Can dogs tell time using their sense of smell?

I think it is very interesting how some animals instinctively know when it’s time to mate, hibernate and even die.

The research on dogs being able to tell time through their sense of smell is something that makes me wonder about how our senses tell time – since we are so visually stimulated we tend to ignore the other senses – it would be interesting to explore how the blind tell time, or even the deaf.

T.S.Eliot – Burnt Norton

Burnt Norton

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
Wtih slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movememnt; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
the black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always-
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

Caesium Clocks

Caesium: A brief history of timekeeping

Caesium in a vial being held in front of a time stationCaesium centre: a relay station in Colorado where atomic time signals are transmitted across the US
Caesium is the chemical element that has literally redefined time.

All your life you’ll have been told the importance of being on time. Well, thanks to caesium the entire world now keeps time so accurately that it has forced us to reconsider what time really is. It has also introduced a bizarre bug into timekeeping.

Measuring time accurately is actually quite a recent preoccupation. I’m not saying our ancestors didn’t want to know the time, of course they did. For millennia mankind has been creating ingenious devices to gauge the passage of time.

But the truth is that, until about 175 years ago, it was the sun that defined time. Wherever you were, high noon was high noon, and on a clear day a quick glance up into the sky or down at a sundial told you everything you needed to know.

That all began to change with the world’s first railways, here in the UK.

Find out more

In Elementary Business, BBC World Service’s Business Daily goes back to basics and examines key chemical elements – and asks what they mean for businesses and the global economy.

Then the fact that midday in London was 10 minutes before midday in Bristol – because that was how long it took the sun to figuratively sail west across the sky – became an issue, and a very serious one.

It wasn’t just that passengers would miss their trains. Inconsistencies in timekeeping were causing an increasing number of near misses and even train crashes.

In November 1840 the Great Western Railway solved the problem with “Railway Time”. It imposed London time across the whole network, the first occasion time was synchronised between different locations to a single standard.

The move was very controversial. Suddenly, your time of day was to be dictated by the Royal Observatory in faraway Greenwich.

The Dean of Exeter stoutly refused to adjust the Exeter Cathedral clock to meet the demands of the railway company. In Bristol a compromise was found: two minute hands, one showing local time, the other Railway Time.

Bristol clock has two minute handsThis clock in Bristol still has two minute hands 10 minutes apart

Nevertheless Railway Time gradually became the standard across Britain, and the same happened around the world wherever railways were built.

But what does all this have to do with caesium, you are probably asking yourself?

The answer is that whenever you have a network operating over distance, accurate timekeeping is essential for synchronisation. And the faster the speed of travel, the more accurate the timekeeping must be. Hence in the modern world, where information travels at almost the speed of light down wires or through the air, accuracy is more important than ever.

What caesium has done is to raise the standards for the measurement of time exponentially.

I took a trip to the home of accurate timekeeping in Britain. It isn’t Greenwich, but the National Physical Laboratory in the leafy London suburb of Teddington.

The series of off-the-peg glass office buildings located on an upmarket industrial park belie the exotic endeavours that take place within.

The NPL is one of the world’s leading centres for research into the measurement of time and is where the British standards for the seven key scientific units of measurement are kept.

It was here in the 1930s that the physicist Louis Essen developed the first quartz ring clock, the most accurate timepiece of its day, and a precursor of the caesium clock.

Quartz clocks exploit the fact that quartz crystals vibrate at a very high frequency if the right electrical charge is applied to them. This is known as a resonant frequency, everything on earth has one.

It is hitting the resonant frequency of a champagne glass that – allegedly – allows a soprano to shatter it when she hits her top note. It also explains why a suspension bridge at Broughton in Lancashire collapsed in 1831. Troops marching over it inadvertently hit its “resonant frequency”, setting up such a strong vibration the bolts sheared. Ever since, troops have been warned to “break step” when crossing suspension bridges.

A soprano singerComing up: The resonant frequency of a champagne glass

To understand how this phenomenon helps you to measure time, think of the pendulum of a grandfather clock. The clock mechanism counts a second each time it swings.

Quartz plays the same role as a pendulum, just a lot quicker: it vibrates at a resonant frequency many thousands of times a second.

