(calm music) - All of our life is an order of time, you know?

It's putting together a collection of moments, really.

- Almost every aspect of our existence is timed by our internal circadian clock.

The nice thing about the clock is we are actually the master conductor of our clocks.

- Can time be altered?

And if time can be altered, it's gonna be only for a fraction of a second.

- Time is not just something that runs out or is not just something that's in front of us.

The past is not locked up and closed off.

- Your past has made you who you are, good or bad.

If you wanna move into the future, you have to look at your past.

I think it's also a problem to say the past is behind us and the future is ahead of us.

- [Jim Cotter] On this program, we'll take a look at the concept of time.

With the help of artists and experts, we'll examine how our understanding of time has changed over history and how our individual perception of time changes over a lifetime.

(lively music) (whimsical music) So much of how we behave is governed by our sense of time, our perception of how much of it has gone by, and of how much we have left.

From a religious understanding of time to modern theories of relativity and space, humans have constantly interrogated what time is and how it speaks to our relationship with the past, present, and the future.

♪ Is there a light ♪ That you have inside you ♪ Can't touch, hmm ♪ A looking glass ♪ It can only show you so much ♪ But if you follow the signs ♪ Slowly but steady ♪ Don't rush - [Jim Cotter] Valerie June is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose sound encompasses a mixture of folk, blues, gospel, soul, country, and bluegrass.

Her 2017 album, "The Order of Time," delves into the mysteries of time and the universe.

♪ And holy water cleansing rain ♪ ♪ Floating through the stratosphere ♪ ♪ Blind, but yet you see so clear ♪ - Those songs, they are, they start with "Long Lonely Road."

So you're dealing with the distance of time and that time passing and people like my grandmother who left the planet, but I have her always in that song, making her yeast rolls and sitting on the church pew, always.

♪ Pile in the church pew rows ♪ Gran made the best yeast rolls ♪ ♪ Gospel of stories told ♪ 'Bout the one way to save your soul ♪ ♪ Drag out the old guitar ♪ Gas up that old Ford car ♪ We're gonna hit the dusty road ♪ ♪ Four wheels can barely load ♪ It's been a long ♪ It's been a long, long, long ♪ Long, long, long, lonely road ♪ - [Jim Cotter] June's relationship with time is practical.

She uses it to record the milestones of her life, to reference important events.

♪ Sun up 'til sun sank down ♪ His body worked to the ground ♪ - [Jim Cotter] Time is an essential human construct.

But beyond this, says Lera Boroditsky, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego, it's quite difficult to find tangible, physical evidence of its existence.

- It's abstract, you can't see it, you can't smell it, you can't touch it with your hands, you can't taste it, you can't hear it, but you also can't experience anything outside of time, right?

It is part of the very fabric of our experience.

So how do we construct this abstract idea in our minds?

For me, these things that we construct that are beyond physical senses are the very hallmark of human intelligence, right?

So we as human bodies, we walk around, we, you know, flex our toes and flex our knees and derive ways to defy gravity.

And we get photons in our eyeballs, and we get sound waves in our ears, and we get pressure on our skin.

And so we have all these physical interactions of the world, and then somehow we come up with ideas like time travel or justice or love, or we write symphonies, or we invent chess, we make radio technology.

We do all of these incredible things with our minds that involve imagining something that we can't see, that we can't touch.

How do we do this, right?

So that's why I got stuck on the question of time.

How do we think about this thing that's in some ways abstract beyond perception but yet so fundamental to our experience?

- [Jim Cotter] Imagining shifts in time is an essential tool for creativity, allowing us to relive the past, reimagine our present, or be convincingly transported into the future.

- What really motivates me is to create artwork that is about the time that I live in and is reacting and raising questions to important issues.

So I like this one phrase, that art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

So I interpret that in my own work, and my goal is to raise these questions and get people to think about the future that we are creating, because we're quickly getting to a level of carbon in the atmosphere that hasn't been seen in 15 million years.

