1.1 Reading Comprehension Read the following magazine article then answer the questions follow: Time Flies or Crawls By Vicki Oransky Wittenstein Background Why do some activities seem to make time race by swiftly while other actions seem to drag? Scientists are busy exploring how the human brain influences the awareness of the passage of time. You are harnessed to a cable dangling 110 feet from the ground at Zero Gravity, a thrill park outside Dallas, Texas. The ride is called SCAD, short for Suspended Catch Air Device—a fitting name for one of the most frightening rides anywhere. Four narrow steel beams support you and the cable. You’re strapped in so that your back tilts to the ground and your face points to the sky. For a few moments you hover in the air. Ready? The cable is released. You plunge straight toward the ground, smacking into a net at a speed of 50 miles per hour (mph). Terrifying? You bet! What details will you remember about the fall? Will you be able to accurately guess how long it lasted? These are some of the questions that Dr. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, asked 23 SCAD volunteers as part of an experiment studying how people sense the passage of time. Dr. Eagleman is head of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He researches time perception in order to understand how the brain constructs our understanding of reality. Dr. Eagleman thinks that most of our thoughts, actions, and feelings run on autopilot and are not within our conscious control. Instead, they are actively constructed in the brain. “Think of a media star, like Justin Bieber during a concert,” Eagleman says. “He relies on an enormous team of people to do the lighting, sound, etc. Yet, all we see is Bieber singing. We don’t always realize the size of the machinery he depends on.” “Sometimes the summaries we receive do not tell the truth. . . .” Similarly, the neurons and circuits of the brain collect lots of information but provide us with just a summary of the important details, according to Eagleman. People are not always aware of all that occurs around them. Sometimes the summaries we receive do not tell the truth, or at least the complete story. The same holds true for time perception. “Let’s suppose you’re watching me clap my hands,” Eagleman says. “Hearing gets processed in your brain much faster than seeing. Yet when I clap, it appears as if you hear and see at the same time. That’s because the brain waits and collects all the information before serving up the best story of what happened in the outside world.” Although it may sound strange, by the time we perceive something in the world (for example, the clap), the event has already happened. “We are all living in the past,” Eagleman says. “Just as television networks wait a couple of seconds to air shows, we too wait before going ‘live.’ In the case of the brain, though, the wait is about a half a second.” Eagleman continually thinks up creative ways to study time perception. He hit upon the SCAD experiments when he remembered a terrifying experience of his own. As a young boy, he fell off the roof of a construction site, badly smashing his nose, and was raced to the emergency room. To this day, he can recount all the details of his fall, as if in slow motion: his foot slipping on the roof, and the brick floor looming below him, littered with nails. But what stands out in his mind most of all is the same quality shared by many riders of the SCAD—the feeling that the fall took forever, as in Alice in Wonderland, when Alice falls down the rabbit hole. “Of course I could have really hurt myself with that fall,” Eagleman says. “But it gave me a sense from an early age that time isn’t necessarily what we think it is, and that it’s warpable. So when I got into neuroscience, that was something that was always on my mind.” Why does time appear to slow down in life-threatening circumstances? Does fear actually cause the brain to work more slowly, or is something else happening? “I wanted to catch people in a terrifying moment and study them,” Eagleman says. “I couldn’t put them in a car accident or something like that. So, I thought, okay, I have to engineer an event.” First he took his lab to an amusement park, but the rides weren’t scary enough to experience a warping of time. “So I sent a graduate student, Chess Stetson, on a mission to find the scariest thing possible that was still safe.” The SCAD was the answer. A device called a chronometer was strapped to the wrists of the SCAD volunteers. While they were falling to the ground, they stared at the chronometer. “The chronometer flashes a number in such a way that the volunteers only see what’s flashing if they are seeing the world in slow motion,” Eagleman says. A hummingbird beats its wings multiple times per second. Eagleman compared the flashing numbers to challenging people to see the beats of a hummingbird’s wings. “Normally, when you look at a hummingbird’s wings you see a blur. But now, if we put you in a super-scary situation, can you actually see, in slow motion, the beats of the wings? Instead of wings, we flashed numbers on the SCAD chronometer.” The SCAD riders could not read the flashing numbers, so they did not see in slow motion. They also overstated the duration of their falls by about 36 percent. “How can both of these things be true?” Eagleman asks. “How can it be that you think it took a long time but you’re not seeing in slow motion?” The red spot in the X-ray indicates the location of the amygdala. It turns out that in terrifying moments a part of the brain called the amygdala works