We are Time: time perception and human brain

Hello everyone, welcome to the BrainCand channel. And I'm so happy that I could catch you, Mark, today between your conferences, between your book publishing, between your paper publishing. And to be honest, your works really changed my life because I was late quite often and quite everywhere. And as soon as I met with your research about inner timing and how we sense time, it helped me to manage myself and to change some things that is really beneficial now for me. So, thank you for your research and thank you for coming. I studied your CV and I found that you studied and worked as a clinical psychologist, as a neuropsychologist, as a psychiatrist. And I would like to ask you to describe the differences between clinical psychology, psychiatry and neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry. Yeah, so actually I would say differently. So I am an experimental psychologist from training and I also studied philosophy, which is an important part of my research that I not only just do empirical research, but I also try to get an understanding of what I'm doing. So therefore philosophy is important. And then I studied or did my PhD in the medical department at the University of Munich and did my degree in medical psychology, actually called human biology the degree, but it was in the medical psychology institute with Ernst Pöppel. And there for my PhD, I started with brain injured patients and studied how their perception of time changed due to an infarction to the brain or cancer, brain cancer in certain areas of the brain. And so I would consider myself, you could say, as a neuropsychologist, an experimental psychologist. At some point I went to the University of California, San Diego, UCSD, and there I studied in the department of psychiatry, so as a postdoc, and did fMRI research, looking at time perception in healthy individuals, and then basically trying to find out which brain areas are responsible or are related to our sense of duration of passage of time. And yeah, so I would consider myself an experimental psychologist, a cognitive neuroscientist, you could say, with a leaning to philosophy. Time perception came into your life quite early. So was it love from the first sight? How did you come to this topic? So of course, I remember when I was five years, that I, as a child, that I had a discussion with, we had a discussion with some other people, we were all exchanging our ages, how old we were. And I remember that I was very proud to say, I'm nearly six, I'll be soon six years of age. So that's maybe the first memory where something like time or age and time came into my consciousness, or I still remember. But to study time perception was started actually with my PhD, so a little earlier, because I did an internship at this Institute of Medical Psychology in Munich, and that's where I came into contact with the scientific research on time perception. I did this internship, then I finished my degree in psychology at the time that was in Fribourg, Switzerland. Then I went to Munich, which is actually my hometown, and in Germany, and there I then did my PhD. And this was with looking at time perception changes in patients with brain injury. And that's how it started. But you could say with falling in love with the subject, actually, you could say something like this, because how did they come into contact with the Institute, with the Institute of Ernst Pöppel, who... Sorry for my cat. Even she's interested in time perception. Just let me into the microphone. And, yeah, so I was there in Fribourg, in Switzerland, and I read the internship paper of a student of mine, a colleague of mine, and there I saw, oh, he had been at the Institute in Munich, and he did work on time perception, and I said, oh, yes, I also have to do this. I want to do this, time perception, that's really interesting. Because, frankly speaking, in experimental psychology or cognitive psychology, a lot of things are very boring, actually, if you study them. But with time perception, I was really thrilled, and then that's how I went to the Institute and studied time perception, and started, and I'm still doing it now. What is the time, actually, concerning the brain? So, concerning the brain, well, first of all, I would say, through our faculty of timing and time perception, similar to spatial perception, we organize, you could say, the input we get through the senses. This is like a Kantian view by Immanuel Kant, that we need the faculty of time and space to be able to perceive, and also, not only passively to perceive, but actually actively be in the environment, showing motor actions, actually actively searching the environment. First of all, actually, we are actively searching, but with these categories of time and space, and that's how we understand the world, with an active search of the world in space and time. So, we need temporal order of events to understand what's happening, what happens first, what happens next. This is also important for understanding causality. So, you have a billiard ball, this one came, and then it hit the other billiard ball, and so there's a temporal order of events which we need. Certain durations, we have to discriminate certain durations, for example, just for understanding a language, a spoken language. Certain phonemes are mainly characterized by different durations. That's actually what I did for my PhD, looking, for example, da and ta. These two are mainly characterized that a certain component of the speech signal at the beginning is longer for da than for ta, and that's how we can make the difference, sense the difference between da and ta, which is, of course, important for language understanding. So, you see, temporal order, duration, et cetera, are important for interacting with the world, to be in sensory motor mode with the world, what we interact now, how we interact now, although it's just through a video conference, it's also related to timing, because you know when I stop with my sentences, you take up and continue talking, so we are actually also