So it's a very scary path that we're treading on.

We're reaching certain tipping points.

And I think my role as an artist is to raise awareness about these things.

- [Jim Cotter] In his "Ultima" project, the fine art photographer Nick Pedersen took such leaps to imagine a post-apocalyptic world where few humans have survived climate change.

- I wanted to create it as a cautionary tale, because we now live in an era that scientists are calling the Anthropocene, which means humans now have this unprecedented potential to alter global systems like the atmosphere and the oceans to such an extent by using carbon fuel emissions.

I think this shows a really extreme example of what we are capable of, because whatever happens to us, the Earth is gonna be around for another 4.6 billion years.

So the question is whether we can maintain a habitable climate or how do we adapt to its changes.

- You're not doing this from some artistic garret somewhere.

You're not sitting in your studio pontificating this.

You've gone out into the field.

You've gone to Iceland, you've gone to the deserts.

What's shocked you, and how stark was that evidence as you experienced it?

- Well, I think that the biggest evidence is just the amount of glacier melting that I saw when I was in Iceland.

I think one of the largest glaciers in all of Europe is in Iceland, and you see it melting and the icebergs breaking off and going into the ocean.

So that's pretty shocking to see.

(calm music) My whole process starts using my own photography.

And I guess sometimes I like to say that it's hyperreal because it's taking images and piecing them together to create a different new reality that doesn't exist in the real world but still has the weight of photographic believability and truth to it, which is what I think makes it powerful.

All of my images are created using my own photography, and then I spend a great deal of time piecing them together using a complex process of digital imaging to create a sort of seamless montage for each image, and each image that I make is actually made up of about 50 or more photographs put together.

- [Jim Cotter] Similarly, as we attempt to articulate the concept of time, we're putting together ideas from a more physical domain.

- It seemed that we were very often using words from space to talk about time.

So in English, we say the best is ahead of us, the worst is behind us.

The way we talk about duration, we talk about things being long or short, long meeting, a short concert, right?

All these spatial words where you say, "I'll see you at five o'clock on Tuesday in a week," all of these, again, spatial prepositions that we use to talk about time.

And then as we started doing research on this and started doing experiments, it turned out that the particular structures in English that people use are actually the ways that people in English spatialize time.

And even little accidents, like English happens to be written from left to right, and it turns out English speakers really want to organize everything from left to right in time.

So if I give you a bunch of pictures, say, pictures of my grandfather at different ages, and say, "Lay these out in the correct order," as you're laying them out, you will just naturally do it where the earliest picture, the youngest picture's on the left, and the oldest picture's on the right.

And if I ask a Hebrew or an Arabic speaker to do this, they'll go in the other direction, from right to left.

So even this little quirk of how your language is written makes a difference in how you organize time, and the metaphors that we have in the language that relate space and time makes a difference for how you organize time.

- [Jim Cotter] These different cultural perceptions of time are key to the work of Akram Khan, the British dancer and choreographer celebrated for his melding of the classical South Asian dance form kathak and contemporary dance.

(peaceful music) - I think it's super important to look back at your past.

I don't believe in this, forget your past.

Your past has made who you are, good or bad.

If you wanna move into the future, you have to look at your past, because I think it's also a problem to say the past is behind us and the future is ahead of us.

It's all one timeline, because some Amazonian tribes believe the past is in front of you because you can actually see it.

The future is behind you because you cannot see it.

So it's just how you perceive time.

We're living in a time where two approaches to time are clashing.

One is the Western time, the Christianized time, the man-made time, the industrial time, the clock time.

And then you have the other approach to time, which is Eastern time, spiritual time, life and death time, sacred time, ritualistic time.

So in a sense, what dance allowed me to be aware of and conscious of is the importance of the spiritual time, the slowing down of time.

