{"id":278,"date":"2023-01-05T02:36:27","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T02:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/?p=278"},"modified":"2023-07-03T20:40:51","modified_gmt":"2023-07-04T00:40:51","slug":"times-gravitas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/?p=278","title":{"rendered":"Time’s Gravity"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/span> 17<\/span> Minute Read<\/span><\/span>\n

[This post was originally published in three parts: First Person Metacognitive<\/em>; Then, Now, & Yet<\/em>; and Nowland. <\/em>All three parts have been re-consolidated into this post.]<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Part I. First Person Metacognitive<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I have a full-scale map of the United States. One mile equals one mile. Last summer I folded it. <\/p>Steven Wright <\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Before he retired to minister to people\u2019s hearts in a more figurative way, world-renown cardiovascular surgeon and medical pioneer Dr. Russell M. Nelson was part of a team that developed the heart-lung machine. That game-changing device safely allowed the human heart to stop beating during life-saving procedures that could only be performed on a still heart. What if, like the heart, time<\/em> could stop long enough for us to perform life-changing procedures on ourselves? Swap out a bad habit for a better one; learn a new skill or profession; or soften the hardness of our figurative hearts. Wouldn\u2019t that be a scientific breakthrough worth its effort?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1970s, I was introduced to three-time worldwide Formula One racing champion Jackie Stewart. A mutual friend serviced his vintage roadsters, which on sunny afternoons, Sir Jackie sometimes drove from his hillside villa in Begnins, Switzerland, into a town called Nyon on Lake Geneva, where I was living at the time. Whenever he cruised by in his relatively slow-moving convertibles\u2014my friend had customized the cars\u2019 windscreens after his colleague had chopped their tops\u2014the cars stood out against their modern counterparts. Nearly 50 years later, I can still picture him puttering around town. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stewart, who became a racing commentator after his retirement, spoke of how, for high-speed precision drivers, at certain moments of a big race, time slows down. In crucial situations requiring split-second timing\u2014think negotiating a sharp turn at speed\u2014an experienced driver can perform a series of intricate maneuvers in what for us might seem like the sub-second time. But for Stewart and experienced drivers like him, our split seconds might pass like full minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music producer George Martin would sometimes record instruments on Beatles\u2019 songs an octave lower and at half-speed to change their tone\u2014think Martin\u2019s \u2018harpsichord\u2019 sound on In My Life<\/em>; he\u2019s really playing the piano\u2014and to allow band members to get the near-impossible, rapid fingering just right before adding back the instrument at double speed\u2014sample Martin\u2019s and George Harrison\u2019s piano and guitar \u2018solo\u2019 on A<\/em> Hard Day\u2019s Night<\/em>. To speed up time, Martin first slowed it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another way to blunt time is to slim the amount of information the brain is required to process at speed. In my last post, Once a Mouse<\/em>…<\/a>, I wrote of how when first learning a complex skill, like driving, the brain intakes a vast amount of visual cues and executes manual actions more slowly when it first encounters them. After these myriad steps have been sufficiently repeated, the brain compiles them to perform on-demand, automatically, like a champion driver or virtuoso guitarist, at what might seem to others as twice their normal speed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Thinking Fast and Slow<\/a><\/em>, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman refers to the brain\u2019s two processing mechanisms\u2014the slow, introductory learning one and the rapid-fire muscle-memory-like execution of the fully learned but now \u2018forgotten\u2019 one. System 1<\/em>, the racing hare, strips information from the more ponderous System 2<\/em>, the tortoise, to make it available for later use, but at rates so fast we don’t even realize they are happening\u2014think driving away from your home and not remembering whether you had closed the garage door behind you. The older we become, the more events and processes we repeat\u2014driving to the grocery store, enjoying the same television characters, visiting the same vacation spot\u2014the more unobtrusively memorized System 2<\/em> routines make their way to the rapid processing System 1<\/em> part of our brain. With so much familiarity deeply tucked away as rapid-firing memories we don\u2019t even register, doesn\u2019t it stand to reason that the memorized life\u2014now predominantly a System 1<\/em> phenomenon\u2014will appear to fly by our current peephole of life faster and faster? Is that why time flies as we age? Why did the year that just ended\u2014I\u2019m writing this on New Year\u2019s Day\u2014feel shorter than the previous year? (Note to Scott the Director<\/em> from Paris, Kansas<\/em><\/a>: Try to change up your life every day, every week, to at least give yourself the impression<\/em> of living longer.