now already in some sort of rhythm, in a language rhythm, or a communication rhythm, actually. But time perception is also more, I would say, time perception is important, for example, even in a more passive sense of that we sense, hmm, this really takes, something really takes long. Let's say the lift is not coming, or the waiter with the food is not coming, something is wrong, and then we start to react to some sort of change in the situation. So, time is of essence in anything we do. And to plan, to plan our actions. Yeah, that's of course anticipation, planning actions in a short time range, but also in a longer time range, that's of course very important. If we talk about time perception, can we talk about specific brain areas that actually encode this duration, sense of duration, and sense of order? So, sense of order, that was actually now the output of my PhD thesis with the brain injured patients, but mainly those patients with injuries to the left hemisphere in the temporal cortex, and which is related, the damage there in these patients was related to aphasia, so the problem of understanding language. But also those patients had a problem in detecting temporal order. So, they needed longer intervals between two events, for example, two click tones, to be able, which were presented to the ears by a headphone, to be able to say which one of the two was presented first, the left or the right. So, they needed longer intervals before they were able to correctly tell the temporal order. So, this could be an indication, then other studies later showed the same thing, also with EEG measures, yeah, and localization methods, that it's more the left hemisphere on this temporal parietal cortex, so more in the back of the brain, that is responsible for temporal ordering in this milliseconds range. But then, let's say duration perception, there we have to make a distinction between two different perspectives. One is experiencing duration at the present moment, now, when you are presented with a certain duration and you have, for example, to reproduce it, or you have to judge it as long or short or whatever, versus looking at time or judging duration in retrospect. So, retrospect meaning you didn't attend to time, but now, suddenly, you're making a time judgment. For example, subjectively, how long did our conversation now last? Now, I can look at the clock, so I know how long it lasted, but without a clock, still, we can make a guess or have a rough estimate of duration. And this is more retrospective, and that is depending on memory. And it has been shown by Roman colleagues of mine that within humans, that this retrospective time perception is related to the hippocampus, hippocampal regions, which are known to be important for encoding events into memory. So, it's important for memory. And that, of course, makes sense because looking back at something, how can we tell time? Because we are judging events that passed, how many events passed, et cetera. And that's why the hippocampus is so important. But more being in the present moment, now, judging duration is more related to, psychologically speaking or experientially speaking, to interception, to the feeling of yourself to your bodily self. What does it mean? For example, we're waiting for a bus, and it's not coming, and we feel a little nervous because we have to catch a train. And then we are much reflecting on ourselves, and we feel this fear in us. We feel our body. And then what happens? Time stretches, duration stretches. But if we were, let's say, in a conversation, a nice conversation with someone waiting for the bus, and we're just not relating to ourselves, we're forgetting ourselves, then time passes very quickly. And related to the brain, the question, what I showed actually in San Diego at the UCSD with fMRI research, looking at brain activity, was that the insular cortex is responsible for this present moment awareness of duration. And what is the insular? The insular is the primary interceptive cortex, so interception meaning that feeling the inner bodily self, breathing, the heart rate maybe, if you have a stomach ache, if you feel tired, if you feel cold, hot, thirsty, et cetera, if you feel pain. This is all body signals that are received by the insular cortex. And this region also showed to be primarily involved in time perception of duration of seconds, many seconds. And this shows that maybe our sense of time comes from our body signals. The more body signals we receive during a time interval, and maybe also through more arousal because we are more angry or happily aroused, or through boredom because it's totally attending to ourselves, our bodily self, and then time stretches. So insular and interception are important for sensing time at the present moment. Since our emotions can drive this inner time sense or time perception, can, for example, attention or motivation, if we are motivated to do something or if we are focused on some event, can this also shift this time perception? Yeah, so exactly. So I think there's two components which are important. One is attention regulation. The question is, where do we attend? Do we attend to time or are we distracted from time? So if we attend to time, then actually time passes more slowly, the classic waiting situation, the boredom situation. But if we're distracted from time because we're in an interesting conversation, just like now, or we are, the biggest time killer is actually going into the internet and browse the internet and, let's say, jumping around the different news and then also the different messages you receive. Scrolling, scrolling. And then you are distracted from yourself and from time and therefore time passes very quickly. But if you're, let's say, attending to time because you're waiting for something to happen, then you feel yourself and time expands. Just imagine how it is crucial that time actually lives in us. Yeah. Not in mathematics because, you know, one time it was really popular to say that universe doesn't have time and time is invented by mathematicians. I really like to support this