12/31/2019 How Long Is Right Now?

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How Long Is Right Now?

As long as it took you to read that headline. Or shorter. Or it might
not exist at all.

By Shayla Love

Dec 30 2019, 10:00am

ILLUSTRATION BY HUNTER FRENCH

S omething remarkable will happen when the clock ticks from 11:59 to
12:00 AM. In an instant, 2019, once all-encompassing, will recede into
the past, and 2020, previously futuristic and far away, will step in to take its
place.

Take a moment to mull that over. How does now unstick itself and become
the past, and when does the future morph into the present? How do these
states transition, one into another, so seamlessly?

How long is right now?

On a holiday dedicated to celebrating the passage of time, as we enter a new

year and a new now, let's take this line of questioning seriously, and literally.
This year felt impossibly long, but science tells us that right now is actually
much, much shorter than it feels when we're trudging through it.
Neuroscientists' best estimate for "right now" is only about 2.5 to 3 seconds,
or less. According to physics, right now is an illusion altogether.

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This isn’t to say we should become chrono-nihilists who throw up our hands
over time being a construct. There's another way to use these facts to
recalibrate our understanding of right now to provide a fresh perspective.
The way we think about the present, and how long we think it is, can
in uence our outlook on life, as well as our behavior. Thinking of ourselves
in suspended animation, in a present that’s never ending, is not only wrong
according to research on the matter, but also isn't helping us make the best
decisions for ourselves or each other.

By using science to realize that, technically speaking, right now is miniscule,

we might be able to stop getting lost in the despair of the present.

A t any given moment, it feels like we're in the midst of right now. For
centuries, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and
physicists have been dwelling on this problem, because of how powerful the
experience is; right now is tightly intertwined with the experience of
consciousness. Take a moment to just sit and be. There you are. Where?
Right now.

Saint Augustine knew this was a dif cult concept to grapple with back
around 400 AD when he wrote his autobiographical book, Confessions.
"What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain
it to him who asks me, I do not know."

After some anguish, Augustine concluded that only the present is real, and
that the past and future simply exist in our minds. (This is a philosophy now
called presentism.) The past is just a memory, the present is direct
experience, and the future is expectation.

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LSD Changes Something About The Way You Perceive Time

SHAYLA LOVE

Psychologist William James also grappled with the nature of right now,
calling it one of mankind's most baf ing experiences. “Where is it, this
present? It has melted in our grasp, ed there we could touch it, gone in the
instant of becoming.”

Unlike Augustine, James arrived at the notion that all experience of time is a
perception, including the present. Any sense of time that we have, including
right now is a subjective, psychological time—what he called the "specious
present."

"The present isn’t something we stumble into and through," science writer
Alan Burdick wrote in his book, Why Time Flies, of James' specious present.
“It’s something we create for ourselves over and over again, moment by
moment."

L uckily, since James and Augustine, science has come up with different
methods of investigating "now."

Even without doing any complicated research, we can intuitively get close
to the answer, said Marc Wittmann, a time researcher at the Institute for
Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany.

Right now is de nitely not a whole year, it's not a day, and not an hour—
these timescales are too long. Even one minute, if you really think about it,

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is too much. “We come closer and closer, and we end up in the few-seconds
range,” he said. “Close to how long it would take if I say, ‘Now.’”

And he's right: According to a wide variety of studies, right now only lasts a
few seconds or less. More intriguingly, it might not be right now at all, but
right a-few-seconds-ago.

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David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, said that we don't

experience the world in real time, we're always living a little bit in the past.
That's because when we perceive anything, we collect sensory inputs from
all over our bodies and the world, and not all of these inputs are processed
at the same speed. Sound is processed faster than light. An input from your
toes has to travel all the way up your spinal cord, while a signal from your
nose doesn't have as far to go.

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The brain has to wait for all these inputs to arrive so you can experience
them together. Otherwise, our daily experience would be a confusing
hodgepodge of inputs in the wrong order—if you clapped your hands, you
wouldn't see the clap, hear the noise, and feel your hands hitting each other
at the same time.

It's an issue referred to as "temporal binding," and it's an elegant proposition

for a de nition of right now: Right now is the window of time when your
brain will experience inputs from the world as simultaneous.