(percussion popping) - [Jim Cotter] Yet with few exceptions, the modern world runs on Western time.

The calendar that is based around the life of Jesus Christ has come to dominate global timekeeping.

Yet strict adherence to this framing of time is relatively new, says David Henkin, a history professor at UC Berkeley and author of "The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are."

- There's a separate Roman astrological tradition, but an astrological tradition that assigns dominion to the seven observable heavenly bodies, right, the sun, the moon, and the five planets that can be seen with the naked eye.

So that wasn't the dominant calendar in the Roman Empire for anyone, but it was a calendar.

In the Roman empire, Jewish Sabbath-keeping and the Roman astrological calendar kind of meet, and Christianity in some sense is, I mean, it becomes a world religion through, in and through the power of the Roman empire.

It passed into Islam as well from Judaism.

And then both Islam and Christianity spread to or conquer other lands, and then, you know, European Christians spread the seven-day week to- - [Jim Cotter] All corners.

- To the Americas and then global capitalism.

I mean, so it's only really in the last 150 years that you can call it a global timekeeping system, because a seven-day week was not a functional calendar, say, in China or in Japan until relatively recently.

(calm music) - [Jim Cotter] And for much of human history, time was malleable.

The hours of the day were not of fixed 60-minute lengths and could vary depending on the time of year, thus making the days shorter in winter and longer in the summer.

- Between, say, 1880 and and 1920, we got standardized time zones, right?

And that's a big thing, right?

Because you're telling people, by having a mean time, you're saying it may look like noon, but it's not noon, right?

That's a real break from nature.

We had summertime, what we now call Daylight Saving.

So, okay, again, it may look like it's noon, but it's not.

It's actually 11:00 AM.

Those are really, really big fundamental changes.

The settlement of the International Date Line, it may feel like Monday, but it's actually Tuesday.

- [Jim Cotter] Making the trains run on time on every day of the week required the standardization of time zones across the globe, and Greenwich in London was set as the place that would dictate time to the rest of the world.

(ominous music) - The world did not immediately switch to that.

It really took decades until a lot of places actually adopted that, and a lot of places resisted this because they didn't have a say in that decision as well.

- [Jim Cotter] Rasheedah Phillips is a visual artist, community activist, and cofounder of the Black Quantum Futurism artist collective, which in 2022 held the Prime Meridian Unconference to examine the consequences of standardized international time.

- I was exploring the Prime Meridian Conference that took place in 1884, where it was agreed upon that Greenwich would be the Prime Meridian for the world, and examining the features of the sort of social historical memory around that time and what was happening in other places and exploring, again, sort of the nature of temporal oppression in Black communities in particular that was only reinforced by this globalization of time, like for example, in sundown towns where Black people had to, and other people of color had to be out of the city literally by the time the sun went down, right?

And so when you think about, for example, Black people who were enslaved, right, part of the way that they fought back, part of the ways that they were able to survive was by manipulating their time, by working slower, by, you know, delaying time.

(mysterious music) I try to experiment with time in my art, so taking things like clocks and really like examining the object and breaking down the object.

And so my collective, Black Quantum Futurism, has a series of clocks called "Dismantling the Master's Clock," and so we use that series to sort of experiment with different ways that a clock can respond to bodies.

You know, we have a clock, for example, that runs backwards when you approach it and one that runs forward as you back away from it.

We've been able to build like a large compass kind of clock that moves, that we embed it into a stage where it will spin depending on where the bodies are on the stage.

So that is another way that we explore this sort of breakdown of time through thinking about how sound comes together and what we can do with sound to manipulate time and temporality for a person in a moment.

(calm piano music) - [Jim Cotter] This sense of time being elastic is essential in music-making.

Rubato is the technical term for the changing of the tempo beyond what is prescribed on the page.

It has the effect of making music sound more natural and human.

