Erica Cherian

Cherian 1

Ms. Pratt
UWRT-1103
12 November 2014

Clockwork
The Long Now
A huge tower rises from the earth and vanishes away into the endless sky. It is topped by
an ornate black globe with silvery specks set in a golden ring, which is encompassed by silver
rings. Wrought silver unfurls in delicate tendrils around the globe, enveloping it in a tender
embrace. The image of a beautiful, mysterious planet immediately jumps to my mind, but in
reality this object is a clock, an enormous clock that is meant to stand for 10,000 years. This
marvel is the brain-child of a foundation called The Long Now. Their mission statement declares
that they intend to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of
the next 10, 000 years. They are trying to make the point that we need to be more conscious of
our time, a point that I fully concur with.
The song In the End, by Linkin Park asserts Time is a valuable thing/Watch it fly by
as the pendulum swings, demonstrating how thoroughly this idea of time and its passing
permeates even the most modern of pop culture. Shifting to a personal standpoint, I have noticed
that durations of time has a tendency to shift based on the activities that I am doing, the sleep that
I am getting, the level of involvement I have at each moment. The idea of time is so variable and
difficult to comprehend that we often simply avoid thinking about how it passes, and how this
changes depending on the situations that we put ourselves in.

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Time Flies When Youre Having Fun
We have all heard that phrase and indeed, I know I have lived this feeling. Time has a
tendency to speed up when we are enjoying ourselves. However, let me be more specific,
because it is not time that is actually speeding up and slowing down. In theory, time is fixed
quantity, however, our perception of time does shift. Actually, in my research I discovered a
study that investigated this very phenomena. Researchers Liu and Wang state that shortened
time perception and approach motivation are closely linked and bidirectional, such that approach
motivation shortens time perception and a perceived shortening of time causes stimuli to be
perceived as more appetitive. Im sure that all sounds like a bunch of nonsense, so let me
translate; theyre basically saying that when we enjoy things and are motivated to do them, our
perception of time speeds up, and the opposite is true for when we dread the tasks that we are
assigned. So it has been proven through experimentation, that the idiom time flies when youre
having fun is true! If youre ever wondering why those last fifteen minutes of class simply drag
out and feel like an hour, this is probably the reason behind that feeling.
But why is this important to me? Well, personally it is an amazing feeling to see that time
appears to be passing faster, because now it means at the most basic level, I am thoroughly
enjoying myself. A few weeks ago, we held our second annual Dance Marathon, which I have
been highly involved in since the beginning of the year. I had decided to be a morale leader,
meaning that for the whole night I had to keep spirts buoyant and I freely admit, I was not
supremely thrilled to have to dance all night, but for some reason on the day of the event, I had a
surge of excitement. Leading up to it, time moved in huge dollops and one moment I was
admiring the artwork at the Bechtler museum for a class, the next I was helping set up for the

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dance itself, and suddenly I found myself in the atmosphere of revelry, celebration, and dancing.
Again, time demonstrated its amazing ability to pass both quickly and slowly, and at about four
in the morning, the latter began to occur. My energy, and that of the crowd began to flag,
especially since the majority of us had literally been on our feet for ten hours continuously. Time
positively crawled, crept, inched by for about an hour. Now, Im going to let you in on my secret
to surviving 12 hour dance marathons. Just pretend that you have energy and somehow youll
find those reserve powers to keep moving. After deluding myself and everyone else into thinking
I still had energy, time, like a movie set in fast forward, began to speed up again. This is just one
of the myriad of examples of my own variation in perception of time.
Time to be Better than Adults
I have heard of the idea that adults are wiser and more knowledgeable than the youth, and
that in general they are mentally superior. However, in perception of time, adults lag behind
adolescents. A research study was done on the two groups, and discovered that adolescents have
a more realistic grasp of real-time, while adults tend to overestimate the duration of time that has
passed. The studies indicated that this is due to the fact that younger people just respond more
effectively to outside stimulus, and that their internal clocks are simply more accurate than that
of an adult(Siu, Lam, Le, and Przepiorka). So in this case, simply due to the fact that their bodies
and minds are less enfeebled, they have a more accurate perception of time.
Time to Survive
Im sure youve all heard of the idea that all living organisms are constantly struggling in
the fight to continue living and pass on their genetics; it goes by the name of evolution. (There

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are those of us who choose not to believe in it, but thats a tale for a different time. Regardless, it
is currently the prevailing scientific notion). Time has a lot to do with evolution, seeing as it is
the mechanism for change, but evolution has a lot to do with time as well, specifically in terms of
how we perceive time. One scientific study by Gil and Droit-Volet discovered that emotions
linked to survival can cause an increase of the length of time perceived. They call these emotions
high arousal, and list examples such as fear and disgust. When people are shown pictures that
make them want to retch, or scream and run away, they report that the picture was shown to them
for longer than it actually was.
Now why does that occur? Personally, I connected this idea to another that I had gained
from a different source. Dr. Eagleman, an American researcher, has a hypothesis as to why we
experience a variegated perception of time. In an interview, he discusses how in situations that
are pertinent to survival, we lay down denser, information-filled memories of these happenings
in order to better accommodate them the next time around. Therefore, when we relive these
adrenaline charged moments, we recall them as longer than they actually were. My mind then
turned to the mechanisms in the brain that cause all of this to happen, but unfortunately, there is
not a lot of information on the brain in general. Therefore, currently the mechanisms behind
these variations in time perception are unknown to researchers, and myself.
The Enigmatic Dr. Eagleman
The first that I heard of Dr. Eagleman was over a podcast that I underwent a lot of trouble
to download. Imagine my surprise, when it turned out to be a veritable treasure trove of
information, because through it, I found this particular researcher. He works at Baylor University
in Texas and from his writing you can tell that he is incredibly intelligent, but he makes his work

