Most people tend to think of time passing in terms of the ticking seconds on a clock and, to a large extent, this passing time appears to be the same for everyone.But, in the 1980′s, prominent English neurologist William Gooddy discovered a disconnect between what he termed “personal time” and clock time in the patients he was treating. Gooddy was studying and treating patients suffering from an acute form of Parkinson’s disease.Gooddy and fellow doctors noticed both ultra slow- and ultra fast-moving patients. Experiments with one particular fast-moving patient showed that she was able to catch a ball thrown at her and return it to the thrower before he was able to retract his hand from the throw.An ultra slow moving patient was photographed over a period of hours. When the photos were put together and run as a sequence it was possible to see the patient had taken most of the day to wipe his nose.The strangest observation of all was that, when questioned, the patients were not aware that time was moving at any pace other than normal for them. The fast patients saw the rest of the world as moving “as if stuck in treacle”, while the slow patients saw the world as a blur around them. However, to them, time was passing at a perfectly normal rate.It would indeed appear as though time is relative.
No comments:
Post a Comment