And that’s where caesium comes in. It has a far higher resonant frequency even than quartz – 9,192,631,770 Hz, to be precise. This is one reason Essen used the element to make the first of the next generation of clocks – the “atomic” clocks.

Essen’s quartz creation erred just one second in three years. His first atomic clock created at NPL in 1955 was accurate to one second in 1.4 million years.

But why caesium?

1956:  The original caesium resonator which led to the development of the atomic standard time, with J V L Parry (on left) and L Essen, 1956Louis Essen (right) created the first caesium resonator in 1955

In a lab on the NPL site, chemistry professor Andrea Sella of University College London produces a tin can with a flourish. He opens it up and pulls out a wad of fabric padding. Wrapped inside is a sealed glass ampoule full of a silvery-gold metal.

He warms the ampoule in his hand. The metal gradually melts into liquid.

“Don’t drop it,” he warns when I take the ampoule.

He explains that the careful packaging is necessary because caesium is an alkali metal, from the first column of the periodic table. As such, it is very reactive, even more so than sodium or potassium.

“Drop it into water,” he warns, “and it will release hydrogen and there will be a very loud bang because the hydrogen will explode.”

Being in column one means that caesium has a single electron in its outer shell. That is what makes it so chemically reactive, and it was also the behaviour of this electron that Essen was interested in.

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Caesium: Key facts

Caesium
  • Discovered in 1860 by German scientists Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff
  • A silvery metal with a golden cast, it is the most reactive and one of the softest of all metals
  • Melting point of 28.4C means it is a liquid just above room temperature
  • Reacts explosively with water and also spontaneously in air
  • About half as abundant as lead and 70 times as abundant as silver

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

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I’m led to a room deep inside the NPL complex protected by a state-of-the-art electronic lock. This is where they keep the machine that sets the standard for the measurement of time in Britain.

It is known as the “caesium fountain” and inside the room I meet the keeper of the fountain, Krzysztof Szymaniec.

Don’t imagine the sort of fountain that plays in the gardens of a palace, this looks like a domestic hot water tank made of stainless steel with all sorts of extra wires and other gubbins attached at the bottom.

It may not be pretty, but it is one of the most accurate clocks on earth.

Caesium fountain

Szymaniec explains it works by using a series of lasers to push a group of caesium atoms so tightly together that they almost stop vibrating, dropping their temperature to a smidgen above absolute zero.

Other lasers launch this atomic “molasses” up into the tank bit of the machine. The atoms fall back under gravity – hence “fountain”.

What the machine does next is tune a beam of microwave radiation into the resonant frequency of the caesium. Just like champagne glasses and bridges, when you hit the right frequency the caesium gets excited, and what happens is that outermost electron jumps into a wider orbit. This is known as a “transition”.

Robert BunsenRobert Bunsen co-discovered Caesium in 1860

As the electron moves out into the wider orbit it absorbs energy, and as it jumps back in it releases it in the form of light, fluorescing very slightly. That means you can tell when you’ve hit the sweet spot of 9,192,631,770 Hz. It’s because this transition frequency is so much higher than the resonant frequency of quartz that a caesium clock is so much more accurate.

The caesium fountain at NPL, Szymaniec tells me proudly, is accurate to one second in every 158 million years. That means it would only be a second out if it had started keeping time back in the peak of the Jurassic Period when diplodocus were lumbering around and pterodactyls wheeling in the sky.

But modern technology means these days even more staggeringly accurate clocks are possible.

That’s because caesium was always a compromise element when it came to timekeeping. Louis Essen chose caesium, explains Szymaniec, because the frequency of its transition was at the limit of what the technology of his day could measure.

We now have new ways of measuring time.

At NPL they are experimenting with the elements strontium and ytterbium that operate at far, far higher frequencies – right up in the optical rather than the microwave spectrum.

An ytterbium optimal clockOptical clocks with strontium or ytterbium, such as this one, are even more accurate than caesium clocks

The frequency of the transition of strontium, for example, is 444,779,044,095,486.71 Hz. A strontium clock developed in the US would only have lost a second since the earth began: it is accurate to a second in five billion years.

The scientists at NPL reckon optical clocks that keep time to within one second in 14 billion years are on the horizon – that’s longer than the universe has been around.

Now, if such insane levels of accuracy seem pointless, then think again. Without the caesium clock, for example, satellite navigation would be impossible. GPS satellites carry synchronised caesium clocks that enable them collectively to triangulate your position and work out where on earth you are.

