Motion influences the Accelerometer which influences the Timing Circuit.

Shaking Time

The object consists of an acceleration sensor, a timer- and counter-circuit and a LED display. The analog charge- and discharge-cycle of the 555 timer circuit represents true parallel oscillation similar to time-keepers in nature: the resonant frequency of the cesium atom in atomic clocks, the circadian rhythm cells responsible for the human biological clock or the planetary motion in orbits around the sun. The measurements from the accelerometer lengthen or shorten the pulse interval of the timer, in similar yet heavily amplified manner as special relativistic time dilation (The faster the relative velocity, the greater the magnitude of time dilation.) Counter circuitry displays the current time for the object in deciseconds.

The clock objects will be powered by batteries so that they can be freely moved around the space. Free hand movement, acceleration and deceleration, will change the clock frequency and show the influence of motion onto the passing of the objects time. Of course, changes in the passage of time can only be acknowledged with relation to a frame of reference. Therefore several clock objects will be manufactured that allow the constant comparison between their time displays.

Moving the object through space changes its acceleration and therefore its own time.

Separate Timelines

A future installation plan to exhibit the clock objects is the creation of a space that holds several time-objects, all at relative motion to each other. The clocks will be put into motion through mechanical (or human) actuation. Fixed to springs, pendulums or motors – the space will represent a chaos of time and highlight the importance of a reference frame – the importance of relativity – to our understanding of time and reality.

Setting Time Zero

Synchronization is important for witnessing the effects of motion on the clocks. A docking station for the battery-driven clocks will allow to synchronize them with a reset pulse sent simultaneously to all objects at once.

Several time objects moving at different oscillating patterns create a chaos of time, held together by a not-moving reference clock.

A docking station allows to sync all the time objects to a common starting time

Khronos Projector (2005)
Alvaro Cassinelli & Masatoshi Ishikawa

Video Cubism (1999)
Sidney Fels, Kenji Mase & Eric Lee

334m/s (2007)
Carsten Nicolai

Psychological Novels of the 19th Century

inspired by mesmerism, hypnosis, dipsychism and split personalities.

• James Hogg’s “The Private memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (1824) … the anti-hero meets a sinister stranger, who represents Satan, but may equally represent the protagonists own dark side.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Double” (1845) … a government clerk encounters a pernicious doppelganger who may embody everything the protagonist hates and fear about himself
• Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow” (1847) … a scholar becomes separated from his shadow. They ultimately exchange roles, which proves fatal for the scholar.
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (1886) … Jekyll liberates his dark side with drugs, which surfaces as the repellent Hyde.
• Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1981) … a beautiful young man doesn’t age while his portrait is ravaged by time and the consequences of a decadent lifestyle.
• George du Maurier’s “Trilby” (1894) … a eponymous heroine enjoys a brilliant yet doomed singing career, under the hypnotic influence of her wicked mentor.

List taken from Hidden Minds – The History of the Unconscious by Frank Tallis.

Metaphysical Movies? Created Realities in Fictitious Realities

Altered States
Through sessions in a sensory deprivation tank and intake of hallucinatory drugs the protagonist explores other states of consciousness. Searching for an origin, the experiments not only change his state of mind, but also take over his physical body. He changes first into a proto-human, and at the end almost dissolves into a non-physical form of primordial consciousness.

Matrix
While machines exploit human bodies for their energy, they send their brains into experiencing a simulated reality convincingly similar to typical middle-order reality. When freed from the machines, hackers tap into the simulation and learn to change the fundamental rules. Noise or glitches in the simulated reality (cat déjà vu) proof the world fake.

Inception
Characters share lucid dreams and experience a dream reality that is created by ‘the architect’ and filled with the subconscious of the others. Several layers of dreams-within-dreams are explored. The dream world is linked to reality by the sense for gravity and sound perception.

Q1: Would two particles, that live in an infinite empty universe and always make the same exact movement at the same time, be able to discover the existence of time and space?
Their only frame of reference is the distance between them.

