Our Time

(excerpt from Lenses, a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

We perceive time very differently than machines record it. Would it be an advance in artificial intelligence if we programmed a computer so it could mimic human subjective time?
There is wide variation in time as subjectively experienced, ranging from sensory-deprived boredom to stress-induced trauma. A second can feel like and be remembered like an hour or a day or a lifetime. There are probably limits to what can be stored in short-term memory. In moments of life-or-death crisis that limit is broken and short-term spills over to long-term, and the mass of data that is perceived gets indelibly imprinted in long-term memory and takes up far more memory capacity than is normal.
You could think in terms of time itself going faster or slower, like varying speeds of the Now turntable. Or imagine that stress can trigger the brain as well as the body to operate in exceptional ways, enabling the perception, processing and storing of far more data far more quickly than normal.
This notion of variable subjective time or variable speeds of time reminds me of a radio receiver tuning in to different frequencies. It also reminds me of the video series Stranger Things which triggered this sequence of thought. In that story El/Eleven moves to another dimension or set of dimensions, the UpSideDown, through sensory deprivation.
I'm also reminded of a story called "Never-Ending Now" which I wrote back in college. In popular wisdom, when you are near death, your whole life flashes before your eyes. I imagined that in the moments before death that might happen over and over again, that time expands subjectively, in a variant of Zeno's Paradox. Just as Achilles never catches up with the turtle, you, subjectively, never reach death. That is the limit that you get closer and closer to but never reach. To anyone else, your timeline ends. You die. But to you, you keep getting closer and closer forever. Or perhaps the Now needle which is your self leaves the groove which has been your time or moves to another.