And the practical applications do not end there. Just ask Leon Lobo – he’s in charge of time “dissemination” at NPL. His job is to tell the time to the UK. For a fee.

NPL has just begun offering businesses standardised timekeeping accurate to the nearest microsecond – a millionth of a second. Mr Lobo is targeting a wide range of clients that all have one thing in common – they need to synchronise a network that operates at speeds far faster than any trains.

Consider for example electricity grids. As wind and solar energy become more widespread, the grid will need to time accurately its reactions to unexpected lulls in the wind or passing clouds. Get that wrong, and you end up with blackouts.

Mr Lobo’s biggest target is the financial markets, which these days are dominated by computers programmed to place thousands of trades per second, transmitted down wires at almost the speed of light.

In this world, the equivalent of a train crash would be ill-timed bets that rack up millions of dollars in losses, and might even briefly sink the market in the process. Unsurprisingly, financial regulators increasingly require a super-accurate timestamp on every transaction.

But the accuracy of caesium clocks has introduced a potentially disastrous glitch into the world’s timekeeping. To understand why, we need to rewind to 1967.

That year, the official international standard second was redefined based on the caesium transition. Yes, caesium has redefined time itself.

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Definition of a second

The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom

A diagram of an atom
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It was a momentous decision. Until then, mankind had always defined time (even Railway Time) by reference to the movement of the sun relative to the earth. No more. The sun was dethroned, and caesium took its place – though one wonders how long it will be before strontium or ytterbium knocks caesium off its perch.

The switch to atomic time was for good reason. The rotation of the earth, it turned out, was not such a reliable measure of time. No day or year is exactly the same length.

First off, the earth is very gradually slowing down and thus the average day is getting infinitesimally longer. Then you have to add in the idiosyncrasies of oceanic tides, tectonic drift and the convection of the earth’s mantle, all of which cause minuscule wobbles.

This is a big issue for Felicitas Arias, whose job is to keep time for the entire world. She is the director of time at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Paris, which is responsible for ensuring the uniformity of measurements worldwide and maintains the modern time standard, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

When UTC was first adopted in the 1960s, long before the advent of GPS, it posed a potential problem for sailors, who still relied on clocks to work out their longitude on the high seas.

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More from the Magazine

Inner workings of a pocket watch

“Who first designed a more accurate timekeeper was once more than a matter of academic interest. In the late 17th Century, clock and watch design was part of national security. Navigation and mapping were both essential for the successful conduct of war – and England was involved in a sequence of wars against the French and the Dutch in this period.”

Lisa Jardine: How the world’s first smartwatch was built

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They still exploited a system that the super-accurate clocks of another British pioneer of timekeeping, John Harrison, had first made possible in 1761. They compared the position of the sun or the stars at their particular location, with the time on a clock taken from another fixed location, typically Greenwich. Every four minutes’ difference represented a single degree east or west.

But in order for this technique to continue working, they insisted that UTC remain synchronised with the earth’s wobbly rotation. And that means every now and then an extra “leap second” is inserted. And it is Ms Arias’ job to decide when.

“For a long time leap seconds came every two years,” she tells me. “Then we had seven years without leap seconds. Then they came back every two or two-and-a-half years.”

But every time a leap second needs to be inserted, all the atomic clocks across the world need to be changed.

Most of us wouldn’t notice a second or two every couple of years, but computers do. They might momentarily shut down, which would, apparently, make them vulnerable to cyber-attack. Or they could get out of sync, leading to electronic train crashes.

It hasn’t happened yet but Ms Arias believes the consequences could be disastrous.

“One second in the financial markets can provoke a kind of earthquake,” she warns.

The prospect of City traders losing out on million-dollar deals may not fill you with horror, but she’s worried that as power stations, mobile phone networks and satellite navigation systems are increasingly synched to caesium time they could fail too.

A man stands looking at computer screens at the NYSETime is money, especially when it comes to trading at the New York Stock Exchange

That’s why there is a move now to get rid of leap seconds completely and go over to unadulterated atomic time. Most sailors already use satellite navigation, so it might not be such a serious problem for them today as it was in the past. But severing the link between time and the motion of the celestial bodies completely would have some significant consequences.

