"We have unlocked time..." read Speed by Oliver Sacks
As a boy, I was fascinated by speed, the wild range of speeds in the world around me. People moved at different speeds; animals much more so. The wings of insects moved too fast to see, though one could judge their frequency by the tone they emitted--a hateful noise, a high E, with mosquitoes, or a lovely bass hum with the fat bumblebees that flew around the hollyhocks each summer. Our pet tortoise, which could take an entire day to cross the lawn, seemed to live in a different time frame altogether. But what then of the movement of plants? I would come down to the garden in the morning and find the hollyhocks a little higher, the roses more entwined around their trellis, but, however patient I was, I could never catch them moving. Experiences like this played a part in turning me to photography, because it allowed me to alter the rate of motion, speed it up, slow it down, so I could see, adjusted to a human perceptual rate, the details of movement or change otherwise beyond the power of the eye to register. Being fond of microscopes and telescopes--my older brothers, medical students and bird-watchers, kept theirs in the house--I thought of the slowing down or the speeding up of motion as a sort of temporal equivalent: slow motion as an enlargement, a microscopy of time, and speeded-up motion as a foreshortening, a telescopy of time.
I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. . . . The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. . . . Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of day and night merged into one continuous greyness . . . the jerking sun became a streak of fire . . . the moon a fainter fluctuating band. . . . I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour . . . huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed--melting and flowing under my eyes.
The opposite of this occurs in "The New Accelerator," the story of a drug which accelerates one's perceptions,
thoughts, and metabolism several thousand times or so. Its inventor and the narrator, who have taken the drug
together, wander out into a glaciated world, watching
people like ourselves and yet not like ourselves, frozen in careless attitudes, caught in mid-gesture . . . and sliding
down the air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid snail--was a bee.
"The Time Machine" was published in 1895, when there was intense interest in the new powers of photography and
cinematography to reveal details of movements inaccessible to the unaided eye. Etienne-Jules Marey, a French
physiologist, had been the first to show that a galloping horse at one point had all four hooves off the ground. His
work, as the historian Marta Braun brings out, was instrumental in stimulating Eadweard Muybridge's famous
photographic studies of motion. Marey, in turn stimulated by Muybridge, went on to develop high-speed cameras
which could slow and almost arrest the movements of birds and insects in flight; and, at the opposite extreme, to
use time-lapse photography to accelerate the otherwise almost imperceptible movements of sea urchins, starfish,
and other marine animals.
I wondered sometimes whether the speeds of animals and plants could be very different from what they were: how
much they were constrained by internal limits, how much by external--the gravity of the earth, the amount of
energy received from the sun, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and so on. So I was fascinated by yet
another Wells story, "The First Men in the Moon," with its beautiful description of how the growth of plants was
dramatically accelerated on a celestial body with only a fraction of the earth's gravity:
With a steady assurance, a swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air. . . . The bundle-like buds swelled and strained and opened with a jerk, thrusting out a coronet of little sharp tips . . . that lengthened rapidly, lengthened visibly even as we watched. The movement was slower than any animal's, swifter than any plant's I have ever seen before. How can I suggest it to you--the way that growth went on? . . . Have you ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand and watched the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon plants grew like that.
We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Baer has indulged in some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations;annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling-water springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) may be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be rash to deny.
This was published in 1890, when Wells was a young biologist (and writer of biology texts). Could he have read
James, or, for that matter, the original computations of Von Baer, from the eighteen-sixties? Indeed, one might say
that a cinematographic model is implicit in all these descriptions, for the business of registering larger or smaller
numbers of events in a given time is exactly what cinecameras do if they are run faster or slower than the usual
twenty-four or so frames per second.
It is often said that time seems to go more quickly, the years rush by, as one grows older--either because when one
is young one's days are packed with novel, exciting impressions or because as one grows older a year becomes a
smaller and smaller fraction of one's life. But, if the years appear to pass more quickly, the hours and minutes do
not--they are the same as they always were.