- There is a fairly large spectrum in certain repertoire of what can be done, but I think that this rubato is something which it's very delicate in a sense because sometimes people think, "Oh, you can just distort the phrase to no end," but of course it's not true because the time you have stolen, you have to give back somewhere.

So you have this ebb and flow to the phrasing.

And that is exactly the question, where do you take, where do you add that tension?

Where do you take it back and let it recede so that you're still within that overarching line, architecturally speaking, of the music and that it doesn't then start to take away from that and becomes a detail for the sake of the detail.

(calm piano music) It's a reconciliation of opposites in a way when you practice, because you have to really pay attention to everything which is on the page.

But then you also have to look behind and sort of open yourself up to take the keys to the secrets that the piece is offering.

And only through your work of that text, looking at it, thinking about it, getting your hands into it, your mind into it are you going to be able to get beyond what is written.

And that's the miracle of interpretation is that it lives anew every time, and not just with every artist, with every concert, you know, with the same artist.

So it's, and I think that that's the sign, you know, of a concert which is special.

It's when you know it has happened in the moment.

You've lived it in the moment.

You've discovered something in that moment.

You've had the freedom to follow whatever the elan, this inspiration, something which is communicated also through that shared freedom with the audience, with the colleagues on stage, and to work with that energy, which can only happen at that moment in this particular configuration and that you were able to just go with the flow of that instead of sticking to something which you had prepared ahead of time where you are in your comfort zone and you just wanna stay in command of what is going on, and then you may be missing some of the most beautiful opportunities of your life musically.

(bright music) (intense music) (lively music) It's actually good to have this give and take and this ebb and flow also in the sound.

So no, nobody's concerned about such, you know, such considerations.

It's really more about, okay, what are we saying?

What's happening on stage?

And are we able to get out there, give everything we have in total honesty, generosity, and then hope that it creates something special for the people who are with us, you know?

Even if it's only, I remember a colleague who's unfortunately no longer with us, but he used to say something very, very true.

He would say, you know, "Sometimes people think they go to a performance, and they think that it's about the sportive aspect, you know, it's about being impressed from the first to the last note, and it's about being wowed by the possibilities."

And he said, "But nothing could be further from the truth."

He said, "It's not about that at all.

It's about can time be altered?

And if time can be altered, it's gonna be only for a fraction of a second.

It's not gonna be something you experience from the beginning to the end of the program.

But if it does happen at some point during that program, then you have won everything, and this is what live music is all about."

- And the truth is that nobody in the hall on either side of the stage actually knows why it's happening.

- That's exactly right.

It's entirely mysterious, and that's what makes it even more beautiful.

- It sounds like living at its highest level.

- Yes, you're right, and actually if living could be truly like this in terms of communication and open-mindedness and open-heartedness to one another, then there would be less problems out there.

(lively music) (jubilant music) (audience cheering and applauding) - [Jim Cotter] Yet in our day-to-day lives, the freedom to interpret time is constantly butting up against the clock, the schedule, the get it done on time.

- The seconds are random.

It was just a random concept, not concept, but random measurement.

- [Jim Cotter] Yeah.

- It's not connected to nature in any way.

- [Jim Cotter] And Akram Khan is constantly aware of how man-made measures of time are often in conflict with more organic manifestations.

- So we have the arrogance, humankind has the arrogance to say, "Well, I'm going to control time by measuring time," having our own measuring system globally.

So that arrogance of humankind is now rubbing up against nature time.

- [Jim Cotter] Satchin Panda is a professor of regulatory biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

His research into the genes, molecules, and cells that keep the whole body on the same circadian clock have led to acclaimed breakthroughs in the regulation of blue light and electronic screens and the health benefits of time-restricted eating.

His interest in time in nature began in his childhood in India.

- Very often we used to have power cut in summertime in the evening, and so there would be no electricity.

And then there's one day I asked my little sister what time it is.

She said, "It must be little after eight o'clock at night."

And I was curious how did she knew it was little after eight o'clock, because I checked, and it was 8:05.

