Intelligent People Experience Longer, Fuller Days.

[Lancewen]

Good article Arkane, I spend a great deal of time thinking about this. The reason being my age and the fact that I'm currently perceiving time differently. So much so that I'm often taking time to focus on this perceived accelerated/lost time. :blink:

 

I've been with my company so many years now that I have 5 weeks of vacation a year. I took this week off for my first week of the year. I have no travel plans, the only reason I took the week is to burn one of the weeks before the end of the year. I hadn't realized that it was the end of August already and I had not taken any time off. I will not use all the weeks and every year I seem to use less and less.

 

It's not that I can't get away because of work. everybody is replaceable no matter how important you are or think you are. The time just moves so fast anymore I have trouble gauging it.

 

Someone touched on the difference between daily time perception as opposed observing how fast a year or a decade has gone by. Time on a daily or hourly basis seems to be slightly faster, but for me the macro time continues to accelerate.

 

I believe one of the reasons for this is, as I slow down with age my days are far more preoccupied. Chores that used to take me three hours on a Saturday now take five. everything in my daily life takes me a little longer making it harder to keep track of time.

 

The speed of macro time perturbs me. Now that I'm aware of the anomaly I feel like I'm always chasing it. In some sense you would think nature would have made this the other way around. With time seemingly passing fast as a youth and slow as and adult, but it is what it is.

 

As far as intelligence and time correlation, I know when I'm having a good time, time seems to fly by. If days are longer for intelligent people then ignorance must truly be bliss.

 

When you are having a great deal of intense chronic pain, each and every day will be much longer than it otherwise would be and yet that same chronic pain would serve to prevent you from getting out into the world to have new experiences and this would make the macro time months and years seem to fly by. Again I will say that in general intelligent people will have the better more interesting jobs. They will also as a group have more spendable income, which will allow them to travel more or invest in better hobbies and these things will translate into more new experience in a given amount of time. In my opinion new experience is the best way to perceive a long life. Having a routine life (get up and do the same thing every day) is what makes the months and years fly by and you are left scratching your head wondering what happened to your life.

[Aethelwulf]

Hmmm I don't know.

 

 

I'm hardly the most intelligent person about, but I'm not stupid. The only days that seem long is the one's that drag out and that was happening a lot the past year which is why I took up chess as a hobby.

 

 

The speed of consciousness (in respect to hours of a day) actually depends on two gene regulators, one for short term and another for long term. This means even the most brightest human may be subject to shorter days than a stupid person, it all has to do with the chemistry of these gene regulators.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Aethelwulf

[Deepwater6]

I wonder if there has ever been a study of the speed of time for people on their death bed. Similar to how some people experience a car accident as moving very slowly. I have been in a situation that was close to death that my life seemed to flash before my eyes. Just a momentary image of experiences throughout my life.

[Lancewen]

I wonder if there has ever been a study of the speed of time for people on their death bed. Similar to how some people experience a car accident as moving very slowly. I have been in a situation that was close to death that my life seemed to flash before my eyes. Just a momentary image of experiences throughout my life.

 

My mother has been in a bad way for the last few years. She's very feeble and can barely get around with a walker and both her eyesight and hearing are highly impaired. She is so bored out of her mind she has to sleep 16 to 18 hours a day. She told me she wanted to die. Well a couple of weeks ago she broke her hip and the doctors discovered a mass in her left lung. They only give her about two months to live. While I'm not in favor of her dying, I do look forward to her end of suffering.

 

For the last few years her day to day life has been very slow seeming to drag on for ever. I can't believe anythings as bad as being trapped in a useless body.

[Deepwater6]

I'm sorry to hear of your situation ArKane. I went through a similar experience with a relative who just passed. Her quality of life was terrible and with so much pain she wanted it end.

 

She was in a retirement home. She valued the short amount of time we could spend with her during our busy lives. Time seemed to drag on for her as well. She spent the most part of every day in her bed looking out the window.

 

I would stay a few

hours after work. She understood I had a family and other obligations so I couldn't stay much more than that, but she was always upset because she felt the time had been too short.

 

Her room was very small with the sink and bathroom next to the bed as she couldn't walk far. It just caught my attention the last time I went to see her and the room size. Most of us start out in a cradle with no possessions. Our worlds grow and expand as we continue to age. As we grow usually so do our abodes. A room in your parents house, your first apartment, to your starter home and eventually the house we plan to retire in.(in a perfect world) Her world had gone back to a small room. Her thoughts seemingly down to little more than what a baby might have in the cradle. She had come full circle.

[paigetheoracle]

Emotion comes into perception of time in that if you resist what you're doing (Don't want to do it / bored by it), time drags. If you don't resist it and in fact actively engage in the task you're doing, time flies by. So by this, even objective time is altered by the fact that more is done within this period, through enthusiasm than is achieved by dragging your heels. The learning curve is shown by this also as I mentioned earlier - you can't go fast, when you're a novice because speed comes with skill and that comes through practice, so yes, the dumber you are the slower time will seem to pass and the smarter you are (more life skills you have), the quicker it will seem to pass for you mentally i.e. the more satisfying it becomes. If this is what you are on about, then this is your proof.

[paigetheoracle]

As I'm sixty I can understand this process as it hits you at this age. The enthusiasm but incompetence of youth is replaced by an awareness that you are slowly edging towards the end of the conveyor belt and everything on it is falling to bits, so you want it to end, rather than drag boringly on, getting worse with each passing day but even so we can learn to manouevre round our difficulties and by observing even our decline, learn to accept, if not enjoy it (See my point about time dragging in my previous post, through resisting events).

[Racoon]

Intelligence is arguing what intelligence is on a message board... :unsure:

 

I prefer my Intelligence Slow.

 

Turtle Wins the Race.

[paigetheoracle]

Snax, I have every sympathy with your mother and these things cannot be forced but it might help her to know how others in her situation have coped. Nick Vujicic, who was born limbless for instance, now goes round the world lecturing on being positive despite your short comings (I also know of a British soldier ended up in the situation and with brain damage, who also didn't let his situation get him down but fought back against his situation with optimism). Then of course there's Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy but still managed to paint with the only limb not affected (My Left Foot - book and film). Closer to home might be Hellen Keller and her mentor Annie Sullivan, who wouldn't let her slide into apathy and brought her round with her diligence (Filmed with Anne Bancroft as Annie). On top of this is Norman Cousins biography Anatomy of an Illness (also a film starring Ed Asner and Eli Wallach), where he turned his condition of Ankylosing Spondilitis round, by watching comedy films he loved. Hope these suggestions help.

[cal]

Snax, I have every sympathy with your mother and these things cannot be forced but it might help her to know how others in her situation have coped.

...

Hope these suggestions help.

I think you meant arKane...

________________________________________

 

 

I'm not sure why this thread was picked up again, but it's been derailed... I'm just going to assume my original post was correct since no one has offered counter-arguments (at least no counter-arguments for my actual arguments, there's all this stuff about perception of time and emotion, none of which my original post had anything to do with).

 

A question if anyone with forum power reads this, "Why?" - directed at the Strange Claims classification of the thread.

 

Leaving this thread with a "I won" attitude. gg no rerez.

Edited September 6, 2013 by Snax