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like the surgeon who must stop a beating heart in order to repair it, you will learn in some of the posts that follow of a hack I sometimes use for stopping time long enough to fiddle with certain aspects of my past, present, and future self.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I got my first and long-wished-for tape recorder for Christmas in 1969. After everyone I knew tired of speaking into its little hand-held microphone, I set to recording songs I liked that played on my clock radio. Not as straightforward as streaming your favorite music onto computers and phones, back in the day you had to wait for your local radio station to play a song and hope you could pick out its intro quick enough to press the record button before hearing \u201cTom, get your plane right on time…\u201d The only other available musical source, for me anyway, was the public library where if you were old enough\u2014I had just turned 12\u2014you could bring home an entire album, put it on your record player, lay the puny microphone aside the puny speaker, and, Voila, \u201cstreamed\u201d music, 1969-style. But only if your local library carried vinyl record albums you liked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word digital<\/em> sounds high-tech enough but all it means for music is that instead of doing their best to replicate the waves of sound coming from our favorite band, computers, which understand only the digits one and zero, cannot possibly combine enough digits to describe every single point of every single nanosecond of every single sound wave of every single voice or instrument of a simple song like The Only Living Boy in New York<\/em>. (And that\u2019s not even considering the computational gyrations and massive storage required to create digital video, let alone a hologram as rich as, say, Paris, Kansas<\/a>.) But computers are anything but stupid; they don\u2019t even try to store or solve the impossibly large. Instead of replicating analog sound waves (or light waves) into a faithful analogy of the real thing\u2014think \u2018one mile equals one mile\u2019\u2014computers extract snippets of the original and then take massive shortcuts to repurpose them as a ton of numbers (ones and zeros for on and off) that can be eventually converted back into analog waves before aiming them at your eardrums. Audio engineers call these snippets samples<\/em>\u2014think Disney animators drawing Mickey\u2019s hands, first at 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM on the tugboat helm; then at noon and 6:00\u2014which, instead of hand-drawing all the transition steps from one state to the next, computers triangulate to synthesize the \u201cinbetween<\/em>\u201d space\u2014think the brain filling in the blanks between the flickering pages of a flipbook. When it comes to brains and computers, sometimes all we humans need do is thumb a card deck, blink an eye, turn a dial, or click a button. Someone or something else will fill in the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the world’s offstage.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The temporal momentum of a full-scale map of everything that ever happened or will yet happen is unstoppable. But like the surgeon who must stop a beating heart in order to repair it, you will learn in some of the posts that follow of a hack I sometimes use for stopping time long enough to fiddle with certain aspects of my past, present, and future self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To prepare, go outside right now and try the following experiment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking straight ahead at whatever horizon you can find, picture a heads-up display\u2014think visual overlay of everything you can see this instant from the peephole behind your eyes. At first, you notice nothing different. You\u2019re looking out from the same one-of-a-kind, edge-to-edge point of vantage as you would every day. But see that nearly invisible clock at the bottom of the display? With your hand, blinking eyes, or just your mind, monkey with it until it displays an hour between 10 AM and 2 PM\u2014think midday, Mickey\u2019s hands on the tugboat wheel, your first driving lesson. Grounded in the moment, you now note that two other panels, one to its left, the other to its right, flank the straight-ahead