I asked, "How did you know that it's eight o'clock?"

She said, "Oh, well, haven't you noticed there are two frogs that hop into our front yard around eight o'clock, and they had just hopped in."

And then for the next few days, I actually watched, and exactly at 8:00, between 8:00 and 8:05, these two frogs should hop in.

And that kind of raised curiosity.

How come these frogs know time?

So that was the first time I clearly remember I got curious about time in nature because these frogs didn't have a clock (laughs) as far as I knew at that time.

It's everywhere, like for example, if you go to the courtyard here, I would say between 4:00 and 4:20 PM in the afternoon, the seagulls come and take a bath.

(seagull squawking) And they're very loud.

(laughs) They bath in the River of Life, and then they go find a nest and go to sleep.

So if you look around, you'll find the signature of time all around us in nature.

And we just have to even pay attention to our own timing in our body because we are built with this fabulous timing mechanism that we till now, we don't understand how we can really count time, our body counts time and synchronizes us to the nature.

When we say to live with nature, that literally means to live in time with nature.

You know, for example, teenagers have a slightly different clock because they're supposed to go to bed later and wake up later.

- [Jim Cotter] Why?

- That's the nature of their clock.

That interacts with the reproductive system.

So when kids enter puberty, then the clock is slightly delayed.

So then the consequences, if you have your school starting at 7:00, 7:15 in the morning, then they're not ready for school.

They're not ready for learning.

- But we're starting to take care of that.

- Yeah, so this is one example.

- So we start the little kids earlier and the older kids later, and- - So this is a clear example of how the field of circadian rhythms is changing societal norms or, you know, public policy about when schools should start.

- [Jim Cotter] And wider connections to the body's internal regulators of time are essential for those who keep time for a living, like Philadelphia Orchestra percussionists Angela Zator Nelson and Christopher Deviney.

- As human beings, I think we're conditioned to look for patterns.

In my case, those patterns tend to be rhythmic patterns.

- If I hear somebody tapping their foot, I'll hear tapping in a rhythm.

I'll often hear bird calls.

I'll think about that, if that sounds like some sort of rhythm that I'm used to hearing.

- When I hear anything that's repetitive in a pattern of any kind, and it doesn't have to be the same note.

For instance, I'll just give you an example.

If I hear construction downtown and a jackhammer going, it doesn't have to necessarily be di-di-di-di-di-di-di over and over again.

I can actually pick up patterns that I'm hearing that could be signals from a security alarm somewhere.

Or maybe it's even someone's computer that's giving a signal of some kind that goes, did-it, dit, dit, did-it, dit, dit.

All of a sudden I've heard two things that are very similar, and I'm drawn to that.

Like, what is that, and is that a pattern?

(powerful drum music) - [Jim Cotter] And though there is a lot of training and practice involved in becoming a high-level percussionist, there are also some innate skills at play.

- I don't know how much of it was gifted, but I was drawn to it.

I was drawn to being able to pick out seconds on a dial or a clock and trying to stay with it and trying to estimate at 30, was I at 30 seconds on a clock?

I've done that since I was a little kid.

I don't know why.

And if you can form those relationships, you can guess tempos quicker than other people.

- I can tell you that I have two ballerina daughters that are excellent, especially my oldest, and I watch both of them, and I'm so proud that they have the best rhythm on stage.

- [Jim Cotter] Very important.

- So now they're trained, and my oldest has been trained since she was four or five, so she's been doing this, she often practices as long as I do after school.

So she'll go in there for two to four hours in the dance studio.

But I think that's just something she was naturally, my husband's a percussionist as well.

So I think that's something all three of my children were born with.

I've got two dancers and a soccer player, and so she's running and timing her kicks as well.

So I find great joy in the fact that I can see rhythm within their passions.

(drum reverberating) (lively orchestral music) - You have circuits in your brain that can tell you if the musical piece you're listening to is allegro or andante or or so forth.

