Changing Clocks and Beating Hearts

With the approach of November and the annual changing of our clocks, I have
been thinking a lot about time, the role of time in our lives and mostly, the passage
of time. We’ve all experienced the passage of time in fascinating ways:
~ The car ride home seems shorter than the ride to our destination.
~ Time flies when we are having fun.
~ Where did the time go?
~ The talk dragged on and on, as if time stood still….
Clearly, our thoughts and emotions seem to affect our sense of time.

Does time stand still? Does time fly by? Probably not in the literal sense, but there
is evidence that time, or at least our perception of time, is influenced by the beat of
our hearts. In a Cornell University study entitled “Wrinkles in Subsecond Time
Perception are Synchronized to the Heart,”lead author Saeedeh Sadeghi showed
what the researchers called “temporal wrinkles.” The results demonstrated that
“cardiac dynamics, even within a few heartbeats, is related to the temporal
decision-making process.”

The study also showed the brain influencing the heart, actually changing the heart
rate, affecting the subjects’ experience of time.” Co-author Adam Anderson wrote,
“The heart is one of the brain’s important timekeepers and plays a fundamental role
in our sense of time passing – an idea contemplated since ancient times.”

I found this to be a fascinating study, illustrating the interplay between our hearts
and our minds. “Knowing” something is not the same as “feeling” something. I
might know that I am safe in a certain situation, yet still feel frightened. This
tension between what is known and what is felt is often apparent when people are
grieving. Your brain might know that your loved one has died, but your heart
knows that it is broken.

It is imperative to honor our hearts as well as our minds. We live in world that
highly values information and technology, thus making it too easy sometimes to ignore our hearts. As we get ready to “change our clocks” this weekend, let the
knowledge of the interplay between heartbeats and our awareness of time remind
us to acknowledge our hearts in all the moments of our lives.