Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Psychology of Time" with Prof. Joel Pearson on The Buzz
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome to the Buzz, where we dissect some big scientific issue, especially if it relates
- 0:08to your brain.
- 0:09We try to blow our minds about the nature of our minds with the one and only professor,
- 0:14Joel Pearson, neuroscientist, extraordinaire who runs the Future Minds Lab at the University
- 0:18of New South Wales.
- 0:19Joel, welcome back to the show.
- 0:20Thank you, Josh.
- 0:21Good to see you again.
- 0:22Time.
- 0:23We're talking about today, not the actual ticking of the clock, but the way that it might
- 0:28be.
- 0:29Yeah.
- 0:30Okay.
- 0:31All right.
- 0:32Let's start with the big stuff, then.
- 0:33What is time?
- 0:34So, yeah.
- 0:35So, it's about time perception.
- 0:37So, chronos, chrono perception, right.
- 0:41And so, we have to start with this.
- 0:43One of the, so when we think about the senses, the five senses, we have ears and eyes and
- 0:47things, and we perceive time, but we don't have a sense organs for time.
- 0:52So it seems to be something that the whole brain does.
- 0:55There's no dedicated sense organ, no dedicated brain area.
- 0:59There's not a tiny bit of my brain that's sort of ticking away in the background.
- 1:03Yeah.
- 1:04There's no, there's no, like, these neurons do time perception.
- 1:06It seems to be nature of the whole brain, and it's also, as we'll get to, affected by
- 1:11what your brain, what else your brain is processing.
- 1:14So if you're highly stimulated, if you're highly emotionally aroused or scared, all these
- 1:19things will affect time perception.
- 1:20So it seems to be sort of intimately into woven into what else the brain is doing.
- 1:26Right.
- 1:27It's a double-tasking, if you like, meaning that my, and so presumably when I'm highly
- 1:31aroused or when my brain is doing a lot of work and I'm thinking very quickly, time seems
- 1:35to take longer, normally people report the opposite that time goes by very quickly, but what
- 1:43about the effect of, I'm in a car accident and everything slows down, playing a game
- 1:48of tennis and the ball is coming at me slowly.
- 1:50This controversy around this, so because there was some, some research and people
- 1:54have suggested that it was that time perception as you perceive it is changing in these things.
- 2:02Right.
- 2:03And then there was this, this experiment by David Egelman, where he is a cool experiment.
- 2:08He had people come, first come to lab and then he took them all out to an amusement park
- 2:12in the US, and it's one of these rides where they, they're sort of hanging in a harness
- 2:17and they free fall like 30 meters, they get caught in a net.
- 2:21And they built this little, this rich, wrist watch thing where those, these sort of flickering
- 2:25lights.
- 2:26And the idea was that it was just flickering so fast that you couldn't read the numbers.
- 2:31So if your brain speeds up with all the adrenaline while you're falling, all of a sudden you should
- 2:35be able to read the numbers.
- 2:36That little bit of change in, in brain speed, if you like, should make the numbers readable,
- 2:41you read the numbers while you're falling, bang, good evidence that things change.
- 2:45They did experiment, no one can read the numbers.
- 2:49Just as if they were on the ground.
- 2:50Yeah, it didn't seem to, it was just flickering the numbers, the lights were there, they couldn't
- 2:54read the numbers.
- 2:55Then they did something where they had people estimate how long they're afterwards, how
- 2:58long they're falling for, and then they had the, all of a sudden, stand there and watch
- 3:02other people falling and estimate how long they were falling for.
- 3:06And the estimate, the two estimates were different.
- 3:09Right.
- 3:10So the, the, the subjective estimate was longer, but the, when they estimated their own
- 3:16time that we're falling through the air, it was that 30 something, 36% longer.
- 3:22Right.
- 3:23So they concluded that it's not due to perception changing in real time as the things
- 3:27happening, but it's due to the richness of the memory and the memories laid out differently.
- 3:31And so when we go back and think about things, it's different, right?
- 3:35So if I witness someone else fall, there's no adrenaline, so my memory is just as normal.
- 3:39When I'm in there, my memories laid out differently.
