Subjective time slowing down

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: Bernard
Date: 07 Sep 12 - 07:25 PM

Yup, that's it, I reckon.

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: Tootler
Date: 07 Sep 12 - 05:18 PM

I have noticed this too.

I have relatively recently started learning to play ukulele.

One day while working on a song, I noticed that I suddenly seemed to know where to place my fingers for the chords without actually thinking about it and without looking at the fretboard. Also I realised that I actually had plenty of time to make the chord changes where not long before it seemed to be a scramble. Also, I was able to do this while singing.

So it seems the phenomenon works even with modest attainment. You reach a point where you seem to have plenty of time to complete actions which previously you felt you had to rush to complete them, even though you are actually taking the same objective time to complete them. I suspect it has something to do with actions you practice regularly are eventually "burned" into the subconscious so the conscious brain can concentrate on other things.

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: Bernard
Date: 07 Sep 12 - 07:13 AM

Yes, Jack, that's my experience, too...

I think there's another consideration, though, which is the 'autopilot'. Once you've practised a tune so well that you cannot get it wrong, you have the surreal experience of being able to sit back and watch as if someone else is playing.

When you're first learning a tune, you're having to do all the thinking. The difference between a good player and an average player is the amount of 'processing time' needed when playing. The average player needs more concentrated effort to think about what comes next, because the fingers haven't been trained to do the thinking for you - a good player doesn't have this restriction.

As an accordion player (amongst other instruments), I often find myself mesmerised by the antics of my left hand which seems, at times, to have a mind of its own - I'm not consciously telling it what to do (bass runs, etc.). But this is happening whilst I'm playing a fairly complex tune in the right hand, which I'm not giving any thought to...

Sometimes it can be quite disconcerting, even distracting, and I find I have to 'snap out of it' before disaster occurs!!

As I also use the accordion to accompany myself singing, this ability is a necessity.

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: Jack Campin
Date: 07 Sep 12 - 06:31 AM

I'd like to bump this because I don't think I've quite got the point across.

The experience I had in mind happens (among other times) when you're learning an instrument. When you start and and are fumbling for the notes, something like the first bar of Soldier's Joy seems impossibly fast, with the notes piling into each other in a near-simultaneous chaotic cascade. Once you've got the technique to play it, the time in between those eight notes seems to spread out: you have all the time in the world to think about how each one is going to sound, what you might do to accentuate it or otherwise. They sit in the time continuum like mountaintops along a ridge.

This is a common experience and ought to be easier to investigate than moments of elite sports performance, as in the study the BBC reported. But sport has such a privileged status in our culture that psychologists have to make their work seem relevant to it if they want get funding.

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 05 Sep 12 - 02:08 PM

Free Improvisation is a time killer too. I was in a quartet once and we recorded every session we did for about year on C90 cassettes - even in gigs we were very adept at very tightly controlled 45-minute improvs which dropped on a heartbeat & felt like 5 minutes to the performers. In the old London Musicians Collective Musics magazine they had a feature comprised of various answers to the question What happens to time & the awareness of time during improvisation? Naturally some of the answers went on for several pages of metaphysical & temporal philosophy, but I think the late, great Derek Bailey summed it up best by saying The ticks turn into tocks and the tocks turn into ticks.

I did a piece earlier today in real time using violin / jews harp and a diverse array of real-time hardware electronica. It came out around nigh on 12 minutes but it felt more 3 to me. I reckon to the casual Mudcatter it might feel like 3 hours...

http://soundcloud.com/sedayne/profunda-sanitatum-5-9-12

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: Jack Campin
Date: 05 Sep 12 - 01:30 PM

Yup. Playing a fast tune you know really well, time passes in cat years.

(I think this has actually been measured objectively as an effect of marijuana, but I can't recall how it was done).

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 05 Sep 12 - 12:44 PM

Time flies when you're having fun - or creating. I can pass 7 hours in what feels like as many minutes when I'm writing or composing. Same with performing, or watching my kids being born. You focus on the moment and something else takes over. Half an hour on stage passes in a blink; and a night of love likewise...

It works in reverse, 2 hours in an Irish Session for me is like half an eternity in purgatory, yet in a Trad Singaround it passes all too soon.

Another temporal theory is that no matter how old you are you percieve a measure of time relative to your age. So a three week old baby will perceive a week as the same as three-year-old perceives a year, or a thirty-year-old perceives a decade, or sixty-year-old perceives two. Approximate, of course, as the limits are growing the whole time. And that isn't accounting for Creative Fun Time either.

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: Jack Campin
Date: 05 Sep 12 - 09:55 AM

"GUEST,Ed" - if you'd ever learned to play an instrument you wouldn't have made those fatuous comments.

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: Amos
Date: 05 Sep 12 - 09:29 AM

I think the idea is slowly catching on that both space and time are projected, not objective, Newton's torque post-interment notwithstanding.


A

Subject: RE: Subjective time slowing down
From: GUEST,Ed
Date: 05 Sep 12 - 09:14 AM

Who are 'they'?

Why haven't you looked?

"such a routine experience when playing music"

So where are your papers that discuss it?

Subject: Subjective time slowing down
From: Jack Campin
Date: 05 Sep 12 - 08:01 AM

Research at University College London about how "time slows down" for sports players:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19477623

There must be money in it if you make your research topic relevant to sport. This is such a routine experience when playing music you'd think they'd have looked at that first.