vi: Past Papers
About time: the lost ingredient of healing Kyra Pollitt The third in our occasional series of excerpts from student papers, this shortened article is adapted from Kyra Pollitt’s dissertation, submitted for the Diploma in Herbology at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, class of 2020. The complete, fully referenced paper can be found on academia.com. If you have a past paper you would like to share, please contact us at herbologynews@gmail.com. Archaeological finds from twenty thousand years ago suggest European hunters carved lines and holes in sticks and bones to record lunar phases (Honoré, 2005; MacGregor, 2010). Similar activities were undertaken by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Mayans, and the Aztecs (ibid; Bronowski, 1973; Grun, 1982). Each of these ancient cultures sought to resolve the chaotic human experience of time through observation of external, often inanimate, distant, and regular phenomena— the sun, the moon, the stars, the tides. In Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, and Shinto traditions, this externalized time came to be perceived as cyclical; in the Western Christian tradition, as linear (Fisher & Luyster, 1990; Young, 2005; Gallois, 2007). Yet, despite what such efforts would have us believe, human time isn’t a single entity, and it isn’t straightforward either. Our sense of time is composed by ‘separate neural mechanisms that usually work together but can be teased apart in the laboratory’ (Eagleman, 2008). It’s the flexibility of these mechanisms that allow us to feel time passing quickly when we are busy or distracted, and more slowly when we are paying close attention to its flow (Glicksohn & Myslobodsky, 2006; Grondin, 2010). The contentions of this essay are threefold: that illness, dis-ease and injury are states that can distort our lived experience of time by altering the flow of attention; that contemporary digital lifestyles also cause disruptions in our experiences of time, which in turn invite dis-ease; and, finally, that these distortions fuel the modern preoccupation with fast-acting medicines, which themselves can disrupt the body’s ability to heal itself more deeply. The science bit: how we perceive time Our sense of time— our chronesthesia —is subjective. It is generated by the brain, using our awareness of the world, called noetic consciousness, and our awareness of ourselves in time, our autonoetic consciousness (Tulving, 2002; Brown, 2008). These temporal constructions are deeply malleable. Within the brain, smaller intervals are handled by the senses and some automatic processing. Incoming signals from each of the senses are processed at different speeds, with our neurocognitive machinery working to a default 3-second ‘temporal window’, so that the brain estimates time according to the number of ‘events’ that occur (Brown & Boltz, 2002; Eagleman 2008). Our feeling of duration mirrors the amount of neural energy used to encode each stimulus, each event (Eagleman, ibid). That’s why, in moments of crisis, the amygdala may form ‘denser-than-normal’ memories, recording more events than usual, and producing that sense of elongated time familiar to fans of The Matrix. Longer intervals of time are processed by deeper cognition, but there is still great malleability here. We are able to make future arrangements, and to remember and follow time-based plans, by using our ‘prospective memory’ (Glicksohn & Myslobodsky, 2006; Labelle et al, 2009), but ‘the timing expectations of motor acts and sensory consequences can shift in relation to one another, even to the extent that they can switch places’ (Eagleman, 2008). Our expectations of how long things will take and when they will happen, as well as our recall of when things happened and in what order, can easily become confused. The social bit: how we ‘do’ time That we presume time to be an objective, external commodity— a thing —is clear from the language we use to classify and describe it. We ‘measure’, ‘mark’, ‘take’, ‘use’, ‘pass’, ‘borrow’, ‘steal’, ‘waste’, ‘spend’ and ‘buy’ time. We equate time with money. We regard time as something ‘precious’ that can be ‘carved out’, ‘set aside’, ‘stored up’, ‘frittered away’, ‘lost’ or ‘killed’. Crucially, all these metaphors fail to recognize what Schutz (1974:48) calls ‘lifeworldly time’:
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