, “Oh, fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Ask Julie how long it takes her to get to work. She’ll tell you that Monday, it takes 16 minutes, Tuesday 12 minutes, Wed 10 minutes, Thursday 13 minutes and Friday 9 minutes.
We can learn consciously to shift from our system that tracks time and our system that holds us in the present.