If normal, as we age, compress the past, there are also neurological conditions that alter the relationship with clocks and calendars
A recent experiment has shown that the sense of time varies, contracting, if you live for a while in virtual reality and that this sensation of acceleration persists even when you return to real reality. But then che what is the sense of time? And how it alters in the presence of diseases such as Alzheimer’s or brain damage in general? Or more simply as the years go by? We asked Arnaldo Bernini, emeritus professor of neurosurgery and neurology at the University of Zurich, author, among other things, of Del temp neurobiologyor just re-edited by Raffaello Cortina. The sense of time is a mechanism of the nervous system of all living beings, even tiny ones like bees and ants. Only in man, for a few thousand years, has it a numerical value. The power of men on earth is partly due to the mind control of time. Without the temporal organization, society could not have arisen. He was the philosopher Immanuel Kant to understand, at the end of the eighteenth century, that the sense of time “a priori” with respect to thea
. We are born with a “nervous trellis” in which the experience of the world and of the interiority is inserted. Neurobiology of the last thirty years has carefully studied its mechanisms.
How do you perceive time? Does it happen in a specific nerve area?
It is not correct to speak of the perception of time: the world is perceived with the sense organs, time is felt, but it is neither seen nor touched. The sense of time, like language, involves the whole brain but also the cerebellum. The organs of the central nervous system that coordinate the areas of the sense of time, space, memory and affectivity are the two small hippocampi in the center of the hemispheres. He explains the influence of the state of mind on the sense of time.
We speak of subjective and personal time and of objective and absolute time. What role do emotions play in making the difference?
It is said that Einstein said that two hours next to a beautiful young lady seem like two minutes, those alone are an eternity. If we are stopped at a red light and we are anxious, it seems that time never passes. If we are not in a hurry, time does not feel. The time we define as “objective”, always the same, measured by the clock, a contraption with numbers that acquire meaning when the eyes, that is, the brain, look at them. Time is evaluated even without clocks thanks to the innate cerebral sense that creates it and transmits it to consciousness: if we have to turn left in the car and another car arrives in the opposite lane, we know how to evaluate, even if not numerically, if we have the time to turn or we have to wait for the other car to pass. This also implies the sense of space which in the brain has areas that are partly common to those of time.
Can brain injuries and the use of drugs cause alterations in the sense of time?
Certainly, even if for years little has been said about it. The first comprehensive essay on nerve disorders of the sense of time from 1969. Problems, even serious ones, appear mainly due to brain tumors, strokes or drug use. The difficulties are frequently related to the loss of the sense of duration, of orientation – for which it is not known, for example, whether it is morning or afternoon – and of punctuality, which is frequent in lesions of the cerebellum. Tumors of the frontal lobes can cause acceleration of the sense of time as an early symptom. Everything that is observed and done occurs at a rate that the patient sometimes describes as “horrible”. In the case of temporal lobe tumors, the same disorder may arise as an initial symptom, but also the opposite, with a slowdown in what is done and in the world. There is no constant relationship between the site and size of the lesion and alterations in the sense of time. The most serious, rare and terrible form is the total loss of this sense, an unimaginable condition that the affected person cannot describe, even once it has regressed (it rarely happens in vascular lesions).
How does the sense of time change with the typical pathologies of old age?
In people, usually elderly, in whom Alzheimer’s syndrome occurs, the disturbance of the sense of time is strongly influenced by the premature decrease in memory. In these patients, the sense of time can be enormously confused.
In old age, even if mind and memory are intact, does the sense of time change anyway?
If the days of the elderly, as unfortunately often happens, are full of nothing, time never passes. But in all people advanced in years, of any social and cultural level, and at any latitude, the past time is always strongly compressed. Petrarch, feeling close to the end, wrote wonderful verses about remembering his entire life which lasted only one day, “this morning I was a child and now I am old”. The compression of the universal past tense, independent of the mood and due to aging. A psychologist found that the felt duration of the elapsed time is inversely proportional to age: at ten years a past year felt as a tenth of life, at fifty as a fiftieth.
If you wake up at night, the time you hear corresponds, with small differences, to that of the clock. How can this be explained?
an event studied in depth. The mechanisms of the sense of time also work during the unconsciousness of sleep. People got up in the morning at the right time to go to work even when there were no alarms. The mechanisms of time, as an internal alarm, sense when to activate the mechanisms of consciousness. In brain injuries this mechanism can also be altered: we have heard from several patients (or their family members) who woke up in the morning convinced that it was afternoon or evening.
December 14, 2021 (change December 14, 2021 | 08:44)
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