Why The Subjective Passage of Time is a Problem of Metabolism

"Young and old, united in the same space, live in a separate universe where the value of time is radically different." - Lecomte du Noüy

The first time I became acutely aware of the metabolic nature of the subjective passage of time was when I took a little thyroid; it’d lowered my adrenaline by quite a bit and increased the temperature of the brain (as well as the production of the youth associated hormones), paradoxically slowing everything down. At the time, during bouts of contemplation and rumination, I had preoccupied myself with the question “Where had all the time gone?” because the disconnect seemed only to grow and I felt its progression to be an unnatural one. The prevailing explanation by those who had tried to explain it to me is to some degree summarized in the Reddit posts below, which I found absurd at the time (and still do).

Surely man, deep down in his natural and intuitive self, cannot possibly perceive life with such calculated mathematical detail. If the passage of time is proportional to objective lived experience, why do some elderly completely defy this law? Why was I so troubled by its quickness at such a young age? As a quick tangent, the unsatisfactory responses that are often blurted out to genuinely curious inquiries presented by imaginative children and teenagers is a problem that’s rarely addressed, and it’s a challenge trying to articulate the uneasiness that arises when an answer you’re provided sounds like a Reddit post or is granted an unnecessary aura of mystery as if meaningfully discussing it is an impossibility outside of an academic setting run by credentialled midwits.

The idea that there is a fundamental biological difference in perceived time between the young and the old, the healthy and the sick, was observed and quantified by Lecomte during his research at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. He understood that physiological time cannot be separated from organic matter, so he categorized the estimation of the biological clock in two ways: the rate of wound healing and chemical changes in the blood. Lecomte found that the rate of tissue regeneration is five times faster in a ten-year-old than a sixty-year-old, and this difference manifests itself in the perception of the passage of time (Du Noüy, 1936).

“The significance of the time of a clock depends naturally on the characteristics of physiological time. When compared with physiological time, physical time loses its uniform value. Parents and children live in different temporal worlds. They are separated by a gap that often is too large to be bridged, even by illusions.“ - Alexis Carrel

If we take wound healing and chemical change in blood serum to mean the metabolism of an organism and its capacity to adapt, then the idea that perceived time is a biological phenomenon has been observed, quantified, and correlated with the health of an organism as early as the 1930s. This correlation was again confirmed more recently by Healy, in addition to the fact that animals with higher metabolism also exhibit their environment in “higher frames per second” (Healy et al., 2013).

When asked to mentally count 120 seconds, there is a progressive decline in its estimation as people age. 120 seconds is perceived as 80 seconds by people over the age of 50, 25% lower than for those under 30 (Ferreira et al., 2016). Time passes by faster, the subjective lived experience becomes shorter, and entire decades fit themselves into mere years.

Ray has spoken plenty about “calm alertness”, the resting state of a healthy organism that perceives its energy reserves to be in excess. This ready state has been shown to slow the subjective passage of time, similar to how baseball players report the feeling of the ball slowing down (Hagura et al., 2012). One of my favorite email responses from Ray has been one about thyroid health and past trauma, where healing the former will automatically fix the latter. Additionally, the overarching idea is that time as experienced by us isn’t very linear, and so when the combination of “euphoriants” and substances are available, the past and the future merge into “the same room”; time slows, and the present reveals itself (I find sitting under a chicken lamp to have a time halting effect, most noticeable when I leave the lit room and feel time hasten).

I think at this point everyone has heard about the idea that LSD in microdose amounts is a powerful serotonin antagonist (hallucinations at higher doses are serotonergic). I decided to check a few of the earlier studies and see whether or not its connection to metabolism had been made. The thermogenicity and “time-bending” of LSD was observed numerous times.

