A Second is Subjective
How many seconds are there in a lifetime? 10^9 sec
A second is an arbitrary time unit, but one that is based on our experience. Our visual system is bombarded by snapshots at a rate of around three per second, caused by rapid eye movements called saccades. Athletes often win or lose a race by a fraction of a second. If you earned a dollar for every second in your life, you would be a billionaire. However, a second can feel like a minute in front of an audience, and a quiet weekend can disappear in a flash. When I was a child, a summer seemed to last forever, but now the summer is over almost before it begins. William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older. Perhaps life is lived on a logarithmic time scale, compressed toward the end.
Notes:
Terrence Sejnowski on how a moment of time is a subjective experience that grows longer the more novelty is packed into it.
Folksonomies: information entropy perception time
Taxonomies:
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Concepts:
Empiricism (0.937560): dbpedia | freebase
Time (0.891714): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Visual system (0.823643): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Concepts in metaphysics (0.779790): dbpedia
Measuring instrument (0.771351): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Visual perception (0.747595): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
A Lifetime (0.711519): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Ayumi Hamasaki (0.711208): website | dbpedia | freebase | yago | musicBrainz

