mo_melanin

At this moment I want to disclose a rather indirect and somewhat weasely method of time travel. It doesn't offer anything in the way of wormholes or Deloreans. Instead it aims to focus on a neglected experiential quality of time travel. I propose that most of us have felt this and that you have emerged from it (hopefully) for the better, without some new fundamental paradox underlying your existence. You, my friend, are a type of 'chrononaut' if you will. Here it goes.

Let us assume that the present time is 6:00 PM. If, sometime in the past, a hypothetical protagonist were to have set his clock forward about 10 minutes, the clock would read 6:10. Now let's assume that our hypothetical protagonist, understandably so, forgets that he changed his clock in this manner. So the scene unfolds something like this: he looks at the clock, thinks it's 6:10 and allows all the implications of it being 6:10 flow through his various neural circuits... perhaps he needed to leave his house by 6:05 PM to get to an appointment on time and now he thinks he's 5 minutes late. This triggers a cascade of stress and anxiety that presumably routes through his limbic system and completely changes his thought processes: his (incorrect) perception of time has effectively hijacked his brain's circuitry and he is running with the assumption that it's 6:10. But then, in a complete reversal of circumstance, he realizes that it's actually only 6:00 PM and he still has 5 minutes to get ready to leave. He effectively travels back in time to 6:00 PM, drops all the baggage of 6:10 PM and has a newly relieved brain. Sound familiar? It's happened to me plenty of times. panda and I have our clock set 10 minutes fast and every weekday morning, in a half-conscious state, time traveling helps me get out of bed and get ready for class on time. A similar thing occurs en masse during Daylight Savings.

I've talked to a lot of people about this peculiar phenomenon of setting a clock forward to basically hijack their brains. It's more common than I thought. You know, the whole idea of human perception of time is a pretty fascinating thing... we view time as this concrete, unchanging element of our existence. But it's really just a function of neural circuits in our brain that have been tuned by evolution. Basically, we perceive time in a way that allows society to function in as efficient of a manner as we can at this point in human development. Our perception of time is malleable, not very easily so, but malleable nonetheless. Think about the cliche of "time flying when you're having fun", or time going by very slowly during a boring week. These are deviations from a baseline perception of time that we have all experienced. It's like this piece of software that's being run on the basic operating system of our brains.

I have more to say on this, but I want to touch on that when I have more... time. Damnit. I pretty much just checkmated myself.

I. Fatigue
There's something of note in how fatigue literally consumes every part of your being.  Presently I am being enveloped in a thick coating of fresh organic fatigue.  Yawns, drooping eyelids and in general everything's very slow.  I suppose it makes sense at the level of global brain functionality... processes that were once buzzing through neural circuitry are beginning to   s    l      o      w  down. 

II. Slowing Down - A Digression
Slower rates of firing... it's a similar kind of deceleration that probably accompanies depression and accounts for the typical lack of motivation and overwhelming fatigue.  It's pretty dangerous stuff from the perspective of being a productive member of society isn't it?  In depression, not only is there a problem of limbic system hypersensitivity, but also this massive slowing down of other processes.  Combine that with what is probably essentially a stagnant dopaminergic reward system and you have this characteristic profile of a depressed individual.

III. Psychiatric Drugs - A Digression from a Digression
Delving further into this tangential issue, I have to say that, having done research in neuroscience for the past half a year, the physiological basis for antidepressants is a bit scary.  Consider this: neuroscience has only really taken off quite recently... with the advent of imaging techniques, combined with the power of molecular biology techniques, we have learned a lot about the brain that is going against what was deemed common knowledge less than a decade ago.  An example that comes to mind is the idea of neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons.  Researchers have learned a great deal about brain plasticity recently and this is, in fact, the springboard for a vast amount of research that is going on right now.  So it turns out neuroscientists have found multiple zones in the brain that are responsible for neurogenesis, the growth of brand new neurons (including the subventricular zone and the subgranular zone).  Not quite the scary picture of popular perception that involves an unchanging number of brain cells.  The idea of killing brain cells never getting them back is simply untrue (this is not a free pass for abusing your brain however: you can mercilessly compromise the integrity of a variety of synapses and should proceed with caution).

But I digress from my digression.  Consider SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor), a class of antidepressant drugs.  Motivated by findings that support a role for the neurotransmitter serotonin in modulation of mood, these drugs aim to influence serotonergic systems in the hopes of positively affecting mood.  Seems like a foolproof idea right?  Think again.  A more correct statement would be that one of the various functions of serotonin is to regulate mood and help modulate the limbic system.  But that is not the entire picture.  There are gastrointestinal functions of ST; it is also important for such familiar guys as appetite and sleep (along with numerous others) and as this list grows, so does the list of possible side effects, including "coma or death".  Yes, things like targeting specific receptors helps decrease the scope of serotonin systems affected, but the truth is that our understanding of the brain is still in its developmental stages and, if the vast interconnectedness of the brain tells us anything, it is easy to see that we still have a while to go before we can make very specific drugs that don't have hidden threats of completely hijacking and derailing parallel processes.

IV. Fatigue
I am consumed by the voices of photographs, mirrors,
narratives stitched through the nylon of time,
and resemblances.  What eats at you more - selfhood or the
goddamned price of oil by the barrel?

Fatigue devours me like a hungry&ravenous raven, a hungry&tigrous tiger.  The literary present presents the present, never before seen and available to you live on a millisecond-scale delay. 

Good night... finally, good night.

Here's a thought I just had about passwords.  We enter them constantly, pretty much everyday... but we see them being typed in (REAL TIME!) as asterisks or dots dotdotdotdotdot, just anonymous markings of that sort.  In our brains, the characters that form our passwords are thus associated with these symbols of anonymity.  If you were to see your password for some site typed out somewhere completely naked, wouldn't that just freak you out?  Wouldn't it rattle your bones for just a new york minute?  They need to be shrouded in secrecy, tucked away underneath these thick dot-shaped comforters, your wee little babe dependent on you for meaning and importance (and oh how important you become little one) and you dependent on it for.. passing into things.  Shit man it's like a part of you, that key collection of characters just coursing through your neural networks, networking amongst your neurons "hey how ya doin, i'm the password for the email account, nice to meet you.  you'll be seeing a lot of me", "oh, it's a pleasure to meet you, i used to be the email password, but i'm slowly fading away..."

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