Our Time
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
You perceive time very differently than today’s computers record it. The amount of information your brain stores in an interval of physical time affects the subjective time that you perceive. Under stress, your brain processes and stores far more data, far more quickly than normal. There are limits to what can be stored in short-term memory. In moments of crisis that limit is broken, and short-term spills over to long-term, and the mass of data that is perceived gets imprinted in long-term memory and takes up far more memory capacity than is normal.
In popular wisdom, when you are near death, your entire life flashes before your eyes. In the moments before death, that flash might happen repeatedly, as time subjectively expands, in a variant of Zeno’s Paradox. Just as Achilles never catches up with the turtle, you, subjectively, never die. Death is the limit that you approach but never reach.
To anyone else, your timeline ends. But from your perspective, you keep approaching death, forever: you never die.