At least, they seem so to me (in my seventies), although experiments have shown that, while young people are
remarkably accurate at estimating a span of three minutes by counting internally, elderly subjects apparently
count more slowly, so that their perceived three minutes is closer to three and a half or four minutes. But it is still
not clear that this phenomenon has anything to do with the existential or psychological feeling of time passing
more quickly as one ages.
Going along with the sense that a few words, a few steps, may last an unconscionable time, there may be the sense of a world profoundly slowed, even suspended. L. J. West, in the 1970 book "Psychotomimetic Drugs," relates this anecdote: "Two hippies, high on pot, are sitting in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. A jet aircraft goes zooming overhead and is gone; whereupon one hippie turns to the other and says, 'Man, I thought he'd never leave.' "
But while the external world may appear slowed, an inner world of images and thoughts may take off with great
speed. One may set out on an elaborate mental journey, visiting different countries and cultures, or compose a
book or a symphony, or live through a whole life or an epoch of history, only to find that mere minutes or seconds
have passed. Gautier described how he entered a hashish trance in which "sensations followed one another so
numerous and so hurried that true appreciation of time was impossible." It seemed to him, subjectively, that the
spell had lasted "three hundred years," but he found, on awakening, that it had lasted no more than a quarter of an
hour.
The word "awakening" may be more than a figure of speech here, for such "trips" have surely to be compared with
dreams. I have occasionally, it seems to me, lived a whole life between my first alarm, at 5 a.m., and my second
alarm, five minutes later.
Sometimes, as one is falling asleep, there may be a massive, involuntary jerk--a myoclonic jerk--of the body.
Though such jerks are generated by primitive parts of the brain stem (they are, so to speak, brain-stem reflexes),
and as such are without any intrinsic meaning or motive, they may be given meaning and context, turned into acts,
by an instantly improvised dream. Thus the jerk may be associated with a dream of tripping, or stepping over a
precipice, lunging forward to catch a ball, and so on. Such dreams may be extremely vivid, and have several
"scenes." Subjectively, they appear to start before the jerk, and yet presumably the entire dream mechanism is
stimulated by the first, preconscious perception of the jerk. All of this elaborate restructuring of time occurs in a
second or less
There are certain epileptic seizures, sometimes called "experiential seizures," when a detailed recollection or
hallucination of the past suddenly imposes itself upon a patient's consciousness, and pursues a subjectively
lengthy and unhurried course, to complete itself in what, objectively, is only a few seconds. These seizures are
typically associated with convulsive activity in the brain's temporal lobes, and can be induced, in some patients, by
electrical stimulation of certain trigger points on the surface of the lobes. Sometimes such epileptic experiences
are suffused with a sense of metaphysical significance, along with their subjectively enormous duration.
Dostoyevsky wrote of such seizures:
There are moments, and it is only a matter of a few seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony. . . . A terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. . . . During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly.
There may be no inner sense of speed at such times, but at other times--especially with mescaline or LSD--one may
feel hurtled through thought-universes at uncontrollable, supraluminal speeds. In "The Major Ordeals of the Mind,"
the French poet and painter Henri Michaux writes, "Persons returning from the speed of mescaline speak of an
acceleration of a hundred or two hundred times, or even of five hundred times that of normal speed." He comments
that this is probably an illusion, but that even if the acceleration were much more modest--"even only six times" the
normal--the increase would still feel overwhelming. What is experienced, Michaux feels, is not so much a huge
accumulation of exact literal details as a series of over-all impressions, dramatic highlights, as in a dream.
But, this said, if the speed of thought could be significantly heightened, the increase would readily show up (if we
had the experimental means to examine it) in physiological recordings of the brain, and would perhaps illustrate
the limits of what is neurally possible. We would need, however, the right level of cellular activity to record from,
and this would be not the level of individual nerve cells but a higher level, the level of interaction between groups of
neurons in the cerebral cortex, which, in their tens or hundreds of thousands, form the neural correlate of
consciousness.
