OttoHart
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- Jun 26, 2024
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This is a phenomenon that can also be attributed to scrolling on social media.
So, when it comes to perceiving time, there are usually differences between how we perceive time happening right now, and how we remember it. In a healthy individual, the difference should be inverse proportionality.
Say you are at an amusement park. During your day at the park, you will be waiting in line for about 6 hours, and will get a total of 30 minutes on the rides.
When you are experiencing the waiting in line, it feels excruciatingly long. You are doing nothing, unstimulated, and time feels frozen. When you are enjoying the rides, time feels as though it flies by.
But this is reversed with memories. A week later, when you are recalling your time spent at the amusement park, you barely remember waiting in line. It feels like a short time. But you remember the rides fondly, and they feel like they were so long.
This is because different aspects of the brain are being engaged in the different activities, and each side is more stimulated depending on the activity. Both boredom and excitement are useful and advancing.
This kind of knowledge about how we perceive chronology can be studied and meditated upon to understand some things about time, so I hope you are encouraged to do so. But this post is specifically about the TV paradox.
When TVs were starting to become common, people noticed an anomaly, and studies were conducted. This is because the inverse proportionality is not seen with watching TV.
After a 6 hour session of scrolling, you often feel as though you have no idea how the time passed by, you experience it as short. So, in theory, you should remember it as long and interesting. But you don't. You barely remember what you saw. A definitive scientific explanation to this has not been found, but many theories exist. And here's the one I subscribe to:
Boring times encourage mindfulness and the brain stimulates itself why they are happening, but the brain doesn't have the need to self stimulate when remembering them.
Exciting times require the brain to be alert, and thus it has no need to sit and self stimulate, so it feels shorter. But these complex, exciting things provide benefits when pondered later, which is where the brain needs to self stimulate.
Scrolling mindlessly is neither boring enough to require the brain to self stimulate, nor exciting enough to make the brain alert and to be worth remembering for future examination. It is dead time, in the most literal sense.
So, when it comes to perceiving time, there are usually differences between how we perceive time happening right now, and how we remember it. In a healthy individual, the difference should be inverse proportionality.
Say you are at an amusement park. During your day at the park, you will be waiting in line for about 6 hours, and will get a total of 30 minutes on the rides.
When you are experiencing the waiting in line, it feels excruciatingly long. You are doing nothing, unstimulated, and time feels frozen. When you are enjoying the rides, time feels as though it flies by.
But this is reversed with memories. A week later, when you are recalling your time spent at the amusement park, you barely remember waiting in line. It feels like a short time. But you remember the rides fondly, and they feel like they were so long.
This is because different aspects of the brain are being engaged in the different activities, and each side is more stimulated depending on the activity. Both boredom and excitement are useful and advancing.
This kind of knowledge about how we perceive chronology can be studied and meditated upon to understand some things about time, so I hope you are encouraged to do so. But this post is specifically about the TV paradox.
When TVs were starting to become common, people noticed an anomaly, and studies were conducted. This is because the inverse proportionality is not seen with watching TV.
After a 6 hour session of scrolling, you often feel as though you have no idea how the time passed by, you experience it as short. So, in theory, you should remember it as long and interesting. But you don't. You barely remember what you saw. A definitive scientific explanation to this has not been found, but many theories exist. And here's the one I subscribe to:
Boring times encourage mindfulness and the brain stimulates itself why they are happening, but the brain doesn't have the need to self stimulate when remembering them.
Exciting times require the brain to be alert, and thus it has no need to sit and self stimulate, so it feels shorter. But these complex, exciting things provide benefits when pondered later, which is where the brain needs to self stimulate.
Scrolling mindlessly is neither boring enough to require the brain to self stimulate, nor exciting enough to make the brain alert and to be worth remembering for future examination. It is dead time, in the most literal sense.
