#subjective-time-dilation

#subjective-time-dilation

"I've done a lot of time-dilated travel." This statement encapsulates the essence of Grace's journey, highlighting the profound effects of traveling at speeds approaching light, where time for the traveler slows down significantly compared to those remaining on Earth.

Attention is the brain's filtering mechanism; what passes through that filter is what gets encoded. What gets encoded becomes memory. And memory is the raw material of identity. So in the architecture of your identity, attention is the doorway.

In behavioral science, identity follows action. If you're generous, you'll begin to see yourself as generous. If you're a patient person, you'll come to see that as part of who you are. Over time, the brain will wire itself to repeat these patterns.

Accomplishment Hallucination is a cognitive state in which speed feels like competence, output feels like accomplishment, and work feels done when the actual work-the thinking-through, the failure-mode analysis, the sitting with uncertainty until the problem reveals its structure-hasn't happened at all. Physics need not apply. AI can create a similar state in waking life—literally, as your very words assume form before your eyes like a conjuring sorcerer. But, like real life, the code may be buggier than we realize.

According to Einstein's General Relativity, for every black hole that exists within the Universe, there are only three properties that go into it that matter in any way: the black hole's total mass, the black hole's net electric charge, and the black hole's intrinsic angular momentum, and that's it. It doesn't matter what type of matter went into the black hole in order to form it; all that matters is its mass, charge, and angular momentum.

A few years ago, I climbed over a gate and found myself gazing down at a valley. After I'd been walking for a few minutes, looking at the fields and the sky, there was a shift in my perception. Everything around me became intensely real. The fields and the bushes and trees and the clouds seemed more vivid, more intricate and beautiful.

We now recognize that even ideas like "when" and "where" are subject to the laws of Einstein's relativity, and that in relativity, space and time are not absolute quantities, but rather are relative to each and every unique observer.

Recent integrative approaches suggest that physics cannot be adequately characterized by magnitude-based distinctions alone, such as those implied by Big-P, little-p, and mini-p physics. While these categories capture differences in scope and historical impact, they fail to address the heterogeneity of physical activity itself. To remedy this, I propose the Five Fs of physics: force, friction, flux, formulation, and foundational structure.

Close your eyes and picture an apple. Most people see something-a faint, slightly blurry image, less vivid than a real apple. A few, however, will see it as clearly as if it were sitting right in front of them. This ability is called hyperphantasia. Hyperphantasia, literally meaning "beyond imagination," refers to exceptionally vivid mental imagery. It is often described as the opposite of aphantasia, a condition in which people report little or no ability to form mental images.

Did someone with spatial-sequence synaesthesia design the calendar app on mobile phones? Because that's how time and dates look in my brain. If you say a date to me, that day appears in a grid diagram in my head, and it shows if that box is already imprinted with a holiday, event or someone's birthday. Public holidays and special events like Christmas and Easter are already imprinted for the year, and the diagram goes backwards to about 100,000BC

Your consciousness can connect you with the entire universe, a groundbreaking study suggests. Experts from Wellesley College in Massachusetts claim that traditional connections in the brain cannot fully explain how we are aware of our existence. Instead, they argue that quantum physics taking place within our skull is what generates awareness. This includes the idea that particles can exist in multiple states and locations at the same time.

In 2011, researchers Jason Tangen, Sean Murphy, and Matthew Thompson at the University of Queensland discovered a striking visual illusion while preparing a set of face images for a study. As they were going quickly through the faces to check their spatial alignment, they started noticing that the faces appeared highly distorted, almost cartoonish. They then realized that these distortions were most pronounced when the faces were flashed about 4-5 times per second in peripheral vision.

Star-formation will eventually end, and then the last shining stars will burn out. Galaxies will dissociate due to gravitational interactions, ejecting all masses and leaving only supermassive black holes behind. And then those black holes will decay via Hawking radiation, leaving only cold, stable, isolated bodies, from which no further energy can be extracted, all accelerating away from us within our dark energy-dominated Universe.

This story is about complexity, advanced math, cognition, and machine computation. But hold on. For this exercise, my task is to take this complex idea and reduce it-to simplify it into something less daunting and (I hope) a bit easier to understand. So, let's take a step back. My bet is that most of us learned our first piece of geometry with two letters: x and y.

In my previous post, I summarized my response to Christian de Weerd, who denied that a Darwinian approach to consciousness is even possible. I argued that consciousness science has unnecessarily insulated itself from the evolutionary tools that revolutionized our understanding of every other biological phenomenon, and that treating human consciousness as the paradigm case distorts our picture of consciousness as a natural phenomenon spanning millions of species across millions of years.

Light is one aspect of the Universe that, for most people, holds a deep and noticeable value in everyday life, helping them to navigate, learn from, and connect with the world around them. Yet it's not particularly difficult to imagine life without it. After all, many nonhuman animals live in lightless environments. However, as Gideon Koekoek, an associate professor of physics in the research group Gravitational Waves and Fundamental Physics