The speed of such neural interactions is normally regulated by a delicate balance of excitatory and inhibitory
forces, but there are certain conditions in which inhibitions may be relaxed. Dreams can take wing, move freely and
swiftly, precisely because the activity of the cerebral cortex is not constrained by external perception or reality.
Similar considerations, perhaps, apply to the trances induced by mescaline or hashish.
Other drugs--depressants, by and large, like opiates and barbiturates--may have the opposite effect, producing an
opaque, dense inhibition of thought and movement, so that one may enter a state in which scarcely anything
seems to happen, and then come to, after what seems to have been a few minutes, to find that an entire day has
been consumed. Such effects resemble the action of the Retarder, a drug that Wells imagined as the opposite of
the Accelerator:
The Retarder . . . should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time, and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings.
That there could be profound and persistent disorders of neural speed lasting for years or decades first hit me
when, in 1966, I went to work in the Bronx at Beth Abraham, a hospital for chronic illness, and saw the patients
whom I was later to write about in my book "Awakenings." There were dozens of these patients in the lobby and
corridors, all moving at different tempos--some violently accelerated, some in slow motion, some almost glaciated.
As I looked at this landscape of disordered time, memories of Wells's Accelerator and Retarder suddenly came
back to me. All of these patients, I learned, were survivors of the great pandemic of encephalitis lethargica that
swept the world from 1917 to 1928. Of the millions who contracted this "sleepy sickness," about a third died in the
acute stages, in states of coma sleep so deep as to preclude arousal, or in states of sleeplessness so intense as to
preclude sedation. Some of the survivors, though often accelerated and excited in the early days, had later
developed an extreme form of parkinsonism that had slowed or even frozen them, sometimes for decades. A few
of the patients at Beth Abraham continued to be accelerated, and one, Ed M., was actually accelerated on one side
of his body and slowed on the other.
Dopamine, a neurotransmitter essential for the normal flow of movement and thought, is drastically reduced in
ordinary Parkinson's disease, to less than fifteen per cent of normal levels. In post-encephalitic parkinsonism,
dopamine levels may become almost undetectable. In ordinary Parkinson's disease, in addition to tremor or
rigidity, one sees moderate slowings and speedings; in post-encephalitic parkinsonism, where the damage in the
brain is usually far greater, there may be slowings and speedings to the utmost physiological and mechanical
limits of the brain and body.
The very vocabulary of parkinsonism is couched in terms of speed. Neurologists have an array of terms to denote
this: if movement is slowed, they talk about "bradykinesia"; if brought to a halt, "akinesia"; if excessively rapid,
"tachykinesia." Similarly, one can have bradyphrenia or tachyphrenia--a slowing or accelerating of thought.
In 1969, I was able to start most of these frozen patients on the drug L-dopa, which had recently been shown to be
effective in raising dopamine levels in the brain. At first, this restored a normal speed and freedom of movement to
many of the patients. But then, especially in the most severely affected, it pushed them in the opposite direction.
One patient, Hester Y., I observed in my journal, showed such acceleration of movement and speech after five days
on L-dopa that "if she had previously resembled a slow-motion film, or a persistent film frame stuck in the
projector, she now gave the impression of a speeded-up film, so much so that my colleagues, looking at a film of
Mrs. Y. which I took at the time, insisted that the projector was running too fast."
