Time Perception

Why do we experience the perception of time the way we do? In the future, will it be possible to alter our perception of time for a beneficial effect? These are a few questions that I have been thinking about recently. The neurotransmitter dopamine is involved in the perception of time. Parkinson's disease patient's have a deficiency of this specific neurotransmitter in a brain area called the basal ganglia. These people often experience problems with time perception. As a person, gets older, dopamine levels tend to decrease in the brain. As this decrease occurs, time seems to speed up and everything subjectively appears to happen faster. For example, an older person might have difficulty watching a television program and they may claim things are happening too fast to keep up. Because their brain is not functioning as well, they percieve time as going much faster than when they were younger. Drugs that increase dopamine (like cocaine) can make time seem to slow down. Under times of high stress, neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine increase causing time to come to a stand still. So drug therapy is certainly a way to alter a person's subjective experience of time.

There is interesting blog post at memebox (futureblogger) about replacing our biological neurons with artifical ones in the future. There are obvious implications for altering our perception of time.

"Nano-engineer John Burch, co-designer of the nanofactory video, “Productive Nanosystems: from Molecules to Superproducts,” believes that by as early as the 2030s, we could be replacing our brain cells with non-biological nanotech materials that process thoughts faster, and is nearly indestructible."

Replacing our biological neurons could be done gradually so we wouldn't lose our subjective sense of conciousness and the self. Doing this could potentially drastically increase the speed of the brain's thought processes.

"In addition, this futuristic brain will allow us to control the speed of our thoughts; we could jump from 100 milliseconds, the response time for biological cells, to 50 nanoseconds – 20 million times faster”. Creating thoughts at this speed would, in our mind at least, slow the world down by a factor of 20 million."

If the brain was replaced with non-biological computer chips, humans could potentially significantly slow down the perception of time. Assume the the universe may (or may not) have a finite amount time left before it ceases to exist. In the future, a human civilization might want to stretch that time out to make subjective experience seem much longer in order to make the most out of the time that's left. This stretching of time by speeding up the brain could make an hour feel like a day or possibly even longer. We could potentially get a lot more thinking accomplished with this new type of computer brain as our processes would be speeded up to a considerable degree. The main problem with slowing down subjective time would obviously be boredom. However this could be remedied by coupling slowing down subjective time with a utopian neuroscience type program to make sure that people were extraordinarly happy in addition to having altered time perception. The universe may have at least 30 Billion years left. There is no reason that a future civilization couldn't increase our subjective time and make that time left seem even longer.