idea when I was late. The time doesn't exist. But now, based on what you are talking, I can understand that time really lives in our body and that our connection to ourselves and our body, our body awareness is fundamental for actually time perception. Yeah, I mean, that's nicely formulated. So you could say we are time, we with our bodies, we are time or I am time with my body and with my emotions, with my self-awareness. I am basically time. Thank you very much. So we talked about natural things that can shift our time perception. But since you worked a lot with pathologists, could you please tell when this shift is so big or significant, then we can talk already about pathologies and which protocols to use to understand if the person is healthy or if all this person has to be medicated. So I myself, I studied when I was in San Diego in the Veterans Affairs Medical Hospital. I studied patients with drug dependency. And then later I did cooperations with psychiatrists, for example, in Strasbourg with Ann Giersch, who studies schizophrenia, or with Kai Vogelei, who is a psychiatrist in Cologne, who studies a patient with depression or with autism. And so with all these different pathologies in mind, important for psychiatry and clinical psychology, what one could say is that a lot of subtle differences. But if I want to make a summary, we have to speak, I think, more in a way of summarizing things, is that in a lot of pathologies, psychiatry pathologies, people have an over-representation of self and time. So one of the most frequent words that patients with anxiety or depression voice is I, me, I, me, I, me. So everything is revolving around themselves due to their pathology, in the sense of that they're feeling depressed, that they're anxious. So their self, their anxious, their depressed self is some sort of upregulated. And at the same time, also, time is upregulated. So, for example, Kai Vogelei, with a very nice interview study with patients with depression, what they showed, and David Vogel, who was the PhD at the time, what they showed was in these interviews that people with depression feel stuck in time, that the future is far away, that they cannot reach the future, that they are stuck in the here and now, and time drags. And this is also, for example, with the patients with drug dependency, which were now in rehabilitation when I tested them. So they had, let's say, a history of years or sometimes decades of cocaine or methamphetamine addiction plus alcohol addiction, et cetera. Always also, of course, tobacco addiction that comes always with these other addictions. And then they're just for two, three weeks, they're off the drug. But of course, still, their whole brain is different, is changed through this addiction. And they also overestimate duration. I could actually even show this with experimental psychology tools where people really had to judge a duration, actual duration, and they overestimated these durations in several tasks, also computerized tasks, but also in a task where just let them wait for a while and then asked how much time had passed. So this shows due to this drug addiction to psychiatry issues like depression, the self is upregulated, and also then time is upregulated in the sense that time passes very often in many situations more slowly for these patients. I have a question about people with addictions. If we have patients, for example, with alcohol addiction and patient with drug addiction, do they have different shifts in time perception? Or if a person has some addiction, for example, addiction to video games, also is one form of addictions, or they have just a general shift? So what could be what you mean maybe with general shift is that if we measure this, is that in a lot of these groups of individuals, that impulsivity is upregulated, they're more impulsive. And so in many patient groups, the impulsivity levels are higher. And what is the definition of impulsivity is basically related very much to time. It means you cannot wait for something to happen. That is basically a definition of impulsivity. You want something, a reward, and you hardly can wait for it to happen. So if you're more self-regulated, more self-controlled, you can say, okay, I like this very much, but at the moment I cannot get it, but I stay calm and wait until it comes. But impulsive people, they want something now. And because they want something now, they also, then you could argue, they are more focused on their self and on time, and therefore for them, time expands. So that means that has been shown a lot of times that more impulsive individuals overestimate presented duration. That's like a characteristic of these patient groups. And so that's what you find in many, many psychiatric patients. And this was also what I found in the patient with addiction, so with stimulants, addictions, that actually it was like a mediation. You could find that drug addiction led to more impulsivity, and this impulsivity led to an overestimation of duration. If we talk about personal traits, for example, or personality, because you can sometimes meet impulsive people that don't have any addictions, can they manage this impulsivity in respect to time perception and body awareness and focus on themselves? Yeah, so we did a very mean study where we invited people to come to our laboratory, to our institute, and we said to them, so we took off their cell phones, their books, any reading material, anything that could distract them from time. And then we told them, our computer next door, where we want to do this computer task with you, crashed. Please wait here until we fix the problem. And so they were alone in a very boring waiting room. How to judge impulsive people. Yes, but we were some sort of not that mean, because we just had the people wait for exactly seven and a half minutes. So they were in this room alone, had no ways to distract themselves. And after exactly seven and a half minutes, the experimenter came back and then revealed this cover story, that it was a fake story, and asked them, so how long do you think you were