The Speed of Thought

Over the past several months I've been obsessed with the idea of time travel. The concept generally comes up when I'm operating on the mental redline, integrating lots of ideas at once or operating across multiple objectives in a short amount of time. Here is what I believe...

When the mind grows heated, time tends to distort.

I don't know exactly how to explain it, but I'm quite certain it's occuring. Often I don't even think about it until after speaking with someone else or passing some point of reference (ie: "has it been only 2 days?"). Einstein proposed a similar idea in his theory of special relatively, namely that as an object approaches the speed of light, a person traveling at that speed and an observer will see the same event, but at different times and distances.

Everyone's had these moments. When you're moving really fast. Working on something very hard. Frequently we brush this off quickly quipping, time flies when you're having fun! Yet what if there's some actual truth to this? What if thought-time exceeds the speed of light and alters what is possible in the same timespan? Tap when I start sounding looney.

What I refer to here is the idea of differentiating thought-time from real-time.

Central to this distinction are dreams. Consider what happens when you sleep. You're real tired, crash on the couch, and wake up feeling as if you've been asleep for weeks. Perhaps you had a dream with some extravagant journey to some elaborate location, for some absurd purpose.

Then you look at your clock. 20 minutes have passed.

In the course of time it took your mind to process weeks worth of experience and adventures, your physical body has experienced only 1/3 of an hour. How is this possible? An article over at Indiana U suggests that there is no difference between dream-time and real-time. I disagree. Actually, the only thing the study seems to suggest is that what we can recall and what our conscious mind can communicate is roughly equivalent to the time that has actually passed. This is not surprising. In fact, even if the study did suggest that our mind only concocted up an amount of experience equivalent to what I could imagine in real-time, the fact is that it still processed through that a longer amount of time in shorter span of space.

conscious... subconscious.
thought-time... real-time.
perception... reality.

I want to explore this vein further, for now it's back to my time machine (sleep). Thoughts?