time perception

Memory, consciousness and time. These three fundamental concepts are interrelated in a fascinating way... Here are three different extracts containing the same exact observation.

We begin with a couple of simple queries about familiar phenomena: “Why do babies not remember events that happen to them?” and “Why does each new year seem to pass faster than the one before?”

I wouldn’t swear that I have the final answer to either one of these queries, but I do have a hunch, and I will here speculate on the basis of that hunch. And thus: the answer to both is basically the same, I would argue, and it has to do with the relentless, lifelong process of chunking — taking “small” concepts and putting them together into bigger and bigger ones, thus recursively building up a giant repertoire of concepts in the mind.

How, then, might chunking provide the clue to these riddles? Well, babies’ concepts are simply too small. They have no way of framing entire events whatsoever in terms of their novice concepts. It is as if babies were looking at life through a randomly drifting keyhole, and at each moment could make out only the most local aspects of scenes before them. It would be hopeless to try to figure out how a whole room is organized, for instance, given just a keyhole view, even a randomly drifting keyhole view.

Or, to trot out another analogy, life is like a chess game, and babies are like beginners looking at a complex scene on a board, not having the faintest idea how to organize it into higher-level structures. As has been well known for decades, experienced chess players chunk the setup of pieces on the board nearly instantaneously into small dynamic groupings defined by their strategic meanings, and thanks to this automatic, intuitive chunking, they can make good moves nearly instantaneously and also can remember complex chess situations for very long times.

Hofstadter - Analogy as the Core of Cognition

But why do people often remember more from their youth than from their more recent past? Shouldn't our oldest memories be the most faded, and our newer ones be fresher and more numerous? The well-documented reminiscence effect mentioned earlier explains why it is just the other way around: In our younger years, the brain commits more impressions to memory, and these earliest memories are less likely to be forgotten in later years. If the memory survives the test of time for the first few years, it is usually indelible, which is why even eighty-year-olds can talk about their youth as though it were yesterday.

We have every reason to recall the experiences of our younger years, when the world was an open book. Never again would we experience so much change. But the first kiss happens only once in a lifetime. The more knowledge of the world we acquires, the fewer new memories are retained in our memory - it would be a waste of brain capacity to remember slight variations on a familiar theme. But the fewer memories we have retained from a period, the shorter that period seems in retrospect. The ongoing acceleration of years as we grow older is a price we pay for learning.

Klein - Time: A User's Guide (Pages 142-143)

Almost all of the 100 billion neurons in a human being’s nervous system are in place at birth, and in early childhood the synapses—the points of contact between neurons that fire memory and sensation—are vastly overproduced. To a large extent, maturity is a neural pruning process, an uncluttering of consciousness so that what is most useful for getting through a day—driving to work, for instance, or negotiating the supermarket—is readily, and unconsciously, available. Our lives are far more organized around repetition than novelty. Less useful neurons weaken and die, a form of forgetting.

Gopnik reminds us that, to accommodate their rapidly shifting attention, babies’ brains generate enormous amounts of cholinergic neurotransmitters, which are released to different parts of the brain as they process specific information. For anesthetics to be effective they must act on these transmitters, which may explain the relatively high concentration of anesthesia babies require to be knocked out before surgery. Gopnik offers the captivating idea that children are more conscious than adults but also less unconscious, because they have fewer automatic behaviors.

Greenberg - What Babies Know and We Don’t