Beau Lotto is a professor of neuroscience and author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently. His terrific TED talk is Optical Illusions Show How We See.
I believe we see in a way that is circumscribed. If time is an iceberg, we see only the flat disc where it intersects with the surface of the water. In a sense, we see only a single MRI slice. But beyond the shape our eyes describe, there is a tip and a base to the iceberg—time’s height and depth—that we are not seeing.
We should not take the images our brains create literally. We take them seriously, but not literally. The cognitive scientist who really hit this point home for me is Donald Hoffman.
In other words, we have to learn to see in a new way. We have to see not the single MRI slice, but to envisage the entire iceberg.
Here is one technique to envision the sun and the moon in a new way, a way that is more holographic. The moon is the homunculus and the sun is the halo. If light is the medium, for our arrow of time, the moon represents maximum density and the sun represents maximum speed.
In these models, time is a width of light, a degree of dilation. The past (the tip of the iceberg) is too narrow. The future (the mouth of the iceberg) is too wide. When we look backward in time, we see less than what was. When we look forward in time, we see more than what will be.
My brain is like a computer that is always trying to read the width of light in my environment, the powers of hydrogen. This helps me to scale my image with my environment—but my brain is itself part of the environment it is reading. The longer time is—the taller the iceberg, so to speak—the more difficult it is for me to hold both pH extremes (very acidic and very alkaline) in one brain.