Because the earth’s spin is slowing, the time on your watch would gradually diverge from the rising and setting of the sun.

“We can predict that in a thousand years we could be one hour out,” she says.

She’s surprisingly relaxed about the prospect. She points out that most of us are already out of sync with solar time.

Due to the earth’s elliptical orbit, the sun can be as much as 16 minutes out of line with mean solar time. Add the distortion of time zones, which average time across huge regions, and the difference is far greater. China, which is almost 5,000km wide, has a single time zone spanning 1h40 of solar time.

The decision of some countries to adjust the clocks twice a year as a “daylight saving” measure exaggerates the issue yet further.

Nevertheless many nations resist the move to end leap seconds. The UK, for example, whose Greenwich Meridian was for centuries the benchmark for global timekeeping, insists that leap seconds are not a serious inconvenience.

And maybe that is a reasonable position given just how slippery the whole concept of time can be.

In 1971 scientists sent three caesium clocks around the world on commercial airliners. When they returned they were compared with caesium clocks that had stayed at home in the United States Naval Observatory.

Two first class seats aboard a TWA jet from London to Washington. One occupied by a caesium beam timepiece accurate to one-millionth of a second used in the USA's space programme. This clock is being returned to America from South Africa and as it must not be allowed to stop it is connected to a power point in the aircraft during the flight. The other seat is occupied by one of the clock's escortsFive years before the effects of flight were tested scientifically, this caesium clock travelled first class from London to the US – it had to be plugged into a power socket, and strapped in with a seatbelt

The jet-setting clocks were found to be slower by exactly the amount Einstein’s theories of relativity predicted. Thereby proving his hypothesis that the speed at which time passes depends on where you are in the universe and how fast you are moving.

Today, the clocks aboard GPS satellites have to be adjusted to take account of precisely this effect.

And the new generation of insanely accurate optical clocks may make use of relativity to map the gravitation field of the earth, by measuring the minute differences in recorded time caused by the effect of gravity.

But stop and consider the irony here. Caesium clocks have proved that an absolute measure of time is – impossible.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29476893

Do dreams occur in slow motion?

(Getty Images)

The mechanism by which a good night’s sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists

When my alarm wakes me up, I’ll often hit the snooze button before returning to the warmth and safety of my duvet for another quick doze. But although what follows can seem like a short dream – perhaps a single conversation or a short walk – I’ll sometimes awake to find that a whole hour has passed. And I’m left puzzling: how could such few events have taken so long to play out in my head? Is this a common effect?

Now researchers may have hit upon a way to answer this question, by studying those who can take control of their sleeping brains – so called “lucid dreamers”. Probing the experience of these people is also revealing other bizarre effects, too, such as whether it’s possible to tickle yourself in your sleep.

Lucid dreaming has offered insights into the sleeping mind for more than 100 years. One of the earliest dream researchers was a 19th Century French aristocrat, the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, who found he could direct the path of his dreams at the age of 13 and spent the next few decades using his lucid dreams to test the limits of his sleeping mind.

Strange trips

His escapades involved, among other things, throwing his dream-self from the tops of tall buildings to see whether he could dream his own death. Invariably, he couldn’t and the dream changed scene, avoiding a grizzly end.  And by noticing the way that places and people from his travels often populated his visions, he concluded that dreams are formed from a patchwork of our memories, offering a more rational explanation than the prevailing spiritualist theories of the time. Another pioneer was the author EM Forster’s niece, Mary Arnold-Forster, who wrote aguidebook to lucid dreaming in the 1920s; she used her dream awareness to avoid frightening nightmares about World War I.

Can you tickle yourself in your sleep? (Getty Images)

 

Can you tickle yourself in your sleep? (Getty Images)

 

Arnold-Forster and Saint-Denys’s work was mostly ignored, however, and during the following decades lucid dreams were over-looked for more “serious” lines of enquiry. But in recent years neuroscientists have recently started embarking on some equally eccentric experiments. Earlier this year, for instance, Jennifer Windt at the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz in Germany decided to find out if lucid dreamers could tickle themselves in a dream. That might sound whimsical, but it helps to test the level of self-awareness in dreams. In real life, we can’t tickle ourselves because we know that what we’re doing, meaning that the brain damps down the sensations that would normally cause us to break down in giggles. Importantly, the same was true in lucid dreams;the subjects found it difficult to make themselves laugh, which suggests their dream self has a high degree of awareness of their bodily actions and sensations, and minimises the response.