panel you are gazing at. Orienting yourself to the horizon and your preferred navigational technique, change one of the times on the panel of your choosing to sunrise<\/em>, the other to sunset<\/em>. Notice you are now gazing simultaneously at both solar events, their midway point\u2014midday\u2014sandwiched between them. Pretty cool, n’est-ce pas<\/em>? But before you get distracted by either beauty, come back to the center panel and double-blink it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wo! What happened? It got larger\u2014so large, in fact, that the sunrise and sunset panels you were just admiring got pushed beyond your peripheral vision. You are now looking straight into, and only at, the present moment. Like Jackie Stewart, George Martin, and every poet who wrote or sang about turning back time\u2014Jim Croce and Cher come to mind\u2014you are alone in the present, looking at a single image, like the one you see every day. But this time, there\u2019s something slightly odd going on. If there are any clouds on the horizon, they are strangely still. Where there might have been a passing bird or squirrel (or car or plane), there is nothing. Humor me and raise your hand in front of your face; then try wiggling your fingers. They don\u2019t wiggle? You can’t even see your hand? That’s because just now, you have managed not only to slow down time but stop it in its tracks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The OED defines Metacognition as \u201cAwareness and understanding of one\u2019s own thought processes, especially regarded as having a role in directing those processes.\u201d Like a heart stopped for repair, the only way for the metacognitive part of our brain to focus on the cognitive part\u2014think the part doing the thinking the other part is thinking about<\/em>\u2014is for there to be a schism in the way time works for each part of the brain. Wearing your new metacognitive head\u2019s up display, you are, in effect, standing outside of time, gazing at a freeze-frame picture of your mind\u2019s eye\u2014your backyard, Lake Geneva, or the last frame of life to hit your optic nerve before Time exited stage left and right. In the nanosecond it did so, you broke free from what I call Time\u2019s Gravity<\/em>\u2014the backward pull of the past, the forward tug of the future. Like a stopped heart, you are, in that moment, at your most changeful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his authorized biography, Insights of a Prophet\u2019s Life<\/em>, Dr. Nelson explains that in medical school:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

We learned that if we added potassium chloride to blood flowing into the coronary arteries, thereby altering the normal sodium\/potassium ratio, the heart would stop beating instantly. Then, when we nourished the heart with blood that had a normal sodium\/potassium ratio, the heart would spring back to its normal beating pattern. Literally we could turn the heart off long enough to repair it and then turn it back on again<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

To a far lesser, though similarly profound degree, the ideas I’ll be batting about in this blog, changeable life elements visible in the metacognitive heads-up display you have just given a dry run, enable us to perform, like Dr. Nelson\u2019s life-changing contribution to medical science, open-bone<\/em>, open-wit<\/em>, open-gut<\/em>, open-flash<\/em>, and open-outbreak<\/em> \u2018surgeries\u2019 we might never have supposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part II. Then, Now, & Yet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In First Person Metacognitive<\/em>, we considered that in a blink, an imaginary heads-up window into three phases of time\u2019s arrow\u2014its past, present, and future\u2014could be superimposed over our mind\u2019s eye with dimension-bending effect. In the center of the display was Now<\/em>, set up to feel like midday in the center of our trek through this middle distance, Act Two of a three-act play. To the right or left of Now<\/em>, depending on how we prefer to orient the invisible passing of time\u2014we might as conveniently have situated them above and below center stage\u2014we imagined this morning’s sunrise as a Then<\/em>. On the opposite side of Now<\/em>, we imagined the coming sunset in what we will call a Yet<\/em>. And when we double-blinked at the midday-Now<\/em> section of the display, Then<\/em> and Yet<\/em> disappeared offstage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next time you take your seat in a live theater\u2014I\u2019m skipping large swathes of history here but before there were heads up displays there were movies, and before movies, stage plays\u2014consider that in Greek, the language of some of our earliest theatrical performances, the words theater<\/em> and theory<\/em> share the same root. To the ancients, where you sat in the theater determined your theory<\/em> about the show you came to watch. That’s because on the stage, and in its living analog\u2014life itself\u2014space matters. You’ll know this firsthand if you’ve ever sat behind a structural pillar in Ford’s theater in Washington, DC, or in the last row of a second balcony at a Broadway musical. