*Hmmm. What gives here? I'll have to think about that.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123448373118079905.html
(...)
One such insight calls to mind an observation made by the psychologist Daniel Gilbert. When we imagine a future event, Mr. Gilbert has said, it usually appears dim and indistinct to our mind's eye, much as an object at a spatial distance does to our real eye.
And yet while our brain informs us that the spatially remote object is actually larger and more detailed than it appears, no inner voice reminds us that the temporally remote event will be much more vivid and lifelike than it appears in our imagination. Instead, Mr. Gilbert writes, we conclude that temporally "distant events" – such as our own earthly departure – "actually are as [small] and vague as we are imagining" them to be. For most of our lives the Grim Reaper appears tiny and hazy.
Similarly, Mr. Eagleman notes that when we gaze at an object at some spatial distance, we see the space or objects between and beyond – "patches of ground, the strata of rocks, the distribution of trees." But when we look back at a particular event in our memory, none of the time or events between and beyond come into view. We would never say of an object in the distance that it is "as if it were right next to us," yet an event from long ago can appear to us as if it happened yesterday, as if no time has intervened.
The effect of this space-time distinction is that we are able to recall events without, as well, getting a full, panoramic sense of how much time has since gone by – and, thus, without getting a cruel reminder of how little time may remain for us. It's an unsung blessing, as Mr. Eagleman's stories show, that there is much less acuity to our sense of time than our sense of space. It helps us keep our mortality at the back of our mind. It helps make life – a long process of dying – bearable.
Differences between time and space, in Mr. Eagleman's tales, also shape the way we understand the mortality of others. As time passes after someone close to us dies, it becomes less and less easy, and finally impossible, to imagine him any longer in the world as it has evolved since his death. The organization that structured his days, the maple tree that made him feel at home: These fall away, as the monitors in Mr. Eagleman's lounge remorselessly reveal. Even when a person is still alive, our memories of precise moments spent with him are always receding, as the years go by, into a nostalgic glow. What changes after he is gone is that the signs of his physical existence – the footprint he made in the world – also begin to recede or erase themselves as time passes, often poignantly....
(((Blurb:)))
"Witty, bright, sharp and unexpected... as surprising a book as I've read for years." - Brian Eno