- 3:42So when we think back to the car accident, the thing, or the hitting the tennis ball,
- 3:47we remember it differently.
- 3:48I think it was definitely like slow motion, everything slowed down because my brain was
- 3:51speeding up.
- 3:52But it's inclusion is that, yeah, it's not, it's just a trick of memory.
- 3:55That isn't the, isn't my ability to hit the tennis ball evidence of the fact that something
- 4:01is operating faster in my brain than it would be if I was just looking at the window day
- 4:05dreaming, not necessarily faster.
- 4:07And this is where it's evidence that things are happening that we're living in the
- 4:11past.
- 4:12So we're going to get into this in a second.
- 4:15So your brain's making predictions and it sees the tennis ball or the cricket ball coming,
- 4:21let's say, and it's making a prediction.
- 4:22It doesn't have to wait for it to be here.
- 4:24And then so you already start moving the racket and it's making that prediction before
- 4:28it happens.
- 4:30So that ties into research where you can manipulate something in the lab and you can have an event
- 4:36that happens sort of first and then an event that happens after it in time.
- 4:42And this event that happens after can change your perception of the event that happened
- 4:46before it.
- 4:47Do you mean that in the act of hitting the tennis ball, I'm changing my memory of where
- 4:52the ball was a millisecond ago, or that after the tennis ball, oh, I imagine.
- 4:56Yeah.
- 4:57So the example I was just talking about was more like a specific set up in the lab where
- 5:01you can have things that happen after an event affect the event, which seems to break
- 5:05physics.
- 5:06Such as what?
- 5:07So you can have like a flash and a thing moving on the screen and a flash and another
- 5:10flash.
- 5:12And the second thing, we're talking like 100 milliseconds, we'll affect the first thing,
- 5:17right?
- 5:18In one way.
- 5:19It will change where you saw it or when you saw it or change, you can it'll merge with
- 5:22it.
- 5:23You can do different thing.
- 5:24Can you describe a specific example of an experiment?
- 5:26There's something called a flash lag illusion where you can have like a rotating thing and
- 5:29a thing will flash and you're alive or get messed up.
- 5:36What's another?
- 5:37There's some other.
- 5:38I can't think the name of them, but there are visual illusions like that where you can
- 5:41have things later in time.
- 5:43Another example would be if I do this, he's tapping for people listening to the podcast
- 5:49and watching on YouTube.
- 5:50I'm tapping my foot and my foot at the same time.
- 5:52And we know that the signal from my toe to my brain takes longer than for my nose to
- 5:58my brain.
- 5:59I perceive them perfectly in sync.
- 6:01Right.
- 6:02But that's because your brain adjusts for the fact that it knows that it takes time for
- 6:07it.
- 6:08But that means there's a buffer in the system.
- 6:09That's what I'm getting towards.
- 6:10So we're living in the past.
- 6:12And so if things happen either they should be happening, I should, you know, I should
- 6:19feel the nose tap before, actionally before the foot tap.
- 6:25And there's other.
- 6:26Is it, isn't it because you know that you're tapping your foot and you can see the
- 6:29other people for you?
- 6:30No, other people for you.
- 6:31So if I blindfolded you, and tapped your foot and your nose at the same time, you didn't
- 6:37know that I was going to do it, I'm pretty sure, yeah, you would still feel them happen
- 6:41at the same time.
- 6:42I think so.
- 6:43Yeah.
- 6:44So the nose sensation is being delayed somewhere in your brain.
- 6:47Everything, everything you experience is actually being delayed in your brain.
- 6:51Art officially or just because of the time it takes for your brain work.
- 6:54It takes, it, so it takes even from your eyes, it takes, let's say, 150 milliseconds
- 6:59to 200 milliseconds, the information to be processed, to go back to the, the LGN, to the
- 7:04visual cortex and then it bounces up and the information comes back down.
- 7:08So really we're living in the past by a few hundred milliseconds all the time, right?
- 7:12But that natural delay should differ between the nose and the toe.
- 7:17It gets absorbed within that, that window.
- 7:21If my leg was like four meters long, it wouldn't, that would take too long, right?
- 7:26It wouldn't have the capacity to absorb that.