Q2: If time had 2 dimensions, would we perceive a bouncing ball that bounces off into the 2nd temporal dimension (perpendicular to our usual time dimension) as existing at one instant in multiple states at once?
Multistability. Growing years older form one second to the other (by lived along the other timeline). Useful for magic tricks.

Q3: If time was a radial dimension growing outwards from one starting point and spreading into all possible scenarios with minor differences between neighboring timelines, what would the antipode to our timeline look like?
Inverted?

Q4: If we extract time from our space-time reality, space remains a valid concept as it holds matter in a multiplicity of possible states, yet how does the concept of time remain if we extract space from our space-time reality and all matter is compressed into one space unit?
How does change happen, if everything is restricted to the same location?

Q5: If time was symmetric, the second law of thermodynamics invalid, and matter would switch between going forward and backward in time in the same fashion as they switch between going left or right in space, would it be easier for us to acknowledge a deterministic universe?
The timeline of each entity of matter would be written on a tape, that some force pushes forward and backward along the dimension of time. All there is is the moment of NOW, that comes alive with the (nearly) infinite combination of tapes and their current ‘age’.

“Apart from the fact that we may not be able to perceive the entirety of the external world due to information processing limitations inherent to our physical system, what seems more unsettling is that we may not even be able to experience all that we perceive! Is there some limitation of our own internal system that keeps not only the world, but the way this world is represented in us fundamentally unknowable to ourselves?”

– Overgaard M, & Timmermans B (2009). How unconscious is subliminal perception?

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

In his 2005 book Malcolm Gladwell presents a series of studies that demonstrate how our subconscious helps us make decisions, yet also leads us astray. It’s an easy read, probably too easy. I have heard Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide and Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious might be a bit more thorough.

“Intuitive thinking is perception-like, rapid, effortless. … Deliberate thinking is reasoning-like, critical, and analytic; it is also slow, effortful, controlled, and rule-governed.”

Lack of Intuition

Antonio Damasio’s study with card decks (Emotion, Decision Making and the Orbitofrontal Cortex, 2000) shows that the subconscious figures out game advantages and starts to influence behavior accordingly before that information reaches awareness in form of a hunch. Damasio also shows that test subjects with damages to a part of the brain responsible for planning and decision making (Ventromedial prefrontal cortex) are not able to produce hunches.

“Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious”
– Carl Gustav Jung

Experiments Below The Awareness Threshold

So, how do you measure if information is present in your subconscious, yet not in your conscious mind? In his paper Does “subliminal perception” (perception without awareness) occur, and how can it be measured? (2004) Berkes gives a good overview of the controversies existing in experiments trying to capture subliminal perception. Experiments testing the effect rely on null effect / null sensitivity data – which means subjects have no conscious awareness of a given stimulus. Detecting this condition is not easy. When detection relies on Self-Report of awareness (or non-awareness) by the subject, it is flawed as every person has different response bias that influence their statement. Early test, like the Peirce Jastrow Experiment have been criticized for this. The Dissociative Paradigm method asks test subjects to choose between fixed options, even if he/she finds them equivalent. The choice will unconsciously be influenced by the subliminal stimuli (see Mere Exposure Effect, 1980). The Exclusion Paradigm presents test subjects with a task and asks them not to use the supposedly subliminally presented stimuli (Jacoby exclusion task, 1994).

“Subliminal perception occurs whenever stimuli presented below the threshold or limen for awareness are found to influence thoughts, feelings, or actions.”

Self Report

Small Difference in Sensation, 1884

In 1884 Peirce and Jastrow published the paper On Small Differences in Sensation that documents their highly interesting experiment, showcasing that our subconscious even has a finer resolution in perception than our consciousness does. Subjects had to compare weights that were so similar that they seemed identical. People were asked to indicate the heavier object and also to specify their level of confidence in their choice. Subjects that indicated zero percentage of confidence – and seemingly only picked one over the other by chance – ended with a 62-70% success rate. Even though they were not aware of any difference between the two stimuli, their intuition let them to pick the right answer more often than not. The findings indicate that their intuition could give the answer based on reason, because their subconscious had a more accurate perception of the weight than their awareness.

