Book | The River of Consciousness

In his botanical writings, Darwin found powerful evidence for evolution and natural selection by pursuing meaning (the immediate sense — like use or purpose — rather than ultimate meaning). In doing so, Darwin transformed botany itself from a purely descriptive discipline into an evolutionary science. In fact, botany was the first evolutionary science. Darwin's botanical research led the way for all the other evolutionary sciences and cultivated, in the words of Theodosius Dobzhansky, the insight that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Darwin called On the Origin of Species "one long argument." His botanical works, by contrast, were personal, lyrical, less systematic, and achieved their effect more through observation, experiment, and demonstration than through argument. According to Francis Darwin, Asa Gray is said to have remarked, "If Orchids had been published before On the Origin of Species, Darwin would have been canonized by natural theologians rather than cursed." 34




Linus Pauling's mother came up to me and explained "what those bees, with their legs covered in yellow pollen, were doing." Then she said, "Bees and flowers depend on each other."

Most of the flowers in the garden had a lovely fragrance and beautiful color, but there was one exception. There were two magnolia trees, and they bloomed flowers that were large but only white in color and had no scent. Yet when the magnolia blossoms opened in full, tiny beetles would crawl into them. Mother explained, "Magnolia trees are very ancient flowering plants. They appeared almost 100 million years ago, when insects like bees had not yet evolved. Since there were no bees, color and fragrance weren't necessary, so they entrusted the delivery of pollen to the beetles that happened to be wandering around. Bees and butterflies and (colored, fragrant) flowers were still waiting their turn — they would evolve, very gradually, over millions of years." The idea of "a world without bees and butterflies, without the fragrance and color of flowers" filled me with awe.

The concept of "eons of time," and the power of "changes that are individually small and undirected, but, when accumulated, can create a new world (an extraordinarily rich and varied world)" — were addictive. The theory of evolution gave most people a profound sense of meaning and satisfaction (something belief in a divine plan had failed to provide). The world that had been hidden behind a veil now had a transparent windowpane, and through it we could look into the entire history of life.




On the opposite side of The Time Machine stands The New Accelerator. This novel flips the perspective and tells the story of a drug that increases the speed of human perception, thought, and metabolism. The drug's developer and narrator takes the drug himself and wanders through a glaciated world, pouring out strange observations.42




A few years later, while attending Oxford University, I read William James's Principles of Psychology, and in the chapter elegantly titled "The Perception of Time," I found the following:

We assume that the number of events any given animal perceives in a given amount of time is roughly constant. But there are good reasons to think the number of events perceived in a given time can differ greatly between species. Von Baer, fascinated by the influence of these species-specific differences on "awareness of nature's cycles," devoted himself to calculating that influence numerically.

Humans perceive only about ten events per second; suppose that, instead of ten, we could perceive 10,000 events. If the number of events we can perceive in a lifetime is constant, then since the number of perceived events has multiplied a thousandfold, our lifespan would be reduced to one-thousandth. We would live less than a month, and would know that the seasons change only through books — never sensing it ourselves. A person born in winter would have to take it on faith that there is a hot summer (the way we believe there was a hot Carboniferous geological period). The motion of the world would be so slow that we couldn't even infer it, let alone see it with our senses. The sun, for example, would appear to remain fixed in the sky, and the moon would appear to barely change shape.

But now invert the assumption. Suppose the number of events we perceive in a given time were reduced to one-thousandth. Then our lifespan would multiply a thousandfold..    .44



A few years after that, while reading Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind, I came across the following passage: "A place that does not change as time passes — a perfect quiet that exists eternally beyond clocks and calendars, where human existence, harried and gasping under time, comes silently to rest. This little non-time space, holding its ground in the midst of time!" I knew exactly what she was talking about.47




However innate their gifts, elite athletes master high-level skills through many years of intensive practice and training. At first, conscious effort and focus are required to acquire the fine techniques and timing, but at a certain point the skill and its neural representation seep deep into the nervous system and become a second nature. At that level, conscious effort or decision is no longer needed. Thus the brain operates automatically on one side, and on the other forms a perception of time that is elastic — it can be compressed or extended.

In the 1960s, the neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet was studying how simple motor decisions are made when he discovered that "a brain signal indicating a decision is detected before one is even conscious of any cue, and the lag is several hundred milliseconds." The 100-meter sprint champion lifts his body and runs five or six meters before he is even aware that the starting gun has fired. He kicks off the starting blocks 130 milliseconds after the gunshot,

whereas the time it takes to consciously register the shot is more than 400 milliseconds. Libet proposed:

"The athlete's belief that 'I kicked off the blocks the moment I heard the shot' is a kind of illusion.

Such an illusory start is possible because his mind precedes the recognition of the shot by nearly half a second."

The fact that a reordering of time occurs — as if time itself were being compressed or expanded — raises the question, "How do we ordinarily perceive time?" William James's reasoning was as follows: "Our judgment of time and the speed of our perception depend on 'how many events we can register in a given unit of time' — i.e., on our capacity for the partitioning of time."

At least in the case of visual perception, there is good reason to argue that "conscious perception is composed not of continuous moments but of discrete ones, which are merely strung together so as to appear continuous." Just like the frames of a film. In automatic responses, like returning a tennis shot or hitting a baseball, time-partitioning seems not to occur. But the neuroscientist Christof Koch distinguishes behavior from experience and argues that "while behavior is executed seamlessly, experience is organized in discrete, film-like intervals." Koch's model of consciousness supports the Jamesian mechanism that "the perception of time can be sped up or slowed down." Lastly, hear Koch's words: "The slow-motion phenomenon experienced by people facing emergencies or by elite athletes comes from concentration. Powerful concentration narrows the gap between individual frames by partitioning time."52