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1995, my sister Emily and her friend Alice had purchased tickets well in advance to see Ralph Fiennes’ Tony-Award-winning performance of Hamlet<\/em>. When she learned I was visiting a client in Manhattan that same winter’s day, she called to ask if I could find a last minute ticket to join them. During the performance, as Emily and Alice, from their third row center orchestra seats, developed a theory about whether the Prince of Denmark might be losing his mind that night. But from where I sat, my back against a frosty, exterior, cinderblock wall behind the last row of the upper balcony\u2014I was looking virtually straight down at the stage three stories below\u2014my theory of Shakespeare’s tragedy that evening was that Mr. Fiennes was definitely losing his hair. (Ba dum bum!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I write or direct for musical theater, before I begin rehearsals I take stock of all the space beneath and behind the proscenium<\/em>. Another Greek word, a proscenium<\/em> frames the entrance in the fourth wall through which the audience looks forward (pro<\/em>) onto the scene (scenium<\/em>). The proscenium<\/em> is sometimes depicted as an arch that frames an indoor stage and, more importantly, separates the Now<\/em> of the performance, from its Then<\/em> and Yet<\/em> offstage acts. I need to know the stage’s length\u2014think its side-to-sided dimension\u2014to gauge how much room the players have, as Shakespeare put it, to \u201cstrut and fret their hour upon” it, in such a way that I can shape your theory of the play from where you sit. I need to know its front-to-back distance to gauge the depth of the playing floor, essentially how much room I have to signal to you which characters it will be important for you to watch at any given moment. Finally, though usually not as important\u2014most stages are plenty tall enough\u2014I need to estimate height, the bottom-to-top clearance of the proscenium<\/em> opening, in case any needed set piece will require a certain amount of headroom; and to make sure, even if you’re sitting on the front row, you don’t have to crane your neck to enjoy the show. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In geometry\u2014or if you don\u2019t like math, think Battleship<\/em>, or dream home design\u2014the distances of length, depth, and height are tracked on an imaginary grid made up of three axes which we label with the letters ‘X<\/em>‘, ‘Y<\/em>‘, and ‘Z<\/em>‘. Along the X<\/em> axis, we measure side-to-side, or horizontally; up the Y<\/em> axis, bottom-to-top, or vertically; and on the Z<\/em> axis depth, or front-to-back. When we think of the idea of a three-dimensional object\u2014the shape of a car, a house, or even the negative space enclosed within a stage set\u2014we can conceive of its shape in X-Y-Z space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew a man, his brain so small
He couldn’t think of nothing at all
Not the same as you and me<\/p>Paul Simon. A Simple Desultory Philippic<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In his 1884 novel, Flatland<\/em>: a Romance of Many Dimensions<\/em>, Edwin Abbott, imagines a world with only two of the three axes we experience in X-Y-Z space. In Flatland, every object, including people, can be measured side-to-side, and front to back; but not top-to-bottom. There is, in effect, no Y axis anywhere in Flatland. Like the title suggests, there is nothing but flatness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The denizens of Flatland\u2014Abbott calls them Flatlanders<\/em>\u2014can perceive length (along the X axis) and depth (running perpendicular to the X axis along the Z axis)\u2014think objects you might approach, or frighten off\u2014as horizontally height-less lines of length and depth, a reality that takes readers living in X-Y-Z space some getting used to. Once all the disorientation of such a world is explained\u2014an effort that takes Abbott half the short novel to lay out\u2014a notable Flatlander makes a journey outside home territory to a higher-order civilization. Spaceland<\/em>\u2014think the normal-to-us three-dimensional (X-Y-Z) world you and I inhabit right now, like for the escapee from Plato\u2019s cave, is an almost inconceivable revelation to the Flatlander. Once oriented in Spaceland<\/em>, the visitor then speculates about a fourth dimension called Sphereland<\/em>. In that almost supernatural existence, objects have not only length, height, and depth, they possess a fourth axis (call it W) that somehow\u2014you\u2019ll need a really flexible brain here, or what some have called a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional object; think Madeline L\u2019Engle\u2019s Tesseract; to picture it\u2014runs orthogonal to the X-Y-Z axes of Spaceland<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later in the story, Abbott\u2019s hero, like Plato\u2019s escapee, attempts to convince his unenlightened brother who did not make the journey, that one of Spaceland\u2019s<\/em> overwhelming virtues is aboveness<\/em>, the ability to know, for example, what is inside someone else\u2019s home without having to enter it. \u201cYou just look down at it from above!