Saturday, February 20, 2010

Different aspects of time

I wonder what it would be like to experience time this way.  What recollections I have of my early childhood are a few fleeting, vivid impressions that make no sense.
Prior to the age of five, children appear to experience time in a different manner. They are perfectly capable of "forgetting" events that they experienced a minute ago, as well as their mental state when the experience occurred. They seem to think associatively, closer perhaps to the hypnagogic state that one drifts into just before falling asleep, than to one that is ordered around a timeline with a past, present, and future.

Gopnik attempts to penetrate what this different form of consciousness is like. She describes a "false belief" experiment in which children see a closed candy box that, in fact, is filled with pencils:

The children are understandably both surprised and disappointed by this discovery. But then we asked what they thought was in the box when they first saw it. Although they had discovered the truth with great surprise only moments before, they still said that they had always known the box was full of pencils. They had entirely forgotten their earlier false belief.

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