Realisations (British spelling)

---

Neuropsychologists know that the way the human mind experiences time is largely dependent on mechanisms in our brain that we are born with. Every human being has a brain "biorhythm." This is the general "pulse" of electricity through the brain. It can vary in different environments between thousandths of a second and about 3 or 4 seconds.

This biological timepiece effects the way cognition and memory process information; the more shocking, novel, boring, or detailed our input is, the more we'll deem the time as "dragging". That is to say, if it requires lots of memory processing of small details (especially if they are related to the body) time seems protracted. However, if you are doing a complex task (processing lots of small details), but that task is routine, then time seems compressed--it seems to go faster.

Hence, our first month in Wales seems, to us, to be extraordinarily vivid and long. Emotional duress, new input, careful attention to new details, all these contribute to the "time crawl." Yet, this is starting to change a bit. I am getting into a routine. My routine does involve many complex tasks, yet, because it is routine I can devote very little brain power to attending to the things around me. Hence, I'm only doing "routine information processing" and so time seems to go faster. It is easy for me to now see that I will be in Italy soon, hopefully visiting my friend Attilio. Not long after that, I will hopefully head back to the US for a conference presentation. After that, it's back to Wales for a 2-3 month finale. Then--well, I don't know what after that. But time is accelerating for me.

I'm continuing my research in cognitive linguistics. I'm currently looking in three directions:
(1) Semantic simulations from novel and conventional cues
-This deals with the fact that when we use language, the brain activates the same parts for memory of a thing as it does for the thing itself (hence the fact that if I say chocolate, you often can "taste it"--this is called semantic simulation). What I am looking in to is whether the brain prefers one type of "sense recall" over another.

(2) Linguistic constraints on TIME
-The human understanding of TIME comes from our brain's processes. Does language restrict how we understand time. Most languages have similar expressions for time, but there are some variations. Do those variations lead to differences in how people understand TIME? (My guess is "no," but what do I know?)

(3) Cognitive linguistics and foreign language instruction
-How do embodied cognition and force dynamics effect phrasal instruction (teaching English to foreign students)

See how TIME dragged while you were reading this? By the way, the "dragging" of time is a metaphor. Time cannot actually "drag". But then, you already knew that.

---