alone in this room? How did time pass for you? How did you feel? What was your boredom level? And other questions. And there we found very clear correlations between the more people attended to time, the more bored they were, the more they overestimated duration, and the slower passage of time. But we also had beforehand measured trait impulsivity. So with questionnaires, people filled out what they thought about themselves regarding impulsivity, how they reacted normally in daily life. And there we also found then this significant correlation, that the more impulsive people were, that's also you could say a mediation analysis, the more impulsive people were, the more they attended to time, the more they also felt bored, and then the more, and then the slower subjective passage of time during these seven and a half minutes. So this was a very neat study where we, not very surprising because we've experienced these things from everyday life, but we now quantified them and could really show all these relationships. And then in the second study we also looked at self-regulation capacities. So you could say on this two-dimensional extreme, you could say massively impulsivity, massive impulsive. And then on the other side of this duality, you could have self-regulation. So people who are highly impulsive are not very self-regulating, have no self-control. People who are very self-controlled, they are not very impulsive. So we did the same thing again, also, but now looking at self-regulation capacities. And there we could show people who are more able to self-regulate, and that means that if you're feeling blue, if you're a little bit depressed, you're able to get yourself out of this situation and feel better. But also, let's say, if you're highly elated, something happens, you also can self-regulate yourself a little down if you have to. A part about impulsivity and self-control, a part that really helps me to manage my lateness everywhere, because I'm naturally a very impulsive person, and how it affects my time management. If I have something boring, time starts to stretch for me. And I have mistakes in planning because of this, because I think that I have more time, but in reality, I have less time. So this is when I started to control myself and always back to the real situation and to the real time. And really, it changed my life for better. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. So I know that you worked a lot with the altered states of mind. Could you please tell what is it exactly, if we talk about altered states of mind, in normal state, in pathologies? Why do I study it? First of all, I study it also because it's some sort of fun to do that, in using altered states of consciousness and doing research on this. Because also, if you experience it yourself, you get curious about what is this. There's more science about fun, yes. Yeah, yeah. But some people just use it like a job, the scientists as a job. But the topics they have are not so much fun, I always think. But then also from a rationality point of view of why I do this in the context of my research is because in altered states of consciousness, what happens, so we just talked about the self and time, how it is related through the insular cortex, from sensing yourself, your bodily self. What happens in these altered states of consciousness very often is that you lose your sense of self and of time. So, for example, as opposed to boredom, what we just talked about, when you're in flow states, because you're totally focused on something you're doing, which is very often something fun you like to do, it could be mountain climbing, doing sports, it could be in music with people in a band. But it could also be work, because you're sitting on a text and you really want to do this, and it's a great thing for you to do. And then in these flow states, then you lose your sense of self and time, or you think, already that amount of time has passed. So, we also did this with virtual reality games, so we had people come into our lab, and we had a virtual reality lab there, and have people play a very dynamic video game in virtual reality, so they're totally immersed in what they're doing. And what we found out is then with flow questionnaires, how much they were in flow assessed, the more flow people reported, the faster passage of time during these video games. Totally makes sense, it's nothing super surprising, but again, we quantified this, and showing them now experimentally and with quantified data, but it's really the more flow, the faster passage of time. So, again, this correlation we have. And then, but you can go into, look at other modes of inducing altered states of consciousness. So, one thing we had in our lab, very experienced meditators meditate in our lab, and we also looked at heart rate and breathing rate, and what we could, versus a controlled situation, where these very same meditators were in the same position, and also, and meditation seat, sit, and then they read a little passage of a calm text as a control condition. And what we could show there is that, again, during their meditation, where they were totally immersed in their meditation, afterwards, when we asked them, they also reported time passed very quickly, they underestimated duration, and their sense of body boundaries went away. So, again, this correlation between sense of self and of time. And one more, just one more. So, for example, a lot of people have problems with meditation. Why? Because they very easily get bored, and then they feel their body self, and time drags, and oh, when does this end, you might think. But there's a way, what I call instant meditation, for example, through the flotation tank. So, flotation tanks are these tanks where you lie in water, which has your body temperature, and you float in it because it's highly saturated with epsom salt. And so, like in the dead sea, you float in this water and feel totally relaxed. It's body warm because it's exactly 35 degrees, so it has your skin temperature. So, you lose your sense of your outer self with the