\u201d he says to his uninitiated and still height-less brother (whatever \u2018down\u2019 and \u2018above\u2019 might mean.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody in Nowland<\/em> behaves in any fashion. Without the gravitational pull of the past on the future, and the future on the past, behavior, as we have come to know it in our world, cannot exist there. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Exactly 100 years after Abbott wrote his classic novel, Rudy Rucker answered back from the future with his 1984 commentary on, and extension to, Flatland<\/em>, called The Fourth Dimensio<\/em>n. After postulating that the wrong sort of Spacelander could easily break into a Flatlander\u2019s home through its non-ceiling, and that a Sphereland doctor could perform open-heart surgery on her Spaceland patient without breaking his skin, Rucker encourages us to imagine dimensions beyond our own\u2014just not too fiercely lest in doing so we lose our grip on the mental and emotional guardrails of the homeland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A little less than four decades after Rucker\u2019s brain-teaser, let\u2019s introduce a new fictional place. Timeland<\/em>. Just as Abbott\u2019s and Rucker\u2019s spatial geography comprised three unique states\u2014Flatland, Spaceland, and Sphereland\u2014Timeland<\/em>, not a spatial but a temporal world, is made up of Nowland<\/em>, Thenland<\/em>, and Yetland<\/em>. Nowland<\/em> was introduced in my previous post. It is the object viewed in the midday heads-up display\u2014the present\u2014completely isolated from its sister past and present peepholes. Like the X-Y-Z span of Spaceland, let\u2019s assign to Timeland<\/em> similar coordinates\u2014call them T-N-Y (Then-Now-Yet<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, just as Sphereland\u2019s fourth-dimensional inhabitants possess what seem like super powers when compared to those of Spacelanders\u2014and who, likewise, operate at a higher order when compared to Flatlanders\u2014Timelanders<\/em> have superpowers with respect to each of their subregions as well. Like Rucker\u2019s Sphereland surgeon who can perform open-heart surgery on a Spacelander without breaking his skin, Timelanders<\/em> can operate on the past, present, and future of Thenlanders<\/em>, Nowlanders<\/em>, and Yetlanders<\/em> with impunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Living in Timeland<\/em> will take some getting used to. Like the initial befuddlement of the Flatlander graduating to Spaceland, as you peer ‘down’ at your Nowland<\/em> life through a zero-temporal-gravity peephole, you get an instant sense of your new superpower. For one thing you can see yourself as you would be seen by someone living outside of time. When you double-blinked on the midday display, you blinked away more than just the concept of past and future. Entering Nowland<\/em>, you experience an absolute present, one devoid not just of past memory and future intention, but of any sort of behavior whatever. Since all action begins and ends outside of the present moment\u2014all the world’s offstage\u2014what is left of now is really just Now<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hold onto your smartwatch…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part III. Nowland<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This sentence no verb. <\/p>Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas<\/em> <\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In considering what it might be like to stop time, we begin with silliness. Were we to visit Nowland<\/em>, I would not be writing this sentence. (Nor would this sentence, as Hofstadter once self-reflected, be writing itself.) As a timeful event that progresses from stillness to movement, back to stillness, writing is not possible in a place where time does not progress in any direction. But even if writing could somehow take place in an action-free world, there would definitely be a problem with the verbs. As we learn in school, verbs are action words, but where there is no action…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most English verbs are said to be dynamic or fientive<\/em>, meaning that they progress, exhibit duration. I drive a car. I reset my clock. I confuse readers when I turn time inside out<\/em>. A small handful of verbs called stative verbs have no duration; they describe only state. I like you. I am confusing. You are well. <\/em>The difference between I like you <\/em>and I touch you<\/em> is that touching has a duration\u2014even a finger touch to the elbow persists for a beat\u2014whereas liking<\/em> just, well, is<\/em>. In Nowland<\/em>, I can like<\/em> you. I just can\u2019t touch<\/em> you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get around the confusion of stative verbs, the Chinese just got rid of them\u2014turned them all into adjectives. The common Chinese greeting, \u201cNi hao?