- 7:28So a snake that's very long, if you tap a snake's tail and then snap it, and then tap
- 7:33a snake, maybe, hopefully not a poisonous snake, like it was really long, long enough to
- 7:37be like it, you know, to take a full second or something for the, or the longer the snake,
- 7:42the more it lives in the past or the longer your leg, the more you live in the past.
- 7:46In other words, so that's what I mean by the buffer being artificial, like the buffer
- 7:50is not just an artifact of the fact that it takes time for the sensation to go from your
- 7:54nose to your brain.
- 7:55It's almost like it's being intentionally delayed from your nose in order to account
- 7:58for the possibility that someone's going to tap you on the foot at the same time.
- 8:02It could be a bit of that.
- 8:03I don't think we know the answer, but that's interesting.
- 8:05That would, that's not really artificial though, what do you mean by artificial?
- 8:08Meaning that your brain is not collecting the information from the nose tap as fast as
- 8:12it possibly could, because if it were, then the nose tap would precede the foot tap.
- 8:17Right.
- 8:18Yeah, or there's just a buffer and you have this binding problem.
- 8:21It's got a brain has to figure out which things go together, right?
- 8:25Which, and so it gets more complicated in actual brain because the parts of my brain,
- 8:29which process the color and the movement, ones here, ones here, ones here,
- 8:34they're all in different parts.
- 8:36And so the communication between those takes some time, but you never perceive the color.
- 8:41You rarely perceive the color before you perceive the motion.
- 8:45Now, you can actually set that up in the lab when you have a quickly changing thing.
- 8:49It's alternating, it's doing this and going like red, green, red, green, red, green.
- 8:54To see that perfectly in sync, you actually need to offset, I think, you need to,
- 9:00you know, delay the color ever so slightly.
- 9:02Oh, is that right?
- 9:03So you can actually set that up.
- 9:04If you, so in other words, for you to see it perfectly, it has to kind of go like red, green.
- 9:11So that not everyone's watching the YouTube, but if you're listening to the podcast,
- 9:14and you're basically saying that if it, in order because you perceive motion before you
- 9:19perceive color, you would need to offset the, no, the color has to lag.
- 9:24I think the motion, you see the motion for change the motion, and then you've got to change
- 9:28the color a little bit afterwards.
- 9:30Interesting.
- 9:31So it's like a misbinding because of all this is all this, all this stuff's happening
- 9:34at different times in the brain because you're on the firing around from different parts
- 9:38of the brain.
- 9:39Yeah.
- 9:40Yeah.
- 9:41Something that it all just comes in and we have this experience of being live and seeing
- 9:46things as if they're consistent things across space and time.
- 9:51But actually it's just a jigsaw puzzle that our brain is piecing together.
- 9:55I mean, a binding problem is a classic conundrum and a classic thing that hasn't fully
- 9:58been solved in your mind.
- 9:59And what's a binding problem?
- 10:00So binding the shape and the color and the movement altogether.
- 10:04So how do I know that the color belongs?
- 10:07So I move my hand.
- 10:09How do I know the color of my hand belongs to the hand and not, why don't I see the blue
- 10:13here in my hand?
- 10:14So how do I bind the color to this shape of the couch?
- 10:18Sorry if you're only listening.
- 10:20How do I bind the flesh color of my hand to my hand?
- 10:23And how do I, how does my brain tag all this?
- 10:25How does it know which sequence?
- 10:26The one doesn't need to because it breaks it, because it's like the Humpty Dumpty
- 10:30problem.
- 10:31It's been referred to because it breaks it apart and sends it off, ships it off to different
- 10:35parts of the brain, different neurons.
- 10:39And we have good evidence that if you damage one part, then you don't perceive motion anymore.
- 10:45If you damage a different part, you won't perceive color anymore.
- 10:49And then there's a whole other one I see.
- 10:50So because of different consciousness is happening in different areas.
- 10:53Right.
- 10:54But then it's happening here and here, how does my brain then know which bits belong
- 10:58back to it?
- 10:59It's going to bring it all back together again.
- 11:00Right.
- 11:01So your eyes see your hand moving in front of your face.
- 11:04And then they send the signal to your brain and then one part of your brain that deals
- 11:07with color.
