WHAT IS OUR UNIQUE SENSE OF TIME?
So what exactly is this different sense of time, you might ask? Well, it turns out it is quite simple. We are the only animal that understands 'when'.
But don't take my word for it, read the detailed article, Are Animals Stuck in Time?, that compares the animal sense of time to the human sense of time. The article concludes that in fact animals are stuck in time whereas we humans can work with and manipulate time.
Humans are not 'stuck in time' because understanding 'when' allows us to time-travel back to our past and also to an imagined future. It allows us remember our personal story and to shape ourselves and our civilization. Furthermore it allows us to take control, to plan for the future based on our knowledge of the past.
The TARDIS time machine from the science fiction TV show, Dr. Who.
(commons.wikimedia.org)
"People can time-travel cognitively because they can remember events having occurred at particular times in the past (episodic memory) [ED: e.g. the sense of when] and because they can anticipate new events occurring at particular times in the future. The ability to assign points in time to events arises from human development of a sense of time and its accompanying time-keeping technology." William Roberts, Are Animals Stuck in Time?
As we go though our lives, we order and organize what we do with a sense of 'when': when in the past, when in the present and when in the future.
Take, for example, this very simple sentence that anyone of us might say -- yet which is extremely sophisticated:
"When I finish this job in about an hour, I will be done for the day."
This sentence which includes past, present, future and future perfect (a past that is in the future at the present time but will be past at a future point), is something we humans understand, but cannot be understood by any other animal.
However, I believe that we have made a critical mistake in our thinking. Most people -- in fact virtually all people I have talked to -- think of time as an objective condition that exists independently.
While time does exist objectively -- the sun will rise every morning no matter what we do -- our sense of time is particularly and perhaps peculiarly human. The way that we work with time, remember time, conceive of time is related to the way that our brains function.
Therefore while the objective nature of time can be sensed, humans deal with it in a subjective manner. For example, as I have pointed out in my blog about 'human meta-time', we humans have the unique ability to move in a virtual world of space and time at warp speed. We can travel in our minds from past and current events and past and current houses, schools and jobs to places and activities we imagine we will do soon in the present and in the future.
And although civilization has developed a highly sophisticated way of marking and telling time such as clocks and calendars, when people remember the past it is rare that they can give dates. Instead they relate the past to things that happened before and after, i.e. when something occurred in their personal history. So our personal memory is not tied to the artificial time-telling and timekeeping devices of our cultures but rather the natural human sense of memory. See William Roberts, Are Animals Stuck in Time?
While we have all learned to live with clocks and show up on time, our personal sense of 'when' is not tied to man-made artificial timekeeping.
My point is that our inborn human sense of 'when' is separate from the man-made clocks and calendars that rule our workaday lives. Understanding when is a major part of being human. 'When' is our own personal story, knowing 'when' and how things happened in the past is how we became what we are, and thinking about 'when' in the future maps out who we hope to be.
CONCLUSION
The concept of 'when' adds a new dimension to time. Time is not just one dimensional, i.e. always in the moment or subject to an immediate need, or two dimensional, i.e. cyclical such as breakfast and dinner, night and day, and yearly migrations -- which are the way time is perceived by all the other animals. Instead 'when' adds a third dimension to time, a linear dimension of past, present and future. We are the only animal that perceives and uses this dimension of time.
Data that is sensed is often multidimensional but not every animal can detect all of the dimensions. Sharks not only have a far better sense of smell which can detect a small amount of blood in the ocean 1/3 of a mile away but also a more dimensional sense of smell than humans have. Once having sensed the presence of blood, for example, they can locate the direction of the source of the blood with their two nares (snouts) in much the same way that our two ears are used to locate the source of a sound.
"Sharks smell through a pair of nostril-like holes, called nares...When its olfactory sensors detect the odor of a potential catch, the shark will turn into the current that is carrying the chemical. In addition, a shark's olfactory talents are so refined that it can often tell which of its nares is getting the stronger scent signal, guiding it even more precisely toward its prey." http://www.pbs.org/kqed/oceanadventures/episodes/sharks/indepth-senses.html
(commons.wikimedia.org)
As I pointed out in my blogs about moderncentric thinking (the often superior attitude modern people have about historic cultures), we humans are also guilty of humancentric thinking. We, unknowingly, have assumed that animals possess the same basic senses we have -- only with some changes. Yet if we want to really understand how animals sense, we need to see the world from their point of view. For example, how does a dolphin perceive its world? I won't say 'see' because even though sight may be involved, the echolocation ability of dolphins goes far beyond anything we have experienced either as humans or in our labs and perhaps beyond anything we can yet imagine.
(commons.wikimedia.org)
"A recent discovery we made is that dolphins appear capable of directly perceiving the shapes of objects through echolocation. Prior to this finding, it had been generally assumed that dolphins learned to identify and recognize objects through echolocation by a process of associative learning -- by comparing the echoes returning from targets with the visual appearance of those targets."
"The sounds they [ED: dolphins] hear create a kind of holographic image in their minds...they perceive echoes as 3-D shapes and textures...Their ultrasonic clicks penetrate flesh, giving them an X-ray view of your bones and innards."
And once we can see the world from the point of view of a different species, we may begin to understand our own world better. This is because the particular senses we humans possess have led us to build this world that we live in.
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