What a shock it is to realize how much quicker our thoughts are compared to the plodding pace of life! This must be why Lucretius wrote:
“Nothing can be seen to match the rapidity of the thoughts which the mind produces and initiates. The mind is swifter than anything which the nature of our eyes allows them to see.”
On the Nature of Things, Book III.183
Here’s a testament to the flashing speed of thought: entire lives spun in the space between two smacks of the snooze button or two stops on the train, images that disappear as soon as my eyes open to take in where I actually am. I then dazedly pick up the slow, serial story that is my actual life, which adds itself daily (or when I can muster it) to the narrative traffic of everyone else’s.
When I return to myself I return with frustration. Every mark of stability in my life suddenly strikes me as too static, unchangeable, and constraining. Do I still work at the same job, commiserate with the same friends? Never do I feel the urge to radically change my life as in those moments when I feel the pull of my dreams most strongly. All the ways I could be happy, in their imagined multitudes, start to outnumber the ways I already am.
Why can’t our mental lives match the speed of external time? What if we had one imaginary life to match the pace of one real, if psychological time was fixed to its physical counterpart? Maybe then my dreams wouldn’t outrun my life, and I wouldn’t be burdened with the suspicion that every choice I make confines me to others I didn’t. Remaining in the present, I would travel nowhere except where my body goes, a faithful watcher of fleshy adventures, a Captain who never jumps ship to dive into unreality.
Or maybe I’m asking the wrong question. I don’t mean to exaggerate the overall length of life—it’s long compared to dreams but still certainly, assuredly finite. We might think our imagination adds extra resolution—although we may only get 80 years of a single life, we have license for a near-infinite number lived virtually. (It feels like a hack, if I’m honest, as if we’re getting more time than we’re allowed.) So what’s the best use of the time we have: to spend it in simulations, in which a real-time hour unspools, like a psychological Slinky, into a perceived day, or to live the day straight through?
Classic wisdom tends to lean toward the latter view. Seneca, a prominent Stoic, even gestures at a sort of ambitious mindfulness in On the Shortness of Life, where he suggests that we “must match time’s swiftness with our speed in using it”. It’s mindful because it encourages a sort of present-ism, and is ambitious with respect to what we do in the present, we can’t spend it idly—time must be used somehow. Life will run out eventually, and so we have to “drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.” Sage advice to be sure, but what does it mean to move as quickly as time does—and what does it mean to use time?
Seneca says elsewhere in the piece that the faster we move, the more active we are, then time will seem to move slower. And conversely, the slower we move, the more it will appear to us that time moves quickly. Seneca’s saying something radical but intuitive, that our very perception of time’s passing is intimately bound up with our use of it. But I’ll take this a step further in an effort to arrive at an answer to the question I had at the start of this piece, the question of how we can match psychological time to physical.
Doesn’t movement—literal movement—bring inner and outer time together? I think of instances when I first learned a skill, like returning a tennis serve. These events required that the inside of my mind be thoroughly occupied by events outside myself, and here I’d include even my muscles in the assessment of outside. As I try to return a serve, all my attention is devoted to two things: the stimulus, say, a ball, and my clumsy effectors. And for a successful tennis rally, my effectors—my hands, by extension, the racket—should meet the ball precisely as it passes close to me.1 This requires excellent tracking of the ball’s dynamics and that of my body. And the learning of new movements, or even the performance of familiar movements applied with care, both have the feature of our mental landscape fitting with the dynamics of the world.
But that some movement can be done without thinking presents a problem for this proposal. We perform so many actions simply out of habit, and it’s in the nature of habits that they’re performed with reduced responsiveness to the outside world. Sometimes I don’t track the outside world, and end up putting the milk in the cabinet and cereal in the fridge, dreaming in motion not unlike when I’m on the train, where I know to rise only when my station is called2. So we don't track the world all the time when we move.
Crucially, I think the proper use of time depends on whether we’re responsive to the world outside our heads. That’s the characteristic sign of not being in a sleep or dream state—being able to flexibly adapt our behavior to reflect changing circumstances. Simple movement doesn’t ensure we use time properly. What does is movement that is in response to, or about, the outside world. The way to make the most of experience is to frequently interact with it, to rely less on versions of life that I invent and more on life as it is.
All this seems to imply that we don’t use time when we live in simulations. Although real-time still passes, psychological time balloons to accommodate our illusory experiences. This dilation of experience is where so much of our lives disappear, and which we can never get back. And this appears to be, at least from the outside, extremely wasteful. Then why do we do it so often?
Stoics like Seneca thought that imagination is useful to the extent that we “meditate on the evil” and thus anticipate it, so that when we fall under bad circumstances we find ourselves to be more prepared. If we’re inevitably going to dream about unlikely events, why not the bad ones, so at least we can face them better? There’s a certain grain of truth to this.
I think it was Popper who had the notion that through our imagination we let our experiments die instead of ourselves. We mentally test explanations before we act them out, through more costly means, in reality. Sure, the cost could be measured in effort, but time is the far more valuable currency. And it’s not just humans who appear to do this.
When met with a fork in a maze, mice can often be seen to deliberate, first turning their heads in one direction and then another. This is called “vicarious trial and error” (VTE) and is often interpreted to mean that mice imagine themselves going down one path, visualizing the outcome of an event before it happens. Perhaps unsurprisingly, animals that exhibit VTE behaviors tend to be better learners (Tolman 1938). (I’d like to go more into detail on cognitive maps in future posts, but suffice it to say that imagination serves a valuable purpose.)
So it makes no sense to have a single psychological time fixed to physical time, since the very function of imagination is to branch, to show us possibility. Our imaginations wouldn’t be worth much if we only came up with one possible future, if we extrapolated from the course of our past and present with a single hanging line! No, we imagine our future course under different circumstances, some bad, some good, some middling.
Dreams are cheap rehearsals, made even cheaper for not taking the time that our slow muscles demand. And using time wisely first requires that we recognize its value. In this respect, dreams might have another use. If dreams flash and glitter, life shines stably in comparison. So perhaps we see time’s value best when we measure life’s heavy, slow weight against the lightness, and quickness, of dreams.
What about habits? Movements performed automatically are generally considered agnostic to outcomes—the habitual movement isn’t intended to achieve a goal, like when you learn it. A bird that’s used to pecking a dispenser for sugar-water pecks even if it’s empty. A basketball player rehearses her shots in her dreams, even when there’s no hoop. In these cases, there’s no correspondence whatsoever between mental and real life.
Similarly, I might watch the news, thinking to get a sense of the speed of life—wow a lot happened today—but it has all the features of a dream; there are few ways for me to meaningfully respond to world events. Watching the news only simulates the feeling of life passing, because it in no way involves the use of it.