A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

14 : The various timeframes of the present moment

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The lived moment has three major timeframes : reactive and subconscious gestalts operate at <0.1s, the conscious mind takes 2-3 seconds to settle on anything, and the body-mind takes at least 40 seconds to recognise that the world might be "different and safer".

All these kinds of communication, and more, occupy different time-frames and have different degrees of latency, residence/decay, and spheres of potential influence. So the "multiplexing" occurs both through different information streams (modes of communication) and through multiplexing in the usual technical meaning of the word – different frequency domains.

The various multiplexed time domains allow for complexity and integration, with some systems (neuron firing at milliseconds, synapse activity tens of microseconds) having insufficient persistence and latency to have any use in the real-time domain of conscious experience. Astrocytes [1] (seconds), and vascular neurotransmitters (tens of seconds to minutes) provide latency of response. Muscle/motor inhibition (tenths of seconds) determines the upper frequency of meaning-making and memory-making as re-presentational movements are formed in the pre-motor cortex based on re-membering the meaning of previous movements. All of these (and perhaps more) combine to give a "unitary conscious episode" of about two seconds[2]. In contrast to the period required for conscious experience, motion is perceived by non-conscious circuits in the mid-brain, and so only becomes life-like somewhere between 24 and 60 frames per second[3].

We therefore operate on several timeframes without paying them much attention at all. "Making sense" of something using cognitive processes takes a whole two-to-three seconds. In contrast, the body needs at least 40 seconds to make sense of anything "new" that might lead it to re-assessing the safety of the present environment (see later sections). On the other hand we link into reflexive processing all the time that operates much faster than cognition or meaning-making because it is run by very efficient Gestalts. Therefore the body and non-conscious are both much faster than the conscious mind (by a factor of at least 20:1) and also much slower (by a factor of at least 20:1). It’s easy to be deceived by the Gestalts into thinking that everything operates at the speed of thought. But it doesn’t. Communication with the body in a way that re-sets reflexive Gestalts is far slower than thought

This ratio of about 20:1 (or more) between the time for an event "logged" by your subconscious and reactive Gestalts vs the much slower time for a fully grasped conscious experience defines the difference between reflex reactive living vs conscious self-aware living. The further 20:1 (or more) slowing down between cognitive appraisal and the speed that your body can "change its mind" determines the rate at which survival responses can be "ramped down" back to a safer normal. It is still possible to be cognitively aware of and respond to some of the rapid subconscious events down to as little as 25 milliseconds, but that response is completely reactive and automatic. The mind does no so much consider, but observe and at the best make micro-decisions from a very limited range of options (such as Yes I do that or No I don’t). Your mind only makes contextual and considered cognitive sense of anything (beyond the capacity to simply react) at a relative snails pace – but at this time frame of 2-3 seconds we potentially have unlimited choice. If you happen to go on a prayer or meditation retreat, the common denominator will be that you are encouraged to slow down, so that these 2-3 second experiences become the norm. A "simple" way to do this [4] is to acknowledge every doorway that you walk through and to consider every mouthful of food or drink, and to take one breath before attempting anything[5].

Time as separation

Life organises itself through separation and restriction of communication, and one way this happens is through different timeframes at different scales.

If you tried to talk to an ant, one problem would be the vastly faster time-perception of a tiny insect, so the ants speech would have to be slowed down - both in frequency and content - so that you could perceive and understand it. So different scales of your organic body communicate with each other by inference, by cumulative interference making larger, slower Turing patterns, and by time-persistence.

Some quantum effects that we know of in the body are instantaneous - such as Bose-Einstein Condensates in microtubules, that coordinate large volumes of neural activity, or entangled biopohotons travelling through myelinated nerves. Here we have the same separation as occurs in the use of nouns. If I say "that's an orange", there is an immediate implication that everything else not so-labelled is not-orange. So BEC's and entangled biophotons also create compartmentalisation - in fact, far more effectively and hermetically than any other information process.