\u201d is the equivalent of the English \u201cHow are you?\u201d But word-for-word, \u201dNi hao\u201d is directly translated as \u201cYou well?\u201d The Chinese stative verb Hao<\/em> acts as the English adjective Well<\/em>. (Hofstadter correct.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you’ve already seen, donning your heads-up-display and double-blinking on midday, you see no action before you, only state. In Nowland<\/em>, when I am confused\u2014confusion is, in Chinese, a stative verb\u2014I am not acting in a confused way, I\u2019m just confused<\/em>. I cannot change my persistently occurring confusion because with stative verbs, nothing persists. Having stopped time, the heartbeat of dynamic verbs\u2014turning them essentially into adjectives\u2014I am, while trapped in Nowland<\/em>, just a mixed-up person. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote all that to write this. No one living in Nowland<\/em> behaves. I don\u2019t by that mean everyone behaves badly. Far from it. Nobody in Nowland<\/em> behaves in any fashion. Without the gravitational pull of the past on the future, and the future on the past, behavior, as we have come to know it in our normal world, cannot exist there. In Nowland<\/em> there is only state. And that is exactly the condition we want our lives to be in when we lay them on the operating table and ask for a scalpel. For us to examine every detail, there must be no wiggling. Time must stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Hippocrates before us, if any theory we observe on the stage of our Then<\/em>, our Now<\/em>, and our Yet<\/em> is ever not to our liking, well, that’s exactly where changefulness prefers to make its grand entrance.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When Kahneman\u2019s System One<\/em>, the part of our brain that converts learned stimuli and patterns\u2014think how to drive a car\u2014into compiled muscle memory, whatever form the brain compacts that memory into can have no time associated with it. In the vernacular of systems, data waiting to be summoned for processing is merely \u201cdata at rest.\u201d As already mentioned, several aspects of being\u2014its physicality, thought, emotion, etc.\u2014will be explored in subsequent posts like a heart at rest. But there is another caveat that differentiates identity under the knife from a beating heart. When sampling analog sound and video in order to convert it into ones and zeros, the first dimension computer engineers strip out of the data is explicate time. This is because, to represent time as an analogy of real duration, every second must be recorded in storage, which, practically speaking, is impossible. Wait. Every second? What am I saying? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traditional motion picture cameras record 24 frames\u2014or pictures\u2014per second, or FPS. (Going back to the flip-book analogy, a motion picture frame is nothing more than a single flip-book drawing.) Modern films\u2014think parts of Avatar: The Way of Water<\/em>\u2014are sometimes filmed at a higher frame rate, 48 FPS, to eliminate blur and flicker from fast action sequences. (For slower scenes, Avatar<\/em>\u2019s director James Cameron still shot 48 FPS but emulated the 24 FPS frame rate by taking a duplicate picture of every other frame and then playing all frames at 48 FPS so as not to disorient the brain when switching from action to non-action scenes during playback. Is your head spinning, anyway?) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can 24-, 48-, or even 60- or 120-FPS motion pictures be analogously rendered into ones and zeroes when converted into digital formats? The answer, at least today, is that they can’t. Not without prohibitively large data storage capabilities. What do engineers do when converting that kind of frame rate to stored muscle memory, so to speak? They strip away time, choosing to sample a burst of pictures here and there\u2014think Mickey at the tugboat helm; now he turns it left, now right\u2014computer algorithms generating the necessary inbetween<\/em>s on demand. Assuming that the brain, abundant but not infinite, would also seek such economies of input, why would time not be stripped out of what is stored there as well and only added back when recalled? