The Brooklyn Rail

When I arrived at MoMA on Thursday February 27, I had some hesitations. I had not seen The Clock before. As a neuroscientist, would I have something to say to the readers of the Rail? I had brought a notebook, just in case I wanted to scribble a thought or two as the hour unfolded. Scenes from nine to ten were mostly about morning activities—waking up, breakfast, sending kids to school, commuting to work. I started jotting down impressions in relation to what was happening on the screen, but also free associations triggered by having the topic of ‘time’ on my mind. I was soon focusing more on ideas about time itself, including the origins of those commonplace feelings and phrases that have arisen from our lived and learned experiences as complex organisms:

“Being on time”
“Being late”
“Killing time”
“Out of time”
“Never enough time”
“The time of your life”
“Time flies“
“Time heals”

Time as we know it goes back at least to “the big bang,” an occurrence which scientists have dated to some thirteen billion years ago. Of course, this ability to “date” time depends on the human invention of intervals and number systems. It’s hard to imagine what our experience of life would be like without this explicit, conscious sense of historical, linear time. But such awareness evolved from earlier landmarks in the history of what we know as time.

One important event was when biological organisms emerged from mere matter, about nine-billion years after the big bang. Life was made possible by the combination of two factors--the ability of single-cell organisms to make energy (metabolism) and hence survive long enough to split in half (replicate). These cells are the ancestor of all organisms that have ever lived.

Multicellular organisms evolved about a billion years ago: plants and fungi came first, and animals arrived some two million years later. The most dramatic difference was that animals possessed a nervous system, which made possible the neural control of metabolism, reproduction and circadian rhythms (i.e. the biological clock). Most importantly, the nervous system allowed unparalleled capacities for sensing the world and responding rapidly in time to challenging situations. It also made possible the ability to learn about the relationship of co-occurring sensations and events, such as the sight or smell of food or of predators, cueing survival responses to eat or retreat. While all animals use their nervous system to respond to stimuli, brains of mammals could make decisions about how to act based on stored knowledge from the past. This marked the beginning of the cognitive way of life.

With the emergence of primate brain, even more sophisticated forms of cognition, including temporal cognition, were made possible. The evolution of language in humans added elaborate systems to remember, plan and make choices in life. As one saw in the morning hour, better get to school on time, or suffer the consequences, not to the mention the stress! Moreover, consciousness and language allow humans to construct notions of space and time in relation to emotions and relationships –hence, those overarching narratives that drive the films excerpted in The Clock. You know that you had a beginning, and you will have an end. You know you have ancestors in your past and that possibly descendants in the future. You know that lots of particular things have happened to you so far in your life and many more are coming as long you live, and that you may be remembered by some people after you die.

The various activities I mentioned above define four realms of existence, beginning with the biological and moving upwards through the neurobiological, cognitive, and conscious levels. Each realm anatomically permeates and physiologically enables the level above it and the survival potential of the level below is enhanced by the one above.

Let’s close by seeing how time relates to each realm, working from the top down. When we engage with time, we do so as conscious beings who understand the present by remembering the past and/or anticipating the future. But such ability depends on preconscious cognitive processing that constructs the experience of time using schema, or bundles of information about specific things or situations, which we have acquired over the course of life in a culture and that we have stored as memory in our brain. Third, through stimulus-response learning, our neurobiological realm forms countless associations that guide our thoughts and action unconsciously. For example, we have learned implicit cues within the 24-hour clock to manage our sleep-wake cycle. Finally, deep down, are primitive life-sustaining metabolic functions that sustain life over time and enable the higher functioning of the other three realms.

Watching The Clock prompted these meditations on the relation of time to our intertwined, realms of existence: I can’t remember a “time” when I so enjoyed this normally mundane hour between nine and ten.