I assumed, at first, that Hester and other patients realized the unusual rates at which they were moving or
speaking or thinking but were simply unable to control themselves. I soon found that this was by no means the
case. Nor is it the case in patients with ordinary Parkinson's disease, as William Gooddy, a neurologist in England,
remarks at the beginning of his book "Time and the Nervous System." An observer may note, he says, how slowed
a parkinsonian's movements are, but "the patient will say, 'My own movements . . . seem normal unless I see how
long they take by looking at a clock. The clock on the wall of the ward seems to be going exceptionally fast.' "
Gooddy refers here to "personal" time, as contrasted with "clock" time, and the extent to which personal time
departs from clock time may become almost unbridgeable with the extreme bradykinesia common in postencephalitic parkinsonism. I would often see my patient Miron V. sitting in the hallway outside my office. He would
appear motionless, with his right arm often lifted, sometimes an inch or two above his knee, sometimes near his
face. When I questioned him about these frozen poses, he asked indignantly, "What do you mean, 'frozen poses'? I
was just wiping my nose."
I wondered if he was putting me on. One morning, over a period of hours, I took a series of twenty or so photos and
stapled them together to make a flick-book, like the ones I used to make to show the unfurling of fiddleheads. With
this, I could see that Miron actually was wiping his nose but was doing so a thousand times more slowly than
normal.
Hester, too, seemed unaware of the degree to which her personal time diverged from clock time. I once asked my
students to play ball with her, and they found it impossible to catch her lightning-quick throws. Hester returned the
ball so rapidly that their hands, still outstretched from the throw, might be hit smartly by the returning ball. "You
see how quick she is," I said. "Don't underestimate her--you'd better be ready." But they could not be ready, since
their best reaction times approached a seventh of a second, whereas Hester's was scarcely more than a tenth of a
second.
It was only when Miron and Hester were in normal states, neither excessively retarded nor accelerated, that they
could judge how startling their speed or slowness had been, and it was sometimes necessary to show them a film
or a tape to convince them.
(Disorders of spatial scale are as common in parkinsonism as disorders of time scale. An almost diagnostic sign
of parkinsonism is micrographia--minute, and often diminishingly small, handwriting. Typically, patients are not
aware of this at the time; it is only later, when they are back in a normal spatial frame of reference, that they are
able to judge that their writing was smaller than usual. Thus there may be, for some patients, a compression of
space which is comparable to the compression of time. One of my patients, a post-encephalitic woman, used to
say, "My space, our space, is nothing like your space.")
With disorders of time scale, there seems almost no limit to the degree of slowing that can occur, and the speeding
up of movement sometimes seems constrained only by the physical limits of articulation. If Hester tried to speak
or count aloud in one of her very accelerated states, the words or numbers would clash and run into each other.
Such physical limitations were less evident with thought and perception. If she was shown a perspective drawing
of the Necker cube--an ambiguous drawing which normally seems to switch perspective every few seconds--she
might, when slowed, see switches every minute or two (or not at all, if she was "frozen"), but when speeded up she
would see the cube "flashing," changing its perspective several times a second.
Striking accelerations may also occur in Tourette's syndrome, a condition characterized by compulsions, tics, and
involuntary movements and noises. Some people with Tourette's are able to catch flies on the wing. When I asked
one man with Tourette's how he managed this, he said that he had no sense of moving especially fast but, rather,
that to him the flies moved slowly.
At times the peace and quiet is broken by the appearance of a catatonic raptus. Suddenly the patient springs up, smashes something, seizes someone with extraordinary power and dexterity. . . . A catatonic arouses himself from his rigidity, runs around the streets in his nightshirt for three hours, and finally falls down and remains lying in a cataleptic state in the gutter. The movements are often executed with great strength, and nearly always involve unnecessary muscle groups. . . . They seem to have lost control of measure and power of their movements. Catatonia is rarely seen, especially in our present, tranquillized age, but some of the fear and bewilderment inspired by the insane must have come from these sudden, unpredictable transformations.
