No two brains are exactly alike although created according to the same basic plan of beauty. and each one produced by encoded instructions in a “unique set of genes.” The genes are engaged in a complex group of interactions with my environment and your environment. We often think our individuality is expressed through our personality but studies show that personality is a mutable phenomenon. We all have subtly different brains, different personalities, in different situations. When I panic I freeze and go into a quiet, silent mode, where I see things going on around me, but I just sit and watch, and do not move. When I panic for others, I go into being very action oriented to help. If I see danger somewhere and people’s lives are in danger, my firings in my brain go into hyper mode and I am all into response. It is almost automatic responses or at least it feels that way, and time becomes irrelevant, so I feel.

Time is a constant in Reality and I know this realistically. However in the brain if you get into an accident time becomes slowed immediately. If you are in Love, time goes so slow at first, but then it speeds up so quickly that there is just not enough time. The brain has many different ways of measuring when time speeds up, slows down or seems to stop completely, or so it feels. The brain is a remarkable organ for survival.

Then Subjective time, my passage of time, is not the same time as Reality, as it slows, speeds, and can sometimes stop, or so it feels. The DIFFERENCE is it feels as though it slows down or speeds up in our mind. It is dependent on what we are experiencing, our brain’s encoded instructions from our Unique set of genes doing in feelings. Minute by minute the rate of time that passes is dictated by the rate of firings in the neurons, or oscillations of clusters of neurons. And the faster they fire the more events we register in any given second and this gives us perception of what happened in the event. Neuronal firings controlled by neurotransmitters , and excitatory firings, can speed up, or slow down, or even seem to come to a stop. The young bless their hide, have excitatory firings and can block or deal with more events.This is the  encoding that Christopher Hitchens referred to in his controversial Religious and Philosophical arguments.

The brain clock has different clocks for different times . One is a dopamine generated neuronal clock and this one runs between the “SUBSTANTIA NIGRA,  THE BASAL GANGLIA, AND THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX.” Each cycle creates a single packet of subjective time, dependent on your “Encoded Instructions, from your own Unique set of Genes.” This is true for every philosopher, for ever researchers, for every student who studies Time in Reality.

1 packet of subjective time generated by dopamine will be dependent on the size of your own packet of time, and on the size of the event. Now if 2 events happen you can miss part of one event, without even knowing it, unless hyper focused. If your inner clock’s neuronal firings register 1 event, then only 1 event is registered, but if it registers 2 events, then 2 events are registered and it doubles the time because your neuronal clock has produced two packets of subjective time.

Now in backdating, or looking back at something in hindsight it takes on 1/2 a second for the unconscious mind to process incoming sensory stimuli into conscious perception. We are not aware of this time lapse. If you know what you see in events and they move forward right away, the illusion of immediacy is created by a mechanism which backdates conscious perception , the time when the data happened, and when the data first entered the brain. In 1/2 a second we become aware of events happening around us, then 1/2 a second later, but  backdating events do not kick in with the brain if stimulated directly. If you stimulate the brain and hand simultaneously , the hand registers before the brain.

The Unique set of Genes that run our encoded instructions through the Substantia Nigra, the Basal Ganglia, and the Prefrontal Cortex, via dopamine neuronal firings and sets of packages of time, is so dependent on the event of whether time has stood still, has sped up, or has slowed down. But the inner clock is working on “Time” as relevant to your survival, whether conscious or unconscious, all the time, whether conscious of reality or not.

Carolyn d Hogarth this day of April 2023.