overtime, recording all the details of the experience. “It’s a trick of memory,” Eagleman says. “When you are in a scary situation your brain is writing down lots of information, and as a result it seems that [the situation] must have taken a very long time.” So our perception of the length of time that an event lasts can be distorted. Remember how slowly summers used to pass when you were a younger child? Time passed more slowly then because your brain was busily taking notes on all the new experiences you were having. When you grow older, though, life becomes more familiar. There is less new information for the brain to process, and the passage of time quickens. Another example of time distortion is what Eagleman calls the “oddball effect.” He tests this effect in his lab with a computer. A person stares at a series of images passing across a computer screen. Usually the image is the same, say, a brown shoe. But once in a while, a flower appears. Even though the shoe and the flower stay on the screen for the same amount of time, to the viewer, the flower remains longer. Why? Because the flower is novel, and when something is new the brain pays more attention. Then why does time pass so quickly while you are absorbed in taking a test? Wouldn’t your brain be engaged with novel information that would slow time down? “It turns out,” Eagleman explains, “that in order to be aware of time, you have to ask the question: Hey, how much time do I have left? When you’re fully engaged during a test or an afternoon where you’re having fun with friends, you’re not asking about how much time you have left.” Eagleman says that people have a general sense of time passing. “Normally, you’re always looking at your clock, or sort of aware of time,” he says. “But when you’re really involved in something, you forget to pay attention to time. And then when you do, suddenly you’re surprised that so much time has passed.” The opposite is true, though, when you’re on a long airplane flight, or waiting for a pot of water to boil. “You check the clock over and over again, and it seems like it’s taking such a long time. It’s so boring,” Eagleman says. There’s a difference, though, between how time is perceived as it unfolds in the present and how it’s perceived later, after the time has already passed. “Time perception and memory are very intertwined,” Eagleman says. “It depends on which direction you’re looking. When you look back on the passage of time, it’s exactly the opposite from how you experienced it initially. So at the end of that weekend you spent with friends, when you return to school on Monday, it feels like you were gone for a long time. And that boring, long airplane ride to your grandmother’s now seems short.” Huh? But why? “That retrospect part has to do with how much fun you can call up, how much memory you have about what happened,” Eagleman says. “During the flight you didn’t lay down new memories because there really wasn’t anything novel. But the time with your friends was fun, so your brain wrote down lots of new memories.” “Time flies on a day packed with activity. . . .” Time flies on a day packed with activity and when you’re learning lots of new things. “But later, it will seem longer and you’ll remember it more,” Eagleman says. “And when you look back at it at night, you’ll feel like it was a long, rich day.” So, although the brain actively constructs time, people have some control over how fast they sense time passing. If you want those vacations and weekends to last a long time, have lots of fun! 7.1.2 Practice A. After reading the magazine article carefully, answer the following questions: 1- What is the meaning of the following words in the text? a- neuroscientist: A neuroscientist is a person who studies the brain and the nervous system. b- neurons: A neuron is a cell in the nervous system that carries messages between the brain and the body parts. c- neuroscience: Neuroscience is any of the sciences that study the nervous system. d- retrospect: is the act of looking back on or contemplating things in the past. 2- What is the focus of Dr. Eagleman’s research? abcd- depth perception sound perception time perception distance perception 3- What main idea does the article convey about time perception? abcd- Our thoughts and feelings mildly affect our perception of how long an event lasts. Our thoughts and feelings have no affect on our perception of the duration of events.. Our thoughts and feelings definitely affect our perception of how long an event lasts. Our thoughts affect our perception of how long an event lasts; our feelings do not. 4- What point is made in using the example of viewers at a concert? abcd- Humans tend to to focus too much on their thoughts and feelings. Humans need to pay closer attention to their surroundings. Human brains are bombarded with too much information. Humans have little awareness of how the brain constructs thoughts and feelings. 5- What figurative language is used in the description of how the amygdala works? abcd- a personification simile metaphor onomatopoeia 6- How does memory influence the perception of time? abcd- The memory of either pleasant or unpleasant experiences tends to fade quite quickly. The memory of unpleasant experiences seems brief at first but over time, the perception becomes longer. The memory of pleasant experiences seems to be longer with more details; unpleasant experiences are briefer, less-detailed memories. The memory of unpleasant experiences is as long and detailed as events are. However, the memory of pleasant experiences is as short and sweet as events are.
