LET'S PLAY - A MENTAL GAME OF TIME PERCEPTION

Our view of the world depends on our sense of time.

In the following text you are being presented with numbers, for example, that man can consciously perceive 18 sensory impressions per second, which I could not find anywhere confirmed, therefore it remains for me a personal open question and allows, for example, also conclusions on what has happened since and apart from the here mentioned persons like Karl Ernst von Baer, Aloys Christof Wilsmann and last Vera F Birkenbihl in the meantime in the field of perception research.

Nevertheless, the game remains absolutely exciting, precisely because it is a mental experiment that is not often heard of.

The source I can only refer to is Vera Birkenbihl, who writes:

Through a quote in a book by an author who (cleanly!) stated his sources, I came across a title by Aloys Christof WILSMANN: "Wunderwelt unter der Tarnkappe" (Wonder world under the magic cap). Unfortunately, his work has been out of print for many years, so I could only get one copy - but it was worth it. This WILSMANN knew how to present the scientific "newest" results from the thirties (of the last century) in a brain-friendly way. In this book I found an example, which impressed me very much, which I quote since then in lectures or seminars, if it concerns to show that we do not live in an "objectively existing" world, but in a completely specifically human world! In the meantime we know a lot about the organs of perception of animals, e.g. that the frog primarily sees what is moving - be it a predator (e.g. stork) or a food victim (e.g. mosquito), so that a still standing tree for the frog de facto does not exist. But the author quoted by WILSMANN - Karl Ernst von BAER - goes on the time axis and offers us the fascinating fact that our view of the world depends not least on our sense of time. Excuse me? ... Well, read on

Birkenbihl refers to Karl Ernst von Baer, German-Estonian natural philosopher and biologist, born in 1792, died in 1876, who gives us a task to still think about today:

How would we see the world if we had another measure of time in us than our innate one?

[Lets assume] On average, a person can record about 18 impressions per second. This means that a sensory stimulus must last at least one eighteenth of a second so that we can consciously absorb it with all our sensory organs.

Processes that last less than these eighteen seconds, for example the flap of a hummingbird's wing or a shot arrow or bullet, a rotating propeller, we cannot consciously perceive, but experience only as an abstract understanding of the process. However, this process is not directly observable for the human eye.

Addition: Everything we perceive through the eye remains on the retina for 1/10th of a second longer than it actually "existed". [again, nothing I have checked, but be with it]

^{https://pixabay.com/vectors/moon-crescent-lunar-42529/}

If we were equipped with a different temporal rate and perceptive faculty, about a 1000-fold time pace,

then we would not live about 80 years on average, but much shorter, about one month. Given, the amount of sensory impressions would not decrease, but the quality of these impressions would.

For example, we could literally see the wing beat of the hummingbird and even the bullet fly by "leisurely". To follow this with our eyes.

On the other hand, the movements of the celestial bodies (moon, sun, stars) would not be visible to us, since we would only be alive for one month and the duration of one moon orbit would already cover our entire existence.

And also the change of seasons we would never get to see.

What about passing knowledge?

But the previous knowledge of the men of the month would have already provided us with hypotheses which would say, for example, that through innumerable data collections a theory would say that the earth would be periodically covered by a white substance, or that periodically the leaves would fall from the trees, etc.

Wouldn't this be the same as what to us is known as myths and fairy tales?

We would read that, but we could not really imagine it.

What if there were a minute human creature?

If our life clock would be 1000x1000 times faster, i.e. if a human life took about 41 minutes? Then how would our reality present itself to us?

Von Baer says: "Concerning the day/night change such a person could not possibly develop an idea of it during his life, rather a philosopher among these minute people, if he had been born around 6 o'clock in the evening on a summer day, would perhaps speak to his minute grandchildren like this towards the end of his life":

^{By Ryanicus Girraficus - Own work, CC0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65858333}

When I was born, the shining star, from which all the warmth seems to come to us, stood higher in the sky than now. Since then it has moved much further west, but sunk ever deeper. At the same time, the air has become colder. It can be foreseen that ... after one or two generations ... it will have disappeared completely, and that then the freezing cold will have to spread. That will probably be the end of the world, or at least of the human race.

As far as the perception of such minute people is concerned, it would be so incredibly fast that the world would almost seem to stand still, the minute people could not see the growing process and changes of any plants growing, every leaf and every flower would appear to them imperishable, permanent. As if always there and never to disappear.

Sound waves, which we perceive as tones and sounds, would be inaudible to the minute people. The minute people, on the other hand, could perceive those inaudible vibrations which we call "ultrasound".

If we were to take another factor of 1000, an age would expire in about 21/2 seconds.

This second person could not hear ultrasound either, but those waves which we perceive as light and colour, but which he would HEAR.

What would happen in the opposite direction?

If we went in the opposite (time)direction, if we did not accelerate the tempo, but slow it down?

If a human age did not last 80, but 80,000 years

always assuming that the sensory impressions always remain the same, because we are playing through a mental experiment - In which world then did we live?
Even the eternally resting forests got into ghostly motion. In just a few hours, the seasons would take over.

image pixabay

Hardly after the winter melt flowers, bushes and grasses would shoot out, trees would get leaves, fruits would sprout, leaves would lose again immediately. Some plants - such as mushrooms - would appear and disappear so quickly that you would hardly ever see them. Some things would fizz and explode like fireworks, and shortly afterwards everything would be over again. Other plants would look as if they were crawling around on the ground, looking for some prey.

In other words, the plants would stop showing the contemplative slowness we are used to today.

The sun, which would have a tail due to the rapid change, would rather resemble a comet.

And the 800,000 year old man?

Day and night would be perceived as flickering northern lights all the time. Seasons would run every second.

Wilsmann:

As soon as we had risen from the chair to look through the window into the spring-like garden, the rushes through the tops of the bare trees and a few seconds later the whirling dances of the white flakes chased over the empty beds.

^imagepixabay

What about the mountains? Wouldn't we also see whole mountain ranges wandering, experience the melting of an ice age?

Do you now have a different view?

So what Birkenbihl said is what we so naturally call "our world" would change in the world view if we had a different temporal rate than the one we were born with.

It is also not the world of sub-atomic particles (whose world is many times faster than that of the 80,000-year-old human) and it is not the world of bacteria, plants or insects, but a special human world, our world.

Time is just sometimes a strange thing. Same with space. Space-time is all the more.

A few weeks ago, I had once racked my brains over calendars in order to devise a calendar that was as accurate as possible, that did not have these unspeakable leap years and that also finally fitted in with the actual names of the months, which - I believe some pope Gregory - changed and, if I remember correctly, plunged people into deep confusion and excitement, because suddenly ten days had disappeared somewhere.

Then I thought about synchronicity, the simultaneous movement of particles that are in completely different places and why this is possible.

Since I don't believe that we will ever be able to bend space with warp-bubble formation, I'd rather stick to the more esoteric version, and think it would be easier to cultivate and train long-distance perception, since we can practice our resonance abilities much more easily than producing anti-matter.

;-)

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source I let myself be inspired and translated also from:
Vera Birkenbihl

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