I posted a few years ago that correcting hypothyroidism is probably the closest thing people have to time travel, and over the years others have noted how supplementing thyroid has brought forth childhood memories that they did not know existed, or had direct access to. Ray’s article titled “A Holistic Physiology of Memory“ concerns itself with the idea that the brain isn’t an organ of compartmentalization, and that memory and time are fluid concepts tied to the energy that passes through the brain. A quite goofy but insightful anecdote of a patient with Parkinson’s who relived her forgotten memories of her youth after taking L-dopa (dopamine raises brain metabolism) demonstrates this point beautifully (Sacks et al., 1970).

I’ve noticed that the thoughts that arise from being in the supine position differ radically when standing vertically. It seems as though when lying down (something the psychoanalysts got right), consciousness expands temporally allowing you to brush past memories and feelings from the past AS IF THEY ARE TAKING PLACE IN THE PRESENT MOMENT, as if you’d never left. There is a similar settling of what can be described as an aura (as cliche as it may sound) when in the fetal position, right before falling asleep.

Taking thyroid, which restores the brain's energy production (by lowering serotonin, increasing progesterone and CO2, etc.), brings us closer to the energetic state that previous memories had formed through, allowing our present self to have access to them. A short, but relevant passage from “Mind and Tissue”:

“Bashkova and Zakharyants described a boy's symptoms following an attack of malaria that illustrate the connection of pace and space:

Objects began to seem much smaller in size. The patient's perception of speed was no longer correct: Everything seemed to him to be taking place faster (people, for example, did not walk, but ran). For this reason he too began to do everything very quickly. After treatment with quinine, these aberrations disappeared.

In the anxious sympathetic state, nerve threshold would be lowered, and reflexes would be triggered more easily: This would increase the pace of activity, but since the energy charge wouldn't return to the highest level, the action would be smaller. This would presumably apply not only to heart-beat and respiration, but to other reflex actions such as orgasm. The thyroid hormone keeps the cellular energy high, the adrenaline low, and reflexes strong. It undoubtedly has an important effect on both perception and responses.“

This process itself I find extremely rewarding and novelty-inducing, and often find myself muttering how “full of surprises ‘peating’ is”. Novelty seeking is a healthy behavior, and largely contributes to the feeling that life is expanding in all directions. The role of dopamine is probably greatly associated with the awareness of time; Click mentioned once how Selegiline, a MAO-B inhibitor, induced a childlike desire for learning and discovery.

"The experience of time governs the way we behave, and our metabolism governs the way we experience time. Progesterone, as a central neurosteroid, is a crucial part of our metabolism that shapes our consciousness as it projects itself into time." - Ray

The positive associations people tend to hold about their childhood summer months which in hindsight seemed to be neverending is, I think, a yearning to return to our childlike metabolism, one where the perception of the idea of the future is replaced with the outward expansion of the present moment. The prevailing philosophy amongst the majority of adults that’s passed down to their children is to be wary of the limited amount of time they’ve been “allotted”, which I find is a projection of their metabolic state where time, year after year, increases in speed. If wisdom or elder advice is the articulation of what a healthy 11-year-old feels and experiences life to be, then restoring the latter, increasing the temperature of the brain, slowing the passage of time, and integrating yourself fully in the present can once again “restore the wholeness” that everyone has unknowingly made to abandon.

References

Du Noüy, P. L. (1936). Biological time.

Ferreira, V. F. M., Paiva, G. P., Prando, N., Graça, C. R., & Kouyoumdjian, J. A. (2016). Time perception and age. Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria, 74(4), 299–302. doi:10.1590/0004-282x20160025 

Hagura, N., Kanai, R., Orgs, G., & Haggard, P. (2012). Ready steady slow: action preparation slows the subjective passage of time. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1746), 4399–4406. doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.1339

Healy, K., McNally, L., Ruxton, G. D., Cooper, N., & Jackson, A. L. (2013). Metabolic rate and body size are linked with perception of temporal information. Animal Behaviour, 86(4), 685–696. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.06.018 

Sacks, O., & Kohl, M. (1970). INCONTINENT NOSTALGIA INDUCED BY L-DOPA. The Lancet, 295(7661), 1394. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(70)91297-3