Catatonia, parkinsonism, and Tourette's, no less than manic depression, may all be thought of as "bipolar"
disorders. All of them, to use the nineteenth-century French term, are disorders a double forme--Janus-faced
disorders, which can switch, incontinently, from one face, one form, to the other. The possibility of any neutral
state, any unpolarized state, any "normality," is so reduced in such disorders that we must envisage a dumbbell- or
hourglass-shaped "surface" of disease, with only a thin neck or isthmus of neutrality between the two ends
It is common in neurology to speak of "deficits"--the knocking out of a physiological (and perhaps psychological)
function by a lesion, or area of damage, in the brain. Lesions in the cortex tend to produce "simple" deficits, like
loss of color vision or the ability to recognize letters or numbers. In contrast, lesions in the regulatory systems of
the subcortex--which control movement, tempo, emotion, appetite, level of consciousness, etc.--undermine control
and stability, so that patients lose the normal broad base of resilience, the middle ground, and may then be, like
puppets, thrown almost helplessly from one extreme to another.
Doris Lessing once wrote of the situation of my post-encephalitic patients, "It makes you aware of what a knifeedge we live on," yet we do not, in health, live on a knife edge but on a broad and stable And yet there are those who seem to reach almost superhuman speeds of thought. Robert Oppenheimer, famously,
when young physicists came to explain their ideas to him, would grasp the gist and implications of their thoughts
within seconds, and interrupt them, extend their thoughts, almost as soon as they opened their mouths. Virtually
everyone who heard Isaiah Berlin improvise in his torrentially rapid speech, piling image upon image, idea up on
idea, building enormous mental structures which evolved and dissolved before one's eyes, felt they were privy to
an astonishing mental phenomenon. And this is equally so of a comic genius like Robin Williams, whose explosive,
incandescent flights of association and wit seem to take off and hurtle along at rocket-like speeds. Yet here,
presumably, one is dealing not with the speeds of individual nerve cells and simple circuits but with neural
networks of a much higher order, exceeding the complexity of the largest supercomputer.saddleback of normality.
Physiologically, neural normality reflects a balance between excitatory and inhibitory systems in the brain, a
balance which, in the absence of drugs or damage, has a remarkable latitude and resilience.
We, as human beings, have relatively constant and characteristic rates of movement, though some people are a bit
faster, some a bit slower, and there may be variations in our levels of energy and engagement throughout the day.
We are livelier, we move a little faster, we live faster when we are young; we slow down a little, at least in terms of
bodily movement and reaction times, as we age. But the range of all these rates, at least in ordinary people, undernormal circumstances, is quite limited. There is not that much difference in reaction times between the old and the
young, or between the world's best athletes and the least athletic among us. This seems to be the case with basic
mental operations, too--the maximum speed at which one can perform serial computations, recognition, visual
associations, and so on. The dazzling performances of chess masters, lightning-speed calculators, musical
improvisers, and other virtuosos may have less to do with basic neural speed than with the vast range of
knowledge, memorized patterns and strategies, and hugely sophisticated skills they can call upon.
Nevertheless, we humans, even the fastest among us, are limited in speed by basic neural determinants, by cells
with limited rates of firing, and by limited speeds of conduction between different cells and cell groups. And if,
somehow, we could accelerate ourselves a dozen or fifty times we would find ourselves wholly out of synch with
the world around us, and in a situation as bizarre as that of the narrator in Wells's story.
But we can make up for the limitations of our bodies, our senses, by using instruments of various kinds. We have
unlocked time, as in the seventeenth century we unlocked space, and now have at our disposal what are, in effect,
temporal microscopes and temporal telescopes of prodigious power. With these, we can achieve a quadrillion-fold
acceleration or retardation, so that we can watch, at leisure, by laser stroboscopy, the femtosecond-quick
formation and dissolution of chemical bonds; or observe, contracted to a few minutes through computer
simulation, the thirteen-billion-year history of the universe from the big bang to the present, or (at even higher
temporal compression) its projected future to the end of time. Through such instrumentalities, we can enhance our
perceptions, speed or slow them, in effect, to a degree infinitely beyond what any living process could match. In
this way, stuck though we are in our own speed and time, we can, in imagination, enter all speeds, all time.