Interestingly, Windt also asked the subjects to ask other characters in the dream to tickle them. “Several times, dream characters just refused,” says Windt. “They behaved as if they had a mind and intentions of their own.” When the other being did tickle the dreamer, however, the effect was often underwhelming – which suggests the brain still recognised its control over those other dream characters.

Sleep-walking

Studying the passage of time in dreams had proven trickier to study, however, until Daniel Erlacher at the University of Bern in Switzerland set up an ingenious experiment.

It began when he was investigating the way the brain imagines different actions; when we dream of running, do we activate the same regions that are busy during a race, for instance? His early experiments suggested yes, but somehow they seemed to be strangely drawn out.

So, inviting some skilled lucid dreamers to his specially equipped sleep lab, he asked his subjects to perform various kinds of tasks during their dreams: once they had gained lucidity, they had to walk 10 paces, count to 30 or perform an elaborate gymnastics routine, for instance. To time the duration of their actions, he used a peculiar aspect of the dreaming mind: although the body is paralysed, eye movements tend to be translated to the body. In this way, the subjects could signal the start and end of the actions by rolling their eyes left and right a couple of times. Along the way, Erlacher measured their brain activity and muscle movements, to be sure they weren’t just pretending to be asleep.

As he expected, the dreamers sometimes took up to 50% longer to complete the routines than you would in real life, suggesting that they were somehow playing out their tasks in slow motion, even though they didn’t realise it at the time. “They reported that it felt exactly the same as in wakefulness,” says Erlacher.

(Getty Images)

 

(Getty Images)

 

Perhaps that can explain why a short dream can seem to fill the whole hour. Even so, Erlacher is currently at a loss to explain the phenomenon; brain activity during sleep may just take longer to process information, he suggests.

There is, however, a practical (if somewhat fantastical) side to Erlacher’s work; he hopes that athletes could use lucid dreaming to cram in a bit of extra practice. Sleep is, after all, crucial for memory consolidation – so it’s feasible that dream practice could cement new skills. That could be useful to allow an athlete to sharpen their skills when they can’t otherwise train – after an injury, for example. “Of course, there are limits – you can’t improve endurance, but if you have good simulator in brain already, can use it to enhance and stabilise the techniques. I see it as a lot of potential for disciplines with a high technical level.” His interviews with top athletes suggest that many are already using the technique, he says, and he is currently investigating the benefits.

His team’s experiments have included standard laboratory learning tasks – like mastering sequences of finger movements – alongside more conventional sports, like darts. “It seems to be very effective – it’s a bit worse than real practice but better than [conscious] mental rehearsal,” he says of his results so far. The time distortion during dreams shouldn’t be a problem, he thinks, since overall the sequences of events seems to be preserved, even if they do take longer to perform.

Admittedly, using our sleep for self-improvement may only appeal to the more puritanical or ambitious among us. But at the very least, learning to master lucid dreams could offer me a new excuse to avoid the plunge out of bed in the morning.

 

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141125-do-dreams-occur-in-slow-motion

Paul Madonna

“Paul Madonna has not only pressed graphic fiction way beyond its present boundaries, he has created a new and stunning art form where the stand-alone brilliant visuals and the hauntingly human words synthesize into a pure and irreducible aesthetic vision. This book taught me something fundamental and true and beautiful about the ineffable thereness and thingness of life.Everything is its Own Reward is a work of genius.” 
    – Robert Olen Butler
author of A Small Hotel, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

coffee_041011_948x682 coffee_442_021509_800x530 120708-coffee 489.03.489Paul Madonna is a San-Francisco based illustrator/Artist. His illustrations are interactive on the iPad.

Things that I have noticed about his work:

  1. He never depicts people in his version of San-Francisco – this is interesting because San-Francisco is a really crowded city and depicting it without people makes it seem very different. This relates to the idea of the flâneur i.e. someone who observes the cityscape from a distance
  2. His buildings seem to talk to each other – the space speaks out to the viewer and the text augments this experience.
  3. There is a sense of storytelling that is unique to every person who views his work. As the work interacts with the viewer in a very personal way.
  4. He appeals to human emotions even though he doesn’t show any humans in his work.