Why time flies in Lagos, other cities

07 Dec Why time flies in Lagos, other cities

Time does not fly. We, especially those in the cities, do! The racing trees we see from the window of a fast car do not move an inch. We do! We seem to be racing through time causing ourselves time-pressure with serious consequences. High time-pressure has, for example, been found to cause distress and high blood pressure among both men and women, and related to increased levels of depression.

With the preponderance of evidence that the earth was created by a supreme being, God, it is becoming more reasonable to expect that the Creator will not vary time the way we see it fly or drag. God is a stable and unchangeable God!

Indeed, many scientists now believe the Biblical passage that “I (God)…made the earth and created mankind upon it.”

The great scientific book, Cosmos, Bios, Theos, which means Universe, Life, and God was written by about 60 notable scientists, including twenty-four Nobel Prize winners. And one of the contributing authors, Yale physicist Professor Henry Margenau, says of the “only one convincing answer” for the intricate laws that exist in nature. “Creation is by an omnipotent, omniscient God.”

Bob Gass uses scientific findings to explain this: “Did you know that if the earth was 10 percent larger or 10 percent smaller, life as we know it wouldn’t be possible? Or that we’re just the right distance from the sun so we receive the right amount of heat and light? If we were any farther away we’d freeze, and if we were closer we wouldn’t be able to survive.

“Consider for a moment the amazing tilt of the axis of the earth. None of the other planets are tilted like ours at 23 degrees. This angle allows the sun’s rays to touch every part of the earth’s surface over the course of a year, as the earth circles the sun. If there was no tilt to the axis, the poles would accumulate enormous masses of ice, and the center of the earth would become so hot we couldn’t stand it.

“Like an excited parent designing a room for the arrival of their newborn child, God made this earth specifically for us.”

Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as what a clock reads

Experts Muireann Irish and Cliere O’Callagan have broken all that down beautifully: “Humans have created reliable instruments to measure time by using predictable repeating events that occur naturally, such as day turning to night or winter becoming spring. We think of these events in terms of days, weeks and years, and we use clocks and calendars to mark their passage.

“But we also appear to possess an internal timepiece, which regulates our day/night rhythms and allows us to register the duration of particular events. We use this “pacemaker” to compare the length of each new event with representations stored in memory. Effectively, we build up a knowledge bank of what a minute, an hour or a day feels like.

“What typically begins as our brain’s ability to register short durations – from minutes to seconds – is transformed into an understanding of the flow of time across the lifespan.”

We therefore live in self-delusion if we think that in reality time is flying like it appears to do in Lagos or drags when we go visiting the village during vacation or holidays. The truth is that (the pace of) timer only varies from location to location, from person to person and from one situation to the next. Sometimes it even feels as if time is standing still. Only in the Bible did that ever happen.

It has been discovered that individual perceptions of time are strongly influenced by our level of focus, physical state and mood. Time can appear to speed up and leave us drained with enormous time-pressure and stress in places like Lagos when our attention is divided and we are busy with several things. Because we pay less attention to the flow of time it seems to pass by much more swiftly.

Back in the village on vacation or on a visit, there are fewer things to focus on and perhaps far fewer attractive events to engage our attention. Life becomes watching a pot boil. It never does! This is also the case when we’re bored; time can seem to drag endlessly. Interestingly the people we visit in the village don’t see time drag; nothing wrong with the pace of time.

Scientists have also found that the emotional quality of an event also influences our perception of time. Negative emotional states, such as feeling sad or depressed, have the effect of making time feel as if it’s passing more slowly.

Fear, they say, has a particularly powerful effect on time, slowing down our internal clock so that the fearful event is perceived as lasting longer. In contrast, fun and happy times seem to be over in the blink of an eye.

And just as time may slow or quicken depending on our current emotional state, our perception of time may also become distorted as we age. People over the age of 60 often report time becoming more variable.

Why time flies or drags: Psychologist, Dr Aoife McLoughlin, has been studying how our technological lifestyles may be affecting our perception of time.

She said: “I’ve found some indication that interacting with technology and technocentric societies has increased some type of pacemaker within us. While it might help us to work faster, it also makes us feel more pressured by time.

As the speed of pace of life increases, the subjective feeling of available time decreases, causing a sense of time pressure within the individual.”

Her conclusions are based on studies which compared people who are always using technology to those who rarely use it.

She found that “people who were always online tended to think an hour had passed when in fact it was only 50 minutes. And this tended to make people feel stressed as they thought they had ‘lost’ more time than their disconnected peers.”