It can also create some variety in right nows. If two people touch their nose
and their toe at the same time, both will feel the touch simultaneously,
Eagleman said. But for a taller person, the signal has further to travel than a
short one, leading to the remarkable conclusion that “tall people may live
further in the past than short people.”

(Eagleman said in a lecture that it also means if something killed you very
quickly, you would be dead before you even knew it. This could explain the
mysterious last scene of [spoiler, if you still haven’t seen it] The Sopranos, in
which the screen goes black while Tony eats with his family at a restaurant:
A surprise, well-aimed bullet to the head would kill before now had a chance
to catch up.)

But if our right now is so short, how can we be aware of things that last
longer than that? We’re able to enjoy things that last longer than a few
hundred milliseconds, like music, books, conversation, movies.

Wittman explained that there are multiple "nows," comprising different

layers of our experience. He outlined three: the functional now, the
experienced moment, and mental presence.

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The functional now we've touched on already. This is the very small time
period in which your brain experiences sensory inputs at the same time.
This is mostly unconscious—your brain waiting for the signal from your toe
—and takes place in the milliseconds range.

The experienced moment is a more conscious, psychological sense of now,

"a slightly longer period in which a single event seems to unfold," as Burdick
wrote. This experienced moment has been found repeatedly to be around 2
to 3 seconds. In a paper in PLOS One, researchers looked into this by
showing people movie clips—a representation of the kinds of multi-sensory
experiences we have in the real world. They scrambled the sequence of
events within and beyond intervals of 2 to 3 seconds. They found that within
2 to 3 seconds, the brain was able to x the order. But above that timescale,
there was a dramatic increase in an inability to understand the clips.

Two to 3 seconds for integration might be a “fundamental component of

human cognition," the authors wrote, given that similar results have been
seen across different tasks. It may "re ect a general organizing principle of
human cognition—better de ned as the ‘subjective present." Or in other
words, “the phenomenal impression of ‘nowness.’”

Wittman said we can also see evidence of this in other places—like a

metronome. If you listen to a metronome tick, the ticks are all the same and
not being grouped in any particular way. But we do hear a grouping: either
one-two, one-two, or if it’s faster, one-two-three, one-two-three. “Although
these chunks are not in the metronome,” Wittman said, “our brain creates
these units of perception.” For images that can be visually interpreted in
different ways, like the duck-rabbit or vase/faces "such changes in
perceptual content occur spontaneously, at roughly 3-second intervals,"
observed one study on the present.

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But Wittman said that right now has to be able to do more, so that we can
have an integrated whole experience. That's what he calls the third tier:
mental presence. It's the right now rooted in the larger, narrative self, and
it's built from the other, smaller nows. It's the functional nows and
experienced nows linked together, with the help of our memories. This is
how everything we see, hear, and feel seems to take place now and yet we
also experience the uid passage of time—our perception is, thankfully, not
in static chunks of minute nowness, even as those blocks of right now lie at
its core.

I n one of Eagleman's experiments, he told participants to push a button

that caused a light to ash at the same time. Then, Eagleman inserted a
small delay between the button and the light. Soon, people’s brains altered
perception so that the light and button were simultaneous again. When
Eagleman removed the delay, people’s brains still accounted for it: The next
time a person pushed the button, they perceived the light as ashing before
they pushed the button.

Our sense of right now—whichever one you mean—isn't passively measured

and tracked and the brain, but constructed by it, Eagleman said. We can see
that in his light experiment, or in other examples where this construction
breaks down.

In
a
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case study that Douglas Fox wrote about in the New Scientist, a man
referred to as “BW” was driving when suddenly it was if he was speeding at
an incredible pace. He tried to slow down, but the outside world continued
to zip past him. BW felt like the outside world was going faster and faster,
but actually he had slowed down. “He walked and talked in slow motion:
when his doctor asked him to count 60 seconds in his head, he took 280
seconds to do it," Fox wrote. "It turned out that he had a tumor in his brain’s
frontal cortex.”

In 2007, neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about a man named Clive Wearing,
whose hippocampus, a region of the brain critical for forming new
memories, was damaged after he contracted viral encephalitis. Wearing
existed only in the “now." If he was holding something in his hand, a
chocolate for example—it would constantly present itself as brand new. As
his wife described in her memoir, Forever Today:

“Look!” he said. “It’s new!” He couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“It’s the same chocolate,” I said gently.

