Groundbreaking neuroscience confirms what Sigmund Freud first theorized: “what we believe to be the objective reality surrounding us is actually formed by our subconscious.”
David Eagleman, who wrote and filmed a 2015 PBS documentary on our “inner cosmos,” explains:
“Neuroscience has drifted off a little bit from the directions that Freud was going in terms of the interpretations of whether your unconscious mind is sending you particular hidden signals and so on.
But the idea that there’s this massive amount happening under the hood, that part was correct and so Freud really nailed that. And he lived before the blossoming of modern neuroscience, so he was able to do this just by outside observation and looking at how people acted.”
To go even deeper down the rabbit hole, David made numerous experiments on our perception of time. What he discovered is quite the breakthrough both, in our understanding of time and our perception of it.
So we come to a conclusion that our perception of time depends on how much energy our brain makes use of to create memories. Or, in other words, the speed of our time perception equals the density of our memories.
Our brain writes memories much densely when we are in a life threatening situation. This is probably a self defensive mechanism of our bodies to get as much details as we can about the dangerous situation, so we can make the best choice and get out alive.
Retrospectively, when we look at that particular situation we have much more details than any other memory of a similar time frame. So, because we have so much details, it seems that the moment lasted for a very long time, that’s the only interpretation our brain can make.
As David Eagleman says, “Time, your assessment of how long something took, has a lot to do with how much energy your brain has to burn during the event and how much footage you have of the event.”
Surprisingly, our subconscious plays even a bigger role in the way we perceive reality than we already gave it credit for. It determines what kind of details we perceive, what they mean, what options are available… It even determines the way we perceive time.
Our subconscious shapes and colors our reality. Therefore, if you want to fix something about your life, in all probability your answer hides somewhere inside your Inner Cosmos.