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completely understandable to those of us who are not on the same level as him in terms of mental
capacity.
During this podcast, the most interesting thing that he discussed for me was how time is
a story that the brain makes up. He then proceeded to explain it in possibly one of the best
metaphors that I have ever heard. Eagleman talked about how signals from the sensory organs hit
the brain at different times and compared it to how, during his reign, Kublai Khan received many
messages from all over his kingdom without any sense of timeline. He then had to reconstruct
the entire story. Similarly the brain has to incorporate all the signals into one cohesive story.
I decided that I would really love to talk to him, but unfortunately he did not reply to my
email. Undeterred, I forged ahead and found another great source for information. This was Vani
Pariyadath. She had done some research with Dr. Eagleman, and I decided to email her asking
for help. She was kind enough to grant me a Skype interview. The morning of the interview
dawned, and right after my 9:30 class, I ran back to my dorm to be able to talk to her. She
answered my Skype call, and I was surprised because honestly, she looked a little bit like my
mom. I ended up asking her about her origins and she told me that she was from the same state
as me in India, and that she even spoke the same language as me! Despite all this, the time when
I felt the most kinship to her was when I asked her why she went into time research. In her sweet
Indian accent, and with a small grin, she answered me I was just curious about all these things.

Me, Myself, and I

So what precisely is the significance of this topic to me? I discovered a poem on Tumblr,
written anonymously that sums it up perfectly:

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First I was dying to finish high school and start college.
And then I was dying to finish college and start working.
And then I was dying to marry and have children.
And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school so I could return to
work.
And then I was dying to retire.
And now, I am dying.and suddenly I realize I forgot to live.
-Anonymous
The poignant poem has a point. If time goes faster when we are scared then why should we live
our lives in fear? Were constantly worrying and stressing about the next project, the next paper,
the next step in our lives.
The writer, Eisenstein, in his book Ascent of Humanity brings up an interesting point
pertaining to the idea of living in the future. He discusses how while adults live their lives in a
routinized, regimented schedule, children completely resist the restraints of scheduling.
Additionally, the study that illustrated the differences between adolescents and adults discovered
that adults tend to be more future oriented while adolescents prefer the present (Siu et at., 2014).
In our most natural form we have a tendency to do what we want, on our own time, but as we get
older and are pressured by societal norms we begin to conform to the idea that time is money
and that we cannot waste a single second of it.
Personally, Im living for the here and now at college. I look forward to fun things that I
have planned, but I mostly take advantage of the fact that Im with people I enjoy talking to. I
love being around those of my own age. Having great discussions with intelligent people makes
an hour seem like ten minutes, and having hilarious, wonderful ones, makes an hour feel like five
minutes. I remember one time I sat up talking to a friend about our opinions and our thoughts on
the world, and when I looked at the clock, I realized that two hours had passed us by and we
hadnt even noticed. (There was a little regret over the lack of those two hours of sleep the next

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day). Regardless, my point is that I have wasted a lot of time worrying about what is to come,
when I could have been enjoying my present. I should take heed of the old idiom stop and smell
the roses but now I know that I should really lean in and get a huge whiff of that delicate, floral,
aroma, because there might not be time for that later.

What Goes Around

In and of itself, the clock created by the Long Now equally represents all aspects of timekeeping. The aforementioned Eisenstein does assert that time-keeping is indeed our downfall,
and yet it is also our saving grace. We are perpetually thinking about the future, and therefore
life itself seems shorter. However, if we did not consider the future we would not progress as a
society. This clock is a testament to the double edged sword that is our obsession with time and
its passing.
The Long Now plans to have its clock stand for 10,000 years. In comparison to the vast
nature of time, this is an insignificant speck in the river of eternity. However, in comparison to
our short lived life-spans, this seems to be an eternity. This clock will stand for the next 10,000
years, even after we are all long gone, and we cannot even truly appreciate the magnitude of this
amount of time because none of us will ever live that long. Its chimes will ring out from the
mountainside and keep time for all the generations to come, and it will tell the tale of what we
did with our time.

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Works Cited
Bennington, Chester, Bourden, Rob, Delson, Brad, Hahn, Joe, & Shinoda, Mike. Time is a
valuable thing/Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings. In the End. mp3. Warner Bros.
2001.
Bogeav, Barbara. "Escape From Time." Interview. Audio blog post.Soundprint. Barbara Bogaev,
4 Mar. 2011. Web. 27 Sept. 2014.
Eagleman, David. Brain Time. Edge. n.p. 23 June. 2009. Web. 7 Oct. 2014.
Eisenstein, Charles. "Keeping Time." The Ascent of Humanity. Harrisburg, Penn.: Panenthea,
2007. N. pag. The Ascent of Humanity. Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences.
Web. 22 Sept. 2014.
Gil, Sandrine, & Droit-Volet, Sylvie. "Emotional Time Distortions: The Fundamental Role of
Arousal." Psychology Press 26.5 (2012): 847-62. PsychINFO. Web. 13 Oct. 2014.
Liu, Ya, & Wang, Zhenhong. "Time Flies When You're Having Approach-Motivated Fun:
Effects of Motivational Intensity on Time Perception." Psychological Science 23.8
(2012): 879-86. JSTOR. Web. 13 Oct. 2014.
The Long Now Foundation. n.p. n.d. Web. 7 Oct. 2014.
Zablocki, Nicole. I was Dying Tumblr. 24 Oct. 2014. Web. 30 Oct. 2014.