- 11:08Another part of your hand.
- 11:09It's ships it all out and deals with motion.
- 11:11And then they all come back together.
- 11:12So how does it get back together again?
- 11:14How does Humpty Dumpty get put back together?
- 11:16How does it?
- 11:17For.
- 11:18So there's different theories.
- 11:19One is like that your brain tags the different, the activity with different frequencies, like
- 11:2520 hertz or 10 hertz or like this sort of oscillations of the neural groups of neurons.
- 11:32Another idea is that all the information goes back, goes up this hierarchy to these
- 11:37different areas and then it has to feed back down to these earlier hub parts of the
- 11:41brain.
- 11:42Primary visual cortex, we'll call it and that up and back down again and then this hub thing
- 11:48glues it all back together or combination, how do we get AI to know about it?
- 11:53Does that give us any insight into how our brains work when we try to figure out how
- 11:56to teach a computer to know the difference between an object that's moving, that retains
- 12:03its color and an object that's moving, that changes its color?
- 12:06That's an interesting question because when the big revolutions in AI stuff started happening
- 12:11people were really trying to model the AI, these neural nets, these learning were based
- 12:17on neurons in the brain.
- 12:19And they're largely still black box systems and that we don't know, it's really hard to
- 12:23look under the hood and see how the AI is learning.
- 12:28But I think we can to a certain degree so that's a presumably extrapolating from all of
- 12:34the data that it's ingested, which is presumably part of what we do as well, right?
- 12:38It's like it reminds me a bit of the, what's the test with the dummy hand where the people
- 12:43touch the hand that's not actually theirs and that's behind a mirror?
- 12:47Yeah, so you can have, you put your hand in a box, I guess it's not going to work well
- 12:50for which is people on audio.
- 12:52So you put your hand in a box and then you have a mirror and the mirror can make, there's
- 12:59different versions of this.
- 13:01You don't see your own hand and you can put a, you can put a, like a rubber hand there
- 13:05and you can set it up so the rubber hand, because the mirror looks exactly, looks like
- 13:09it's where your hand is.
- 13:11And then you can do extra things like you touch, you used to say you stroke the rubber
- 13:17hand and then someone strokes your hand perfectly in sync.
- 13:20And once you start doing that, you go, your brain binds up the visual with the tactile.
- 13:25So it's like, oh shit, this thing, like I can see the brush touching the rubber hand and
- 13:30I'm feeling it, it must be my hand.
- 13:33And then if you like stab the hand or hit it, like you, you really freak, you think it's
- 13:37your hand being hit with the hammer.
- 13:39And isn't it also the case?
- 13:40The people really freak out.
- 13:41But more than that, isn't that the case that you can stop stroking the feather on your
- 13:46real hand and continue stroking the rubber hand and you'll keep feeling the feather?
- 13:53I thought that was the punchline to the test.
- 13:56This kind of thing is used as a treatment for people with phantom limb syndrome, those
- 14:00people with missing, with a missing hand, with a missing arm.
- 14:03And what will happen sometimes is they'll get the sensation that they, their, their hands
- 14:07in a fist and their nails like pushing into their hand and it's quite uncomfortable.
- 14:11It's like they, they feel like they're making a fist as hard as they possibly can and
- 14:15it hurts, but they, there's no hand there to, they can't do this.
- 14:19They can't release the fist because there's no, and they don't have an arm.
- 14:23But if you do this mirror trick and we do it with your other hand or with a fake hand
- 14:27and then you do this release and you make it look like it should be where the missing
- 14:30hand is, people get relief from this.
- 14:33It's like you're tricking your brain and it, it thinks for a moment that the missing
- 14:37hand is there and it's, it's opening and I mean, this is really fascinating.
- 14:41This is why I'm interested in whether or not the eye and toe tapping depends on your
- 14:46seeing the toe tapping because I can understand if you can see it that your brain, much as
- 14:53the phantom limb experiment shows, your brain will coordinate the feelings with what it
- 15:00can see is supposed to be happening.
- 15:03But if you were blindfolded and you didn't know, maybe that coordination wouldn't take
- 15:08place and they wouldn't feel like they're exactly the same.
