Abstract
It has been an accepted scientific fact in physics for almost 100 years that time speeds up and slows down for an observer based on factors—such as motion and gravity—that affect space. Yet this fact, drawn from the theory of relativity, has not been widely integrated into the study of the psychology of time. The present article helps to fill in this gap between physics and psychology by reviewing evidence concerning what a psychological spacetime processor—one that accounted for the theory of relativity’s empirically validated predictions of the compensatory relationship between time and space—would look like. This model of the spacetime processor suggests that humans should have a psychological mechanism for slowing time down as motion speeds up, a prediction that already has widespread research support. We also discuss several novel hypotheses directly suggested by the spacetime model and a set of related speculations that emerge when considering spacetime (some of which have already received empirical support). Finally, we compare and contrast three very different potential reasons why we might have developed a spacetime processor in the first place. We conclude that the spacetime model shows promise for organizing existing data on time perception and generating novel hypotheses for researchers to pursue. Considering how humans might process spacetime helps reduce the existing gap between our understanding of physics and our understanding of human psychology.
Highlights
Everyday experience fails to reveal how the universe really works, and that’s why a hundred years after Einstein, almost no one, not even professional physicists, feels relativity in their bones
Available evidence suggests that the psychology of time and the psychology of space are in reality intimately bound up; and yet this fact is rarely tied to the physical relationship between time and space
Positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) studies suggest that time perception and motion perception systems have quite a bit of direct overlap in shared biological space in the brain (Coull, Frith, Buchel, & Nobre, 2000; Coull & Nobre, 1998; Doherty, Rao, Mesulam, & Nobre, 2005; Griffin & Nobre, 2005; Janssen & Shadlen, 2005; for a review, see Eagleman et al, 2005)
Summary
We generally perceive that time only moves in one direction (from the “past” to the “future”), classic relativity theory shows that there is no reason it cannot move both forward and backward. Similar studies, participants’ judgments were influenced by primes that occurred after their judgments were reported, and participants performed better on a recall test for words that were rehearsed after the recall test was completed These findings have been met with a fair amount of critical skepticism, in part because results have been inconsistently replicable (e.g., see Galak, LeBoeuf, Nelson, Leif, & Simmons, 2012), and more frequently due to both a lack of theoretical explanation and a limited understanding of the potential underlying mechanism(s) of precognitive effects (Bem, 2011). Neither relativity theory nor modern quantum physics directly predicts the specific mechanisms associated with existing precognition effects, classic spacetime theory at the very least offers a theoretical starting point whereby the future might psychologically affect the present. Precognition fits within the larger framework of relativity theory by suggesting that the direction of time is somewhat malleable at least some of the time
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