- [Jim Cotter] Dean Buonomano is a professor of neuroscience at UCLA whose research draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to explore how we encode and perceive time.

- In the context of music, with training, you can learn to, some people are better at it, some people are worse, but you can perfect your ability.

And we've actually done studies of this where if we train people to discriminate, say a certain temporal interval, maybe 200 milliseconds, which would be a very fast tempo, they can get better, and musicians tend to perform a bit better at this task.

So musicians, not surprisingly, and it even depends on the instrument, so percussionists, not surprisingly, have better tempo than, sensory-measured, quantifiably, better ability to discriminate temporal intervals or generate temporal intervals, than a lot of string instrumentalists.

(lively music) - Philadelphia percussionists Zator Nelson and Deviney can attest to the body's ability to feel time, allowing 100-piece orchestras to play together in rhythmic structure and in time.

Well, do you guys take over the the tempo and rhythm?

- Sometimes.

- Right.

- Yeah, and sometimes they're very grateful that we are, because our parts are more rhythmic of nature than melodic.

They're really relying on that to kind of be the glue that will hold it together.

But sometimes the orchestra is searching for where is the placement that everyone can agree on.

(lively orchestral music) - Just recently we performed Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, and it was faster than usual, however, not as fast as we've played it before.

Again, with experience, we think, "What will the tempo be for this?"

So we're ready for any sort of tempo that the conductor gives at the first rehearsal.

I think just because we're, we play together so often, and I think that goes for the entire orchestra as well, we just know what to expect when we come in.

Really, we know that, again, the tendencies of the other sections as well, and we know that everyone is at this incredible level that they can perform something much faster, much slower, much longer, softer.

(dramatic orchestral music) (bright orchestral music) (drum roll reverberating) (drum roll reverberating) (bright orchestral music) (dramatic orchestral music) - The human body is a type of clock.

And to prove my point, we measure your age in years, which is a unit of time, just like a clock measures in seconds.

So yes, the human body is absolutely a clock in and of itself.

- The circadian rhythms are our internal timekeeping mechanisms, our daily time table of different physiology, metabolism, behavior that are supposed to happen at a certain time of the day.

And only in the last 25 years, we realize that there are also internal clocks that are present in our body, actually in every cell in our body, that's telling every cell when to rise up, when to do its stuff, and then when to rest, reset, and rejuvenate.

So these clocks in different organs, they time the best time to metabolize our food so that we stay healthy.

They also have the best time to tell the brain when it's to do a complex task so that we keep our high intellectual performance.

So in that way, almost every aspect of our existence is timed by our internal circadian clock.

The nice thing about the clock is we are actually the master conductor of our clocks.

So if we think of 24 hours and when we should do what, since our day begins the night before, so that means we should find a consistent time to go to bed, stick to it, and once we go to bed, try to be in bed for eight hours so that you can get 7 to 7 1/2 hours of restorative sleep.

And then after waking up in the morning, wait for an hour or so before your first bite, because that's the time when the night hormones are going down, and then the day stress hormones are coming, rising up.

(calm music) - [Jim Cotter] And while our circadian clocks track the cycles within each day, we feel ourselves moving forward from one day to the next.

But it's unclear if that sense of linear time, the future following the present following the past, is the only way for us to conceptualize it.

- One of the debates in philosophy is, to the degree that it's a mental construct, is it a mental construct in the sense that time isn't really flowing?

And so many physicists and philosophers will embrace that notion, and that's what we call eternalism, or the block universe, in which the past, present, and future are equally real.

And this is sort of consistent with the notion of time travel.

So a common metaphor here is in the old-fashioned movie reels, right?

So you're looking at any frame at time, at a frame at a time, but all the frames are there.

The movie is already in one chunk, in one block.