- 15:10One is to do that experiment.
- 15:11You need to do that.
- 15:12You need to do that experiment.
- 15:13Well, maybe it's been done.
- 15:14How do you, how much credence do you give on the watch with numbers experiment?
- 15:21This, that ride, right?
- 15:23The ride where you go up and you go, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga in a seat up
- 15:28to the top of a tower and then you get released and you go falling down.
- 15:33It's funny you mentioned that one because I was doing a podcast for Nova podcasts a
- 15:38couple of years ago called The Rush, which I think people can still hear, which was eight
- 15:43episodes about the ways in which our brains get a rush from some extreme activity.
- 15:48So one episode was about sex, one episode was about drugs, one episode was about adrenaline.
- 15:54And for the adrenaline, I didn't, I didn't actually, sadly, I was unable to take recreational
- 16:01drugs for the purposes, but I did go to a sex, I did go to a Japanese sex dungeon and
- 16:07get, like, strong up by a, I mean, I wasn't engaged in actual sexual activity, but a
- 16:12job.
- 16:13This was audio with visuals.
- 16:14This was audio, thankfully.
- 16:15This was an audio podcast.
- 16:17And like a Japanese bondage master, she, like, strong me up in, like, leather straps and
- 16:24this is a me up.
- 16:25Yeah.
- 16:26It was amazing.
- 16:27Anyway, one of the experiences that I went through was we rented out Dream World on the
- 16:32Gold Coast, which is a big amusement park for an hour before it opened one day.
- 16:37And we flew up there and they did that ride with me about 10 times in a row, with just
- 16:43me on the ride.
- 16:45And I was strapped up with a GoPro and strapped up with, like, to see what my physiology
- 16:49was doing in those moments as you're just about to be released.
- 16:53And then what happens when you're dropped.
- 16:55And I remember, I hate those rides.
- 16:57I love roller coasters, but because I love the feeling, you go up and you go up and
- 17:01then free fall.
- 17:02Yeah.
- 17:03Yeah.
- 17:04Yeah.
- 17:05But like, I like a roller coaster because I like feeling like I'm a bird, but I don't,
- 17:07I don't like my gut just being up in my mouth and feeling like I'm going to puke because
- 17:11I'm just falling.
- 17:12And I certainly don't like the moments before the free fall where you're just waiting,
- 17:19gazing out over the physical of the Gold Coast, anticipating when it's going to happen,
- 17:24any second now, any second now, any second now, any second now.
- 17:27And afterwards I got down, I said to the operator, it's ingeniously timed how long you have
- 17:32to wait up the top before you get released.
- 17:36It's like just long enough that it's uncomfortable.
- 17:40It's like just long enough that you really feel antsy and frightened because you expect
- 17:47it's going to happen at any moment.
- 17:48And the operator said, funnily enough, the amount of time that you're waiting at the
- 17:52top is zero.
- 17:53Where it goes up and drops.
- 17:55And as soon as it touches the top and all I was feeling was those final moments, maybe
- 18:01a second or a fraction of a second when it's so slow that you don't have a sensation
- 18:05of motion anymore before it touches the actual top and then releases you down.
- 18:11So certainly my subjective experience, it wasn't minutes after the thing, it would have
- 18:18been seconds or milliseconds after the drop began was that the time was interminable.
- 18:25Certainly felt like the time was passing internally while I was there.
- 18:28I certainly remember thinking, when is it going to happen, when's it going to happen,
- 18:32when's it going to happen?
- 18:33And it's hard to separate memory from the actual thing, right?
- 18:36So how do you know whether, because now all you have is the memory, right?
- 18:39But is it the right to say, can I read numbers that are flashing very quickly?
- 18:47Why would I necessarily have the ability to do that just because my experience of time
- 18:52has been slowed?
- 18:54It's, you also have to add in that, and that would affect like visual processing in the
- 18:59visual cortex.
- 19:00Exactly.
- 19:01Yeah.
- 19:02It may not.
- 19:03It may be other parts of the brain or, you know, so it's only testing one narrow visual
- 19:06perceptual dimension.
- 19:07Yeah.
- 19:08Yeah.