environment, and you're there, it's dark, light is switched off, you could always switch it on again, but then you just switch it off, it's dark, you don't hear anything, you're totally relaxed, and you totally lose your sense of time, and again, your body's self-boundary, some sort of, there's a dissolution of those. So, again, this shows in these different altered states that you lose your sense of self and time. That's why I like to study these different induction methods, because then I learn something about how we sense time, and it's important for understanding basically self-consciousness. A couple years ago, there was a paper about meditation, where researchers picked up really experienced meditators, so they have an average experience of 10 years of meditation as permanent practice. So, when they really found that during this meditation, people start to lose their body awareness, they have changes in time perception, and they also measured how brain works within this state, and they found that there is like a short disconnection between thalamic regions and between cortex. So, thalamus generally is responsible for sensory information, and if the signals accelerate, so the person starts to feel the stretching of time, and it works vice versa. Since you also did the analogical work, could you please comment something about this? Do people really have this small disconnection between regions and alteration between thalamic regions and cortex? This sounds plausible, because thalamus is also not only the point where the sensory signals from the eyes, the ears, etc., except for smell, enter the cortex, but it's also important for the crosstalk between different regions of the brain. So, if there is less crosstalk between regions of the brain, this fits well with other findings with altered states of consciousness. For example, you find it with flotation, where the flotation tanks. So, colleagues of mine from Tulsa with Justin Feinstein in the lead, what they showed was after the floating tank, what I just told you, where they were in this tank and relaxed for an hour. Did you think about this? This is actually the state that is very close to the embryonic state. Yes, people discuss it in this context. People say that you can get into the states again you had when you were born. So, people discuss it in this context. But in this case, what they showed was that it had people going into the fMRI before flotation, and then after flotation, again, they went into fMRI, just recording the brain and basically the fluctuations of the brain of brain activity. And what they showed was that, especially in a certain brain region, the PCC, the posterior cortex, the PCC connections to other brain regions was less strong. So, the crosstalk between the PCC and other brain regions was diminished. And the PCC is very important also for our narrative self, for realizing ourselves. So, this is one indication that through the flotation tank, the sense of self is diminished. And a very similar result also appeared with an even more strong induction method for altered states of consciousness with psychedelics. So, people, again, while they were under the influence of psychedelics, like psilocybin or LSD, this was studies conducted at UCL, University of College London, with two researchers, Carl Harris and Nutt. And they showed that, again, the PCC, the connections between PCC and other regions were downregulated. So, this means in altered states of consciousness, you could say that this crosstalk between certain regions, in this case, regions which are important for your sense of self are downregulated. And then you have experienced this flying time, right? Yeah. These individuals didn't look at subjective time, unfortunately. But, of course, theoretically, because what we showed with the flotation tank is that the sense of self goes down. And also, you have a time distortion, subjective time distortion. So, these go hand in hand. So, there could be a relationship between this diminished crosstalk in these brain regions and subjective time. Speaking about meditation, this is very important and popular now, if we talk about mental health and mindfulness. Could you please tell something about how meditation helps us to stay mindful? Yeah. So, this is actually a part of the research related to what I said earlier, with this over-representation of self and time in patients with depression, anxiety issues, also drug addictions. And we also talked about more impulsivity. So, in daily life, we experience this. If we're more stressed, for example, then also our sense of narrative self is upregulated as our sense of time. For example, we're mad because someone said something about us we didn't like. And then, suddenly, we have all this narrative self, these ruminations going on. So, meaning that our sense of self is upregulated. And then, what mindfulness meditation is good at is because you get to go into the present moment of what you experience right now. This decreases, then, the sense of narrative self. Because the narrative self means, oh, I'm remembering what this guy said yesterday to me. And this is nothing to do with the present moment, but it's actually memory. It's the past. Or I'm anxious about something that might happen in the future. Let's say I have an exam or something where I'm a little scared about. And then, again, I'm thinking about this exam or this exam. So, I'm always in the future. So, I'm in the past or in the future. But the mindfulness regulation is that you attend to the present moment. You're just here and now. And you can help having this breathing in, breathing out. You have these techniques. So, to be in the present moment. And that's what helps you downregulate these negative ruminations. And that's why you feel better. And this is also when through different induction techniques. Also, then, not only for us in stressful situations, very good for everyone, but also what you could, these are complementary techniques that are now being probed and tested. That, for example, through virtual reality environments where you play video