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we will do in Nowland<\/em> is pretty much the same as what a video editor would do when zooming in on a single frame motion picture frame\u2014picture Mickey’s hands at 10 and 2\u2014that is, strip away all in-between motion coming before or after, to get a precise look at the full reality of a single frame of life without the pull of time\u2019s gravity. But in the process, the surgeon\/editor will sacrifice information\u2014all the inbetweens<\/em>\u2014in exchange for raw, un-fiddled access. Unlike open-heart surgery, life-splicing, like digital sound, and video compression and transmission, is at best an incomplete compromise. This is why it would be far easier to form a good habit in the first place than to try to rectify a poor one later. But where’s the changefulness in that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this post I’ve made a fuss about an idea called Nowland<\/em>, particularly how time there stands still. But here’s the thing about Timeland<\/em>: there is no time in any of its countries. That is because, like the superhuman species that traveled from Abbott’s Flatland to his Spaceland and on to his Sphereland, I experience all of Timeland<\/em> from within my Nowland<\/em> display. From it, I double-blink left and behold Thenland<\/em>, and double-blink right to see Yetland<\/em>. From my metacognitive stance I observe, and to some extent, experience, the past, present, and the future from a timeless perch. It some respects then, Timeland<\/em> is one gigantic Now<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A place in Thenland<\/em> I sometimes visit is the spring of 1963 when there occurred a tragic accident involving several members of my neighborhood just after turned six-years-old. On the 30th anniversary of that accident, its account was published as part of a memorial erected to its victims near the site where 13 people, most of whom I knew, were killed when a truck in whose open back they were traveling overturned when climbing an overly steep mountainside. What I learned in the stillness of time as I carefully studied the published account was that a key fact I remember being told at the time, that those who died had gotten into the truck because they were tired of hiking, was just not true. For three decades I had understood that the older brothers and fathers of my friends had died because of a hasty decision made in a moment of weakness. But the article obliterated my sure knowledge of the event when it stated that the truck boarded by those who died had been chartered by the group months ahead of the hiking trip. The new information was at odds with the perspective I had harbored, based on what I was certain<\/em> was accurate information, for 30 years. Today, further years on from reading the published account, I am still re-processing a theory I formed while seated in a point of vantage that obscured my view of that by-now ancient theater. Standing up from my original seat to change my places, I can now look back at that event and view it as an entirely different play. That’s why I frequently visit Nowland<\/em>, to look upon my frozen past, present and future from a point of vantage that allows me to alter it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(To read more about that event, and what investigators determined were the correct facts of that tragedy, you’ll have to wait for me to write my version. Or you can read about it here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coming full circle from a previous post<\/a>, if our old friend and physick Hippocrates had got hold of our heads-up display of Nowland<\/em>, declaring the past would be for him getting the Then<\/em> as accurate as possible. Diagnosing the present would be to look more scrupulously at ourselves as we exist in the Now<\/em>. Foretelling the future would combine crystal clarity about the Then<\/em>, with the sharpest focus he could bring to bear on the Now<\/em>, in order to make the most reasonable extrapolations in his power as he foretold the future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Hippocrates before us, if any theory we observe on the stage of our Then<\/em>, our Now<\/em>, and our Yet<\/em> is ever not to our liking, well, that’s exactly where changefulness prefers to make its grand entrance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/span> 17<\/span> Minute Read<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[This post was originally published in three parts: First Person Metacognitive; Then, Now, & Yet; and Nowland. All three parts have been re-consolidated into this post.] Part I. First Person Metacognitive I have a full-scale map of the United States. One mile equals one mile. Last summer I folded it. Steven Wright Before he retired to minister to people\u2019s hearts in a more figurative way, world-renown cardiovascular surgeon and medical pioneer Dr. Russell M. Nelson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-changefulness"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}