- 19:09It strikes me as the wrong experiments.
- 19:10Yeah.
- 19:11I mean, you would need to, you'd need to ask me, I suppose you can never do it in real
- 19:16time, because everything becomes a memory of the previous movement, doesn't it?
- 19:19But you would sort of need to ask me in real time over a headset, like, how long does
- 19:25it feel it's you've been up here, but I guess I'm still, you know, you can do timing
- 19:29intervals and drop people from different heights and see, like, do that.
- 19:33And so they're actually trying to time it as they're falling, right?
- 19:36And then they guess you compare it to watching other people, a bit like they did, but try
- 19:39and take out the effect of memory.
- 19:40Yeah.
- 19:42And if, and just because I could count one one thousand two one thousand three one
- 19:46thousand, at the same rate, when I'm waiting for the drop, as I could, after the ride,
- 19:54does that mean that the experience is going at the same pace?
- 19:57Because I could still be having the same brain speeds up or the brain processing changes
- 20:02then you would be counting differently, but again, that the assumption there is that
- 20:06my language slows down as well, which is another assumption like the visual thing.
- 20:12There's something, it's a hard, I mean, this is, you know, we, we pushed up against this
- 20:17problem all the time, trying to separate the thing from the memory of the thing and you
- 20:21just have to do it in real time.
- 20:22Right.
- 20:23So yeah, the perceptual flick of things one way to do it.
- 20:25Okay.
- 20:26So let's assume that we don't know that time slows down in extreme situations.
- 20:30It certainly seems, it certainly is different in memory and there's data from that and the
- 20:34the theory around that is the, the richer your experience of whatever I'm on your vacation,
- 20:39your holiday, the more stuff gets pushed into it, your brain thinks, oh, that must have
- 20:43happened, must have been a longer period, because this is more things happening, more stimulation,
- 20:48more different people, more scenes, right, if you sit in and, you know, a cell for three,
- 20:53you know, three or four days and nothing happens, then as you look back, it's going to be
- 20:56like, it was like a couple of hours or just because nothing changes.
- 20:59Right.
- 21:01So it felt interminable, it might have felt like time.
- 21:02And so that's, yeah, at the time, it would just drag and drag, but later on you should
- 21:07get this flip where the, the, the, the grade vacation, you know, in memory, because it
- 21:12was spread out by the time it's like, oh, the days over already down.
- 21:15Yeah.
- 21:16Interesting.
- 21:17Sitting in the cell, it's like every, you look, you know, you look at your watch and
- 21:19you think it's the afternoon and it's like, I mean, that's gone by or something.
- 21:22And does pain extend time?
- 21:25Do we know?
- 21:25Because you know, there's like experiments where we took, actually, there are some new
- 21:30research that came out last year showing that again, look, this is like really like 100
- 21:36millisecond times again, really short, which, which for the brain is actually a long time,
- 21:42that as your heart beats, it affects your time perception.
- 21:46As the heart contracts, your perception of time actually gets shorter.
- 21:51And then as a heart relaxes, your perceptual, you think time, the same amount of time is
- 21:56longer.
- 21:57So when you have to do these things where they can put this stimuli on sound or visual
- 22:01things and they can, they measure your heart to their time, they sink it up.
- 22:05Yeah.
- 22:06And you'll perceive the same thing to be shorter or longer, depending off the heart's contracting
- 22:11or releasing.
- 22:12Does that mean that having a fast heart rate changes your time perception versus a short
- 22:17time?
- 22:18And it seems to be slow.
- 22:19So it's, it's, it's both within the contraction and the relaxation.
- 22:22Okay.
- 22:23So it's boom, boom.
- 22:24So it's moved by moment.
- 22:25So it's not like, alternate, fast, fast.
- 22:26It's not like I can just give myself hypertension and therefore experience time.
- 22:31Yeah.
- 22:32No, but that was interesting because there's a lot of you had new research linking the
- 22:35heart and breathing and all this stuff we tend to think of as just the body, whatever.
- 22:40It does affect cognition, thinking, time perception.
- 22:43Yes.
- 22:44There's more links with that than we originally thought.
- 22:46I remember there being a, a, a study about how if the final moments of a painful procedure
- 22:52are not painful, then you'll have a more favorable perception.
