This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its relationship with the world. The existence of temporal illusions crucially challenges the naïve assumption that we can simply infer the temporal nature of the world from experience. This anthology gathers eighteen original papers from current leading researchers in this subject, covering four broad and interdisciplinary topics: illusions of temporal passage, illusions and duration, illusions of temporal order and simultaneity, and the relationship between temporal illusions and the cognitive representation of time.
From his unique perspective, author Norimichi Shuto re-examines the mixed fields of knowledge expounded by Zeno, Descartes, Husseri, Galileo, Newton, Yojichiro and Einstein, and gives evidence that the perception of time is nothing but an illusion. He closes in on the essence of time without the use of formulas and by taking clues from time itself, as it passes right before our very eyes. In the process, by referring to the hypothesis that light is the source of our consciousness, our universe, and of all matter, the clues to understanding the Arrow of Time will ultimately be revealed.
One of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade "Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, Helgoland, and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.
From his unique perspective, author Norimichi Shuto re-examines the mixed fields of knowledge expounded by Zeno, Descartes, Husseri, Galileo, Newton, Yojichiro and Einstein, and gives evidence that the perception of time is nothing but an illusion. He closes in on the essence of time without the use of formulas and by taking clues from time itself, as it passes right before our very eyes. In the process, by referring to the hypothesis that light is the source of our consciousness, our universe, and of all matter, the clues to understanding the Arrow of Time will ultimately be revealed.
Why does time seem to speed up as we grow older? Do you want to learn the secret of how to slow it down? Now you can! With access to in-depth research, you can learn how to extend the good times and fast forward through the bad ones with "The Power of Time Perception."
Our contact with the world is through perception, and therefore the study of the process is of obvious importance and signi?cance. For much of its long history, the study of perception has been con?ned to natural- tic observation. Nonetheless, the phenomena considered worthy of note have not been those that nurture our survival—the veridical features of perception—but the oddities or departures from the common and c- monplace accuracies of perception. With the move from the natural world to the laboratory the oddities of perception multiplied, and they received ever more detailed scrutiny. My general intention is to examine the interpretations of the perc- tual process and its errors throughout history. The emphasis on errors of perception might appear to be a narrow approach, but in fact it enc- passes virtually all perceptual research from the ancients until the present. The constancies of perception have been taken for granted whereas - partures from constancies (errors or illusions) have fostered fascination.
We are obsessed with time. However hard we might try, it is almost impossible to spend even one day without the marker of a clock. But how much do we understand about time, and is it possible to retrain our brains and improve our relationship with it? Drawing on the latest research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and biology, and using original research on the way memory shapes our understanding of time, acclaimed writer and broadcaster Claudia Hammond delves into the mysteries of time perception. Along the way, she introduces us to an extraordinary array of colourful characters willing to go to great lengths in the interests of research, such as the French speleologist Michel, who spends two months in an ice cave in complete darkness. Time Warped shows us how to manage our time more efficiently, speed time up and slow it down at will, plan for the future with more accuracy, and, ultimately, use the warping of time to our own advantage.
A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Changing the passage of time is a concept that has captured the imagination of many philosophers and writers throughout history, but we have no evidence of anyone being capable of altering it at a macroscopic level. But what if it were possible? This question formed the basis of our research, and in this thesis we describe a series of experiments carried out to address this. In this thesis we report three main experiments. The first considered whether the perception of elapsed time can be influenced by the tempo of music. We placed participants in an immersive virtual reality environment where they heard in the background two versions of a musical piece, varying only in tempo, for 7.5 minutes in two separate sessions. Volunteers retrospectively estimated the length of each session. The results show that participants' estimates were not correlated with background music tempo. In the second experiment we considered whether previous findings that body size and age influence the perception of space might also influence the perception of time. In this experiment we immersed participants in a virtual reality scenario in which they performed a task for 200 seconds while embodied in one of three avatars that depicted three different age groups. Volunteers underwent two trials where the only change was the avatar they embodied, and compared the length of the sessions. The results suggested that time perception was not affected by body shape, but the task performance was. In the third experiment we addressed the notion of time travel itself, and considered whether virtual reality can be used to give people the illusion of having travelled back through time. We immersed participants in virtual reality where they experienced a series of events that unknowingly led to a violent incident. Immediately after they were either transported in time to the beginning of the developments or they simply restarted the session, depending on the condition. We found that participants felt as if they had travelled back in time whenever subjective levels of other three illusions were high. We also describe an application of the technology that was developed for the time travel to a psychological counselling situation, where people could maintain a conversation with an embodied version of themselves. We set the background of this thesis in reviewing the major themes of virtual reality research, including the concepts of presence and its constituent elements of ‘place illusion' and ‘plausibility' – the sense of being in the place depicted by the virtual environment, and the illusion that events are real. Of particular importance in our work is the concept of ‘body ownership' – the feeling that a co-located virtual body seen from first person perspective is the participant's real body, and we present a critical review of the relevant literature showing how this thesis relates to past work and is a further contribution. Finally, in order to carry out the scientific work reported in this thesis we have made technical advances in virtual reality, including the development of a software platform that integrates compatibility for several different devices. The conclusion of the thesis is that more research is necessary in the field of time perception and time travel in immersive virtual reality. We have seen that body shape can affect cognitive task performance, and further studies should expand the knowledge by analysing more variables. Additionally, a novel kind of illusion is presented in this thesis. Its potential and limits should be explored in future experiments, possibly with completely different applications. Indeed, the technology involved was applied in a study, reported in this thesis, concerned with personal counselling. Overall, this thesis contains several different angles on the illusions of time perception and time travel. We present a thorough review of the literature involving the perception of time and the illusions of presence, body ownership and agency, as well as the technical background. Furthermore, the description of three studies that take a novel approach to time perception and time travel is included. Finally, we discuss our results and outline a future work direction.
