"Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got."
— Bilger, Burkhard
Author
Work Title
Date
April 25, 2011
Metaphor
"Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got."
Metaphor in Context
Eagleman traces his research back to psychophysicists in Germany in the late eighteen-hundreds, but his true forefather may be the American physiologist Hudson Hoagland. In the early nineteen-thirties, Hoagland proposed one of the first models for how the brain keeps time, based partly on his wife's behavior when she had the flu. She complained that he'd been away from her bedside too long, he later recalled, when he'd been gone only a short while. So Hoagland proposed an experiment: she would count off sixty seconds while he timed her with his watch. It's not hard to imagine her annoyance at this suggestion, or his smugness afterward: when her minute was up, his clock showed thirty-seven seconds. Hoagland went on to repeat the experiment again and again, presumably over his wife's delirious objections (her fever rose above a hundred and three). The result was one of the classic graphs of time-perception literature: the higher his wife's temperature, Hoagland found, the shorter her time estimate. Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Burkhard Bilger, "The Possibilian" in The New Yorker (April 25, 2011). <Link to newyorker.com>
Date of Entry
10/10/2011