Dissociative Paradigm

[Image Source: Nick Epley]

Mere Exposure Effect, 1980

In 1980 Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc showed that subliminal exposure to an object increased a persons affect for the object. This phenomenon is know as Mere-Exposure Effect – we tend to prefer what we are more familiar with. (Yet! The more invasive and repeated the exposure is, the more we’ll start to respond in a negative fashion.) In their experiment Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc showed test subjects 1 millisecond flashes of an image of a polygon. Afterwards the test subjects were presented with images of two different polygons, and were asked to pick the one they recognized and the one they liked better. As the flashes were too fast for conscious awareness and therefore at chance level, the recognition question correctly led to 50:50 answers. Yet the same test subjects indicated at 60:40 preference for the polygon they were subjected to.

Exclusion Paradigm

Jacoby exclusion task, 1994

In 1994 Debner and Jacoby executed a word completion experiment that sparred conscious processing against unconscious processing. Images of a priming word were flashed at test subjects at durations that ranged from subliminal to clearly visible. Afterwards the test subjects had to complete word-stems and were instructed not to use the priming word. Here the threshold of awareness was evident in the results. If test subjects were aware of the priming word, they avoided in the word completion task. If the priming was truly subliminal, they were much more likely to use the priming word in the task.

Original paper: Unconscious Perception: Attention, Awareness, and Control, James A. Debner and Larry L. Jacoby, 1994 (PDF)

Benjamin Libet – Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness

Always Half a Second Behind?

So, we know that the unconscious influences our conscious behavior. What if it does more than simply influence it? Benjamin Libet’s famous volatile-action experiment challenges the concept of free will as it demonstrates that neuronal spikes signal the onset of action before a conscious decision to take action has been made.

Maybe our subconscious is truly in control of us? Maybe our subconscious possesses free will and orchestrates our conscious experience like a puppet on a string. Your subconscious as the dark ego, living within us.

Or, our subconscious is not in control either, and free will is an illusion. Which option is better? Creepy vs. disillusioning.

Libet’s Bereitschaftspotential Experiment

In 1983 Benjamin Libet, following German neurologist Hans Kornhuber, asks volunteers to move a finger ‘whenever they feel the urge to do so’. Measuring their brain activity, he discovers that first brain activity controlling the movement happens roughly 500 milliseconds before conscious awareness of the subjects intention to move their finger, and another 150 milliseconds before the actual movement.

Open Questions

Now that we know that our subconscious knows more, sees more, hears more than we do, the questions arises – how can we access it? Through simple training? A more sensitive awareness to whatever your gut tells you?

Once a skill is routinized by extensive practice it is moved down into subconscious territory, to make space for new content. We walk, we breath, we swallow, and are mostly not aware of it. Can we master any skill and implement it in our subconscious?

Has our subconscious a more open mind for scientific ideas that are hard to grasp for our conscious mind? Is our subconscious able to understand multistability, and therefore allows the existence of separate realities in it’s neuronal circuitry (see An Oscillating Reality Battle)? Is our subconscious the maker of time and creates the illusion of time for our conscious mind?

Hidden Minds – A History of the Unconscious

In this book Frank Tallis leads us through the history of the unconscious touching upon hypnotism, lucid dreaming, subliminal stimuli, psychoanalysis and new research in neuroscience. Very recommended.

Podcast References

Brain Science Podcast – Episode 13 “Unconscious Decisions!”, where Dr. Ginger Campbell discusses unconscious rapid decision-making, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and other writings on the subject.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind Podcast – Episode “Is Your Gut A Genius?”, where Robert and Julie talk about butterflies and lots of neural wiring in your stomach.

Brain Science Podcast – Episode 19 “Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer”, where Dr. Ginger Campbell discusses said book.