The Cholent: Some Science about Time
This won't be the last time I talk about this subject
Readers of this blog (especially my Beat the Haters Friday series, or who know that my favorite movie is Back to the Future) will know that I think a lot about time. To me time is at the same time a very abstract concept, yet sometimes is among the most rigid and punishing of things in our lives. Since I have recently come across a Ted talk about this, I’ve been thinking about it a lot more. So set your slow cookers to low and let your Cholent stew, because today’s Cholent is all about time.
Among the things I’ve recently seen, the most relevant one is a Ted talk that features a neuroscientist describing how the heart can dramatically affect the perception of time in our minds (I reached out to her for an interview but she declined). In the experiment, they showed people who were connected to EKGs pictures meant to evoke an emotional reaction (not exactly sure, maybe cute babies, people embracing, etc.) but they varied when the pictures were displayed, either during the contraction or the expansion of the heart muscles during a beat. What was found was “that stimuli that occurred during [the] heart’s contraction were perceived to last shorter than stimuli that occurred between beats.” Essentially, “the momentary state of the heart caused time to contract and expand within each heart beat”. SO on some level, depending on the pace your heart is beating you may experience more or less time as time that happens during a heartbeat is perceived to last longer than those between.
But if we bring this up to the population level, is everyone’s pace slightly different? Are they living through time at a different pace than us? Maybe we all live the same amount of “time” but what our heart is doing makes that actually shorter or longer in the real world. The neuroscientist continues to say that when the heart is “resting” during boredom, things move slower, which helps us perceive the things around us and become unbored.
So while there is evidence that we can (minimally) bend time, there is also the other side of things, where time controls us. When I’m in situations I’d rather not be in, I always tell myself that “nothing lasts forever”. Getting through something is just a matter of enduring the amount of time it takes for that thing to end. No one escapes time, and in the end, time will decide who is right and who is wrong.
Sometimes we also say that we are slaves to time. And I’m always amazed as to how rigid many people’s schedules are. We see the same people at the bus stop. We get hungry at the same time each day. We invest in calendars and apps that promise to organize our schedules and free up more time for ourselves (the promise of AI is that no one will have to work anymore).
Large scale time also has its impact on us. We have schooling set for certain ages. Many cultures push marriage by a certain age. We break down our lives into different stages (childhood, adulthood, seniority, etc.) and sometimes we try to avoid moving from one stage to another.
So which is it? Do we control time or does time control us? As I often do, and is appropriate for this week’s Torah portion, I fall back on the Torah. Here, God tells the Jewish nation, “this month is for you, the first of the months”. Many commentators interpret this to mean that we (Jews/Humanity) have been given the right to control time. We declare when a new month occurs, not some preset calendar. But at the same time, there are things in our Jewish lives that must be done within a certain time (e.g. reciting Shema each day). Even the verse itself is kind of at odds with itself, as it may be the first month, but it is not the first month of the year, and Judaism has many beginnings of the year that take place at different times.
The most I can say is that we should appreciate the time that we are given. Try to live your life in a way that maximizes perception during the beats of the heart and not its contraction. Doing so is probably not only healthy, but will lead to a feeling of fulfillment, something we all desire.
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