So that's the idea here under eternalism, which I don't advocate for, by the way, is that you and I are looking at this one frame of our lifeline, of our timeline, but the other moments are already there, have already happened and so forth.

- So what's the opposite of eternalism?

- Is presentism.

- [Jim Cotter] which is your- - And which this is the only thing that's real.

So the past was real.

The configuration of matter that represented our past is no longer existent in the universe, and neither is the future.

But under physics, in physics, many physicists readily embrace the notion of the block universe, that the past, present, and future are equally real.

To most neuroscientists, certainly that would not be what we would consider the standard view, and that the brain evolved to use the past to predict the future and really and interact with the future and create the future and manipulate the future, and really only the present moment is real.

- [Jim Cotter] The intersection between Afrofuturism's concept of time and the evolutions in scientific thinking about it brought Rasheedah Phillips to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

CERN was the birthplace of the worldwide web and is today home to many of the world's most accomplished physicists.

Following her residency at CERN, Phillips published a paper entitled "The boundary between art and science may be arbitrary."

- Spending time with scientists at CERN really affirmed my thinking around the flexible nature of time.

And I think for me, what's been extremely exciting about it is that looking at, even when people aren't calling it Afrofuturism, looking at the way that they are utilizing these kind of principles of like time as not just something that runs out or not just something that's in front of us.

The past is not locked up, locked and closed off, right?

So being able to look at literature, look at how Black folks who have written books have constructed time within those books and like how it mimics our social time within our communities.

One example of that is Gloria Naylor's book "Mama Day," which talks about this island called Willow Island, and it talks about how the past and the present in this space converges, how the past is open to being rewritten, it's not closed off, how our ancestors still exist with us on this sort of plane, right?

It's not on the same temporal plane, but in a way that we can interact with them.

So these are all things that are communal ways of thinking about time, experiencing time, being with each other in time.

(calm music) - [Jim Cotter] The ability to fluidly travel through time is also a central component of the visual stories Nick Pedersen tells.

- So the idea is that these future people are mythologizing the old world and creating sacred spaces to perform these rituals based on their unknown ancestors.

So with this, I was really inspired by Inuit shamanism and other things like that, and I like the idea of equating and juxtaposing spiritual power with nuclear power because one shocking thing that I learned is that nuclear waste will exist in the environment for more than 10,000 years, which is so long that they've had to invent signs and symbols that would be understood by future civilizations to warn of its dangers.

(calm music) - [Jim Cotter] The COVID-19 pandemic with its attendant lockdowns was a major disruptor to how we perceived time, says UC Berkeley history professor David Henkin.

Days of the week in particular became less important because the ebb and flow of social activities and rituals couldn't be practiced, creating a kind of disorientation.

- Forgetting what day of the week creates all kinds of inconveniences because you typically have different schedules.

It also means you probably forgot what you were supposed to do, and sometimes we take it as a real symptom of cognitive decline.

And that's why during the pandemic shutdown, we used not doing, not knowing where we stood in the week as a symptom of temporal disorientation because that's the calendar that we most need to know.

So my argument was this technology has been around for a very long time.

It's ancient, and it's been remarkably stable.

I mean, it's crazy to me that in no point in recorded human history have any different groups, societies, religious sects disagreed about the count.

- [Jim Cotter] What different groups do disagree about is the appropriate pace of life.

Raised in Tennessee and now living in New York City, Valerie June says she definitely feels the pace of life shifting from place to place.

- Tennessee time is a very, very slow-moving, easy, gentle time.

It was how I was raised, and because I've traveled the world now and I see that other places are quite rapid, like New York is high energy, very fast, Tennessee's more like slow like molasses.

So it's just simply moving on a very, very on your own time.

And they have island time that they talk about in life or Delta time.

Tennessee time is like my name for the time where I'm from.

