This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Mar 2008, by Jeremy Price.
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10 Mar 08
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But the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.
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Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time.
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To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement.
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Time seems to expand when our senses are aroused.
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The brain’s inclination to distort time is one reason we so often feel we have too little of it.
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Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.
Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.
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In scrambling to use time to the hilt, we wind up with less of it.
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The remedy is to liberate ourselves from Franklin’s equation. Time is not money but “the element in which we exist,” as Joyce Carol Oates put it more than two decades ago (in a relatively leisurely era). “We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.”
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