- 22:56I think that was.
- 22:57Yeah.
- 22:58Who just died.
- 22:59Yeah.
- 23:00Yeah.
- 23:01Can you tell us a little bit about that?
- 23:02I think there's a colonoscopy stuff.
- 23:03Yes.
- 23:04It works.
- 23:05Yeah.
- 23:06So I think it's similar for holidays as well that that these peak experiences will sort
- 23:11of mess with your memory of the whole thing.
- 23:14And let me just remember how the study goes.
- 23:17They actually had participants in a colonoscopy as part of the study and the, it's the last
- 23:26like few minutes.
- 23:27Yeah.
- 23:28I think what they did was, from memory, they extended the duration of the unpleasant procedure
- 23:35in order to make the, the end of it less unpleasant.
- 23:38So they pretended to still, to still need to be doing things, but those things were non-invasive
- 23:43and not painful.
- 23:44But the low pain goes for longer.
- 23:45That's right.
- 23:46Yeah.
- 23:47And people reported, subjectively, the experience being less painful, even though the whole,
- 23:53even though the peak pain was just as pain, I don't know who's doing these fucking colonoscopies
- 23:58by the way.
- 23:59They're not supposed to be painful.
- 24:00You're supposed to be sedated.
- 24:01I think they studied a while back and I think some of the interviews I've heard him
- 24:03say like, everyone relax, this is, this was done, this is, it's different now.
- 24:07Right.
- 24:08Now they give you a functional, like an act of the painful thing and morphine.
- 24:12But anyway, so it was supposed to be, it's equally painful, but if you have a pleasant
- 24:17final, the last couple of minutes you drag them down by the thing, in other words, your
- 24:24intuition might be, I just want the painful experience to be as brief as possible.
- 24:28Yeah.
- 24:29But actually, you'll remember it as being more painful if that's the case than if it's
- 24:32a longer experience, equally painful, but ending with less, with, if at the end there
- 24:37is less.
- 24:38Yeah, you've got to drop, I think if it drops the pain, the same thing with a holiday,
- 24:42which would be, at the, if you have a peak experience at the end of the holiday, you'll
- 24:47remember the whole holiday as being better.
- 24:49And if you have a bad experience at the end of the holiday, the lights in the way home
- 24:52are all messed up and there are ways and everything.
- 24:54Your bag gets lost on the way home, something the whole holiday gets taken over the holiday
- 24:58as like, no, I wasn't really good.
- 24:59Yeah.
- 25:00Interesting.
- 25:01Yeah, memory, people think of memory as this like video camp, video phone video recording
- 25:05of the whole thing, as it happened, and it's not, I mean, you have visual, optical illusions,
- 25:11people know about those, but there's, there's effectively illusions in every part of our
- 25:17mind and brain, right?
- 25:18And there's lots in memory.
- 25:20You have to try and remember a string of numbers, the stuff at the beginning and the end
- 25:23are easy to remember, everything in the middle is really hard to remember.
- 25:26These peak experiences, there's, yeah, it's not like a video recording of what happens
- 25:32in your life.
- 25:33It's sort of certain, certain things are laid down in memory and then we sort of try and
- 25:38reboot that memory with these little fragments that are there and so it's, it falls by us
- 25:42to all these things about the nature of how the brain is processed information.
- 25:46And so in terms of time, it certainly strikes me subjectively that the amount of novelty
- 25:52that takes place in an experience affects my memory of how much time it took in the
- 25:59sense that to go back to the holiday example, if I'm going on a vacation on a holiday and
- 26:04I'm bouncing around a bunch of different places and having quite varied experiences in
- 26:09each place, then the two weeks feels like longer than two weeks and if I'm only staying
- 26:14in one place at one resort, funny should bring this up.
- 26:18Let me, let's do it.
- 26:19Let's try into a visual demo.
- 26:20We'll try and do it to the camera.
- 26:22Okay.
- 26:23And see if you can see it too.
- 26:24We'll load, we'll load this in there.
- 26:25But if you can see it on the YouTube, what is, let's wait for it to just reset.
- 26:29So what is going to show?
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