What happens when the simple act of slowing down a metronome reveals the exact limits of our attention, and how might our physical body size secretly dictate the way we experience rhythm and reality?
Dr. David Gilden, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, joins host PJ Wehry to discuss the overlooked physical and biological laws shaping human perception.
Dr. Gilden explores the human response to living in time in his book, The Psychology of Human Temporality. They examine how the world we experience is not rote or matter-of-fact, but actively created by our minds through relationships, and why those cognitive connections inevitably fall apart.
In this conversation they explore:
- How our minds generate emergent properties—like transforming isolated claps into rhythm or sequential notes into a melody—to actively construct the world we experience.
- The phenomenon of "islands," demonstrating how introducing just a couple seconds of silence between beats or gestures destroys our ability to perceive continuity, leaving us lost.
- Why the traditional psychological view of memory as a storage container of facts falls short, and how a physics-based approach—where the past dynamically influences the future, much like weather systems or financial markets—better explains how we lose our train of thought.
- The metaphor of "cooling coffee" applied to the mind, illustrating how a sensory input temporarily heats the brain, creating a brief window for connection before the activation energy decays according to natural laws.
- The biological science of allometry and the radical hypothesis that a person's physical body size and surface area might actually dictate their cognitive decay time.
- Surprising experimental data revealing that taller people can actually maintain slower rhythmic connections than shorter people, suggesting the mind's shedding of activation mirrors the body's shedding of physical heat.
This is a conversation for anyone interested in experimental psychology, theoretical physics, and music who wants to understand the hidden biological mechanisms structuring our everyday perception of the passage of time.
Make sure to check out Dr. Gilden's book: The Psychology of Human Temporality 👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/100940878X/
Check out our website at chasingleviathan.com
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. When it rises up, the mighty are terrified. Nothing on earth is its equal. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud.
These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop.
Timestamps
0:00 Introducing Dr. David Gilden
0:52 Why Dr. Gilden Wrote The Psychology of Human Temporality
5:27 From Time Perception Research to Body and Biology
7:21 Experimental Psychologist Versus Popular Science Writer
11:54 Three Core Equations Behind Forgetting and Time
12:25 How Minds Create Relationships and Emergent Properties
15:01 Rhythm, Melody, and Emergent Feelings in Music
18:41 Loss of Musical Connection
21:30 When Temporal Separation Turns Patterns into Isolated Events
22:51 Trained Musicians, Rehearsal, and Internal Subdivision
24:58 Bitter Metronomes and the Two Second Limit of Connection
29:48 From Duration of Events to the Problem of Memory
32:23 Redefining Memory as Influence of Past on Present
38:52 Why We Misunderstand Memory through Containment Metaphors
44:56 Cooling Coffee as a Model for Mental Decay
47:35 What Actually Decays When We Lose the Thread
52:47 Exponential Decay and Newtonian Cooling in the Mind
55:20 Human Attention Lifetime
58:18 From Formal Theory of Decay to Allometry
1:02:20 Body Size, Metabolism, and Kleiber Style Scaling Laws
1:05:38 Can Body Size Shape How We Experience Time
1:09:31 Testing Rhythm and Body Size With Drumming Experiments
1:11:48 Analyzing When People Lose the Beat Across Tempos
1:13:05 Shared Law for Heart Rate, Body Size, and Attention Decay
1:16:47 Surface Area, Heat Loss, and Cognitive Cooling Metaphor
1:18:11 Closing Thoughts