“No . . . look! It’s changed. It wasn’t like that before . . .” He covered and
uncovered the chocolate every couple of seconds, lifting and looking.

“Look! It’s different again! How do they do it?”

The way we experience now is for our survival. We need to understand

when things in the outside world happen at the same time, in what order
they happened, and be able to use our memories to create a narrative
through time. “It was as if every waking moment was the rst waking
moment," she wrote. "Clive was under the constant impression that he had

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just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own

mind of ever being awake before. . . . “I haven’t heard anything, seen
anything, touched anything, smelled anything,” he would say. “It’s like being
dead.”

E ach theory of right now has one thing in common: It challenges the
notion that the present is reliable and objective, or that it stretches
out in nitely in front of us, even if we sometimes perceive it that way. This
is an important reminder because the way we think about time affects the
kinds of decisions we make.

We don't just think about the past, present, or future, we think about
ourselves in those places. (That's the impetus behind something called Time
Perspective Theory, which argues that there are six different ways people
regard time, and it greatly in uences your perspective on life.)

Studies have found that many people think about themselves in the future
not as themselves, but as other people. When asked to imagine a birthday in
the far off future, people are more likely to envision it from a third-person
viewpoint. When we think about ourselves in 10 years, compared to right
now, it activates similar parts of our brain that think about others, not
ourselves.

Our instinct to place a lot of emphasis on the present, said Hal Hersh eld, a
psychologist at UCLA who has studied how perceptions of time relate to the
choices people make. But if we could better relate to our future selves, we
could be better off later on. Hersh eld and his collaborators did a study that
found that those who felt more similar to their future selves made more
future-oriented decisions and had higher levels of well-being across a
decade.

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Recently, Hersh eld and his colleague Sam J. Maglio asked people about
their conception of right now. “Without giving it too much thought, off the
top of your head, indicate when you think the present ends. You could
obviously answer this question in objective terms, but we are more
interested in what you feel. In other words, please answer the question:
when do you feel like the present ends?”

Your Brain Might Be Distorting Reality

SHAYLA LOVE

They found that the longer people thought the present lasted, the fewer
emotions they felt about the future. In contrast, people who believed that
the present ended sooner were more likely to make those kind of future-
oriented decisions that led to well-being. If given the choice between
spending now and saving for later, for example, they would save. “If I think
that the present's going to give way to the future very soon, then I'm more
likely to take some action to help that future along,” Hersh eld said.

Figuring out how we’re going to feel in the future, and what we’ll need, how
what we do today will affect tomorrow, are crucial tenets of personal and
social survival. One could argue we’re not doing a great job at this. We’re not
taking radical and immediate action on climate change. We’re electing
leaders that are against social programs or immigration.

If people could be swayed into thinking that now is shorter, could they also
be more invested in making bigger, societal, choices that are future
oriented? Hersh eld said it would have to be studied more formally, but it

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could make a difference. “Especially when you think about these sorts of
things like climate change where it has often been talked about in terms of
things that were going to happen in the distant future," he said. "Eventually,
Miami will be underwater, you know? But that's not now. That's eventually.
So how motivating is that to me? And so to instead say, 'The present is
ending. The future is starting now.' It could have an impact."

A s a nal blow to the notion of the present, a short detour into physics:
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, even people moving at
different speeds experience time in different ways.

In his book, The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli reinforced the idea
that any information about now requires that sensory information to travel
to you. This hurdle becomes insurmountable at larger distances: If someone
is in the same room as you, the light only takes a few nanoseconds to reach
you and let you know what they’re doing. But if they were farther away, say
on a different planet, then light could take years to arrive.

This means that we share right now with those who are physically close to
us. “Our ‘present’ does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a
bubble around us," Rovelli wrote.

What's striking about this is that it means that any notion of right now we
might be tempted to hold onto—despite the fact that it is eeting, and a
construction of the mind—only exists for the others living on our planet. We
are tied together not only by our physical location, but by our now. So
whatever right now is, 1/10 of a second, or 3 seconds, or nothing at all—
we're all in now together.

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