And it’s much easier than you might think to convince people that they have had experiences which never happened. Every time we recall a memory, we reconstruct the events in our mind and even change them to fit in with any new information that might have come to light. On occasion even the reminder does nothing to jog our memories.Īs we lay down memories, we alter them to make sense of what’s happened. Most of us forget far more than we remember, sometimes forgetting events happened at all, despite others’ insistence that we were there. One aspect of time perception many of us share is how we think of our own past: as a kind of giant video library, an archive we can dip into to retrieve records of events in our lives.īut psychologists have demonstrated that autobiographical memory is not like that at all. Like the Newtonian idea of absolute time, however, our belief in how time works for humans can also be misleading. Our shared idea of what the concept of “future” or “past” mean may not apply to everything everywhere in the Universe, but it does reflect the reality of our lives here on Earth. This is why the evidence from physics is at odds with how life feels. Of course, although some physicists propose that time does not exist, time perception – our sense of time – does. However much time feels like something that flows in one direction, some scientists beg to differ.Ī few theoretical physicists, such as the best-selling writer and physicist Carlo Rovelli take it even further, speculating that time neither flows, nor even exists. And in the West, at least, many would still identify with these ideas.īut physics tells a different story. What we do know is that Aristotle viewed the present as something continually changing and that by the year 160, the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius was describing time as a river of passing events.
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