games, you're actually also immersed in the present moment and could downregulate all these negative ruminations. Or in the flotation tank, the same thing. After a while, this inner chatting, these ruminations go decreased. And or even with psychedelics. They are in patients with really severe depression, for example. Also, these psychedelics help in getting people out of these strong ruminations and they feel much better. So, you could say these inductions of other states of consciousness are very important for our health and, let's say, stress-related in everyday life for everyone, but also in clinical psychology or psychiatry for patients who have severe problems. But do these methods have restrictions? Which patients should not take psychedelics, for example, or should avoid this meditation practice? Yeah. So, of course, you always have to make a differential diagnosis for people. Even speaking of people who are, let's say, not psychiatrically speaking ill or that already there, we have people who have to choose their right method. For example, with meditation, you really have to have some sort of self-regulation capacities already, that you really stay because you have to meditate over and over again for quite a long time in a session of half an hour, maybe, and then doing this every other day. And you have to stay in this habit of doing it. And some people kind of have problems in maintaining the habit. But then, for example, then you could say, oh, going into the flotation tank could be a good thing because the flotation is very safe and you very easily get into something like meditation type states. But then that is not good for everyone because some people don't like having the light shut off. But this is not the biggest problem because you could have something like a little light still on. So that's also possible. But then in things like if you go to differential diagnosis with patient groups, one has to make sure, for example, psychedelics, because psychedelics have a really great impact on your mental self, is that what people normally do is that they some sort of try and exclude people who have problems also in the family history of, for example, with psychosis or something. Because psychedelics, you could say this used to be an idea that psychedelics are something like inducing a temporary psychosis for a couple of hours, but where you can get out again. And then the danger with psychedelics is that you could some sort of induce a psychosis in some people. So that's why you have to be very careful. Psychosis is almost equal to schizophrenia. Yeah, exactly. So schizophrenia is like the label for an illness which you use for describing certain psychiatric patients. But psychosis is basically a state you are in which people with schizophrenia could also have. But even with meditation, you always have to be careful. People who have problems with some sort of traumatic history or something, what they normally can do is they can very often cope in daily life with these traumatic experiences because you can, for example, distract yourself. So if you don't feel so good, you call someone and talk to him or you watch your favorite TV show or you go swimming and you can distract yourself. But then in these situations like in the floating tank or in meditation, then suddenly you have no means of distracting yourself. So then the trauma actually could come up. So that's why you have to be actually quite careful in certain contexts with certain patient groups. But that's, of course, then the job of the clinician or the psychologist because any proper treatment can have side effects. So you cannot say, okay, take the psychedelics, go into the floating tank, do meditation, and then all is good. But you have to embed these techniques into a greater context, a therapeutic context. So a therapist should be with you. So you analyze the person, you know the person, and then you try stepwise to get people into these states, altered states. For example, my colleagues in Tulsa, when they studied patients with anxiety and depression, so they had really patients with severe problems because other techniques like meditation or psychopharmacological treatment or psychotherapy, standard psychotherapy, didn't work for these individuals. And only those for these standard treatments didn't work, they were allowed to take part in the study. So you can really see they have severe problems for many years. What kind of problems? Depression? Depression and anxiety. Diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression. And then you get them slowly into the situation. So for example, you have them lie in the floating tank, but with the lights on. So they feel more secure. And then you have the total control over the light, they can shut it off and on. And that's basically how they treated the people. So some people just floated with lights on all the time, but you still have a certain relaxation. Other people, after a while, said, oh, I tried with lights off, and then they felt fine. And then they had tremendous positive effects after just one hour of float in these patients. And some said, oh, they've never had this state of relaxation and well-being for many years. But now for the first time, only after one float. Of course, one has to continue doing studies because this was just one float. And then directly afterwards, they felt much, much better, better than any time in years. But now what the people are doing is like having people come several times a week, let's say two times a week, similar to psychotherapy, where you also have to come once or twice a week. And then trying to see what are the effects of several sessions and also long-term effects. These things have to be studied. This was Feinstein and colleagues, also Martin Polos, who is the director of the institute, in the journal PLOS ONE. If you type in Feinstein and floatation, then you'll find the journal on the paper. I have two questions left. The first question is from my audience. How schizophrenic people sense time? That's an important question because it's very different to what we find with other patients' groups. What I learned, for example, from my colleague Ann Giersch in Strasbourg, who's a psychiatrist with whom I cooperate, and how she analyzed it, that's how I learned it. But there's really a history of knowledge over the last 100 years concerning this, is that they have some sort of the sense of self and time is something like segmented. So what people, again, if you interview people with schizophrenia, what they very often say, very similar to what people with depression say, that, oh, the future is somewhere far apart, I don't connect to this future. But if you analyze furthermore subjectively, but also do, and that's what my colleague Ann Giersch did, looked at experimental results where people had to judge durations, is overall, if you want to summarize it, is that they have a segmented sense of self. They don't have this, what we would call, and Thomas Fuchs, a psychiatrist from Heidelberg, says the same, that what we normally feel is an overarching sense of self across time. So we're feeling, we're having the feeling of something that just has passed, we have the anticipation that something will happen in the near future, and this is an overall overarching sense of our self in time. But these patients with schizophrenia have a much more segmented sense of self, that they don't feel being connected with themselves even, you could say, over time. And this is, I think, the most striking characteristic with patients with schizophrenia. Impressive, thank you. So imagine you have multiple personalities, and no one of them feels… Yeah, multiple personalities would be having a personality at the same time, but you only realize one maybe, but there it is, you yourself, your one personality is segmented into bits, and you don't feel your connection with yourself anymore, with your future self, with your past self. And as soon as we lose the connection to ourselves, we actually lose the connection with reality, as I understand, with space perception and time perception. Yeah, you could say so. Thank you. How time perception changes with age? Yeah, so intuitively this has been known for hundreds of years, people like William James and his principal psychologist in 1890, he already talked about this, and I think people have always talked about this, in the sense of, oh, what you feel is the older I get, the faster time passes. So this is especially people getting older, at a certain age, feel, oh yeah, compared to let's say my youth, my early adulthood, time passes so quickly now. And I actually did studies concerning this, and which are one of my favorite studies, also because you can repeat these studies across different people with different countries, and you always get the same results, especially for the question of the last 10 years. So when we asked people between 14 and 94, and there was like 500 people we asked, with these questionnaires on how time passes, especially the question of the last 10 years, how fast did the last 10 years pass, you find this increasing of subjective passage of time with age. So the older people get, the faster subjectively time passes across the last 10 years. And we first showed this in Bavarian and Austrian subjects, when I was in Munich and had a doctoral student doing this in Innsbruck, and then this was repeated with people in Netherlands and New Zealand, and then also in Japan, and latest results also with people from Italy. So at least in industrialized countries, you could say, you have this very constant finding, which is very important, because you have this replication crisis in psychology and the cognitive neuroscience that you cannot repeat suddenly your results. I would say in general, in science, 13% of studies could be repeated. Yeah, in psychology, at least in experimental psychologies, they did this really systematically, and they could show only 38% could be repeated, you could say the same results. And in social psychology, it was only 20%. So I'm happy to show that with my first study, which was published in 2005, you have these basically repeated results over the decades, and it still holds. And what is the, let's say, interpretation, maybe that's a thing that's also important, and this has something to do with memory, of course, again, because you have to think about your last 10 years. And the question is, of course, with memory is, as I said, at the beginning, the more events you have in memory, for a certain time scale or certain time period, the longer subjective time. And now you could say in your youth, in childhood, youth, early adulthood, you experience so many things for the first time, you have this novelty effect, which is then specially encoded in memory. So everything's so important and has this uniqueness, this novelty effect. But later, we get more routine, we know the things, and suddenly we realize we are, let's say, for 20 years in the same city, with the same job, with the same friends, everything stays the same. And of course, if you have something that always stays the same, there's no novelty, it hasn't got to be some sort of particularly memorized. And so then looking back, let's say a year of routine of always going to morning to work and coming home and then watching TV. And attention to new things, right? Yeah. Now you're talking about the remedy. How could you counteract that? One thing would be that you try to be open for new things. Try new things out. Try to get through your routine. Routine is, of course, important also in your daily life, because it has something to do with expertise, routine. So that's very important. But for your episodic memory, at least, which is important, you should have new experiences, different experiences. Thank you very much, Mark. I think this is a perfect point to finish our discussion. But anyway, I have more questions for you. Because time perception, self-awareness, body awareness, time awareness, this is so important in understanding who we are and where we are now, actually. To conclude, please describe what you are doing in three words. Researching time consciousness.