♪ Well, I thought there'd be something ♪ ♪ In those bright lights ♪ But all I got ♪ Was lonely sleepless nights ♪ Now I know ♪ What I didn't know back then ♪ So when I get to Tennessee ♪ Well, I'll never leave again ♪ Running on Tennessee time ♪ Running on Tennessee time ♪ Well, there's a tap on my window ♪ ♪ There's a ring at my door ♪ And I'll answer in Tennessee time ♪ ♪ Running on Tennessee time ♪ Running on Tennessee time Anything I wanna do in the future, I can do that right now, and I have to.

If I want to get there, I gotta see it here first.

So this moment is the only moment.

And when this moment exists, like, when you're here in this present moment, anything is possible, like anything.

Like, time doesn't exist.

- Have you observed subjective time?

Have you observed Valerie time?

- I've gone a week of silence pretty regularly, you know?

But I say to people who are around me, "Hey, I'm gonna take a week of silence" so they don't think that anything's happened to me.

But like, you know, I'll just buy the food I need and the things I need and spend a week in silence, and that'll like reset my life.

But it also, like, I get a lot of information.

I get a lot of inspiration.

I'm looking at picture books, I'm like drawing things.

I'm reading things, you know?

It's time that I've carved out to have for myself and be on my own time and like escape in some ways from clock time.

That helps me- - And does it go slow?

Does it go faster?

Does it move, I mean, does it?

- It depends on how much I try to get done in that time period, because like during the pandemic, for example, it seems like that went fast because I was trying to do a lot in those two years.

Just, I was alone for the most part, but I was, I had all these creative ideas and things I wanted to do, so I was really busy with all of that.

And it just seems like if I have a lot to do, then no matter what, time goes fast, and as I get older, days, they just go like this.

- [Jim Cotter] The sense that our remaining time is fleeting and therefore precious is not unusual.

It turns out that time does seem to go faster as you get older, says Lera Boroditsky.

- The common theory for that is as you have built up more expectations about how things should go and as things seem more and more familiar and as you have fewer new experiences, more routine experiences, you're laying down fewer new memories.

That's why retrospectively when you think about very event-rich moments like a vacation, it takes up a lot of your memory, and you think, "Wow, we did all those things in just a week."

But in a way that seems counterintuitive, while you're on vacation, it seems like it's flying by because there's no point where you're checking your watch, thinking, "Oh, is this over yet?"

'cause you're having fun.

So time flies when you're having fun, but then when you look back on the fun, it actually expands in your mind.

So the amount of time that things seem to have taken or how fast time seems to be going depends on how many new memories you're laying down.

So if you want your experience of life as you get older to still feel like it's a lot of time, you should do lots of new things, lay down lots of new memories, and that makes time feel like it's slowing down, not in the way that you're bored, but in the way that there's a rich memory for every unit of time that you're spending.

- [Jim Cotter] And this perception is experienced even by those whose job is to be acutely aware of how time can move and shift.

- Time has sped up, especially seeing them grow, not necessarily seeing myself change, but seeing how my infant is now a 13-year-old, wanting to have that time stand still, of course, to enjoy those moments.

It's funny, I often think when I go to work that it's the easiest thing I do all day, even though it's not necessarily, of course.

You know, making a bowl of soup or driving my child to school, those are seemingly easy things, but I think because we're so conditioned to the organization, to playing our instruments, and that time within on stage feels the most comfortable to me during the day, whereas everything else is sort of chaotic.

Like I said, I'm often late, I'm trying to do one last thing at home.

- My daughter just recently got engaged, and she's gonna be getting married next year, and all of a sudden that forced me to think that maybe I'm a little bit older than I thought I was, little clues like that.

When I think that next year will be my 20th year in the orchestra, you know, certain numbers depicting time tend to designate milestones or markers, I think, and for me and my life and those kind of things definitely made me think of time when I wasn't thinking about it.

I do think in my own personal life at my age, I'm starting to think about the end of my life when I never thought about the end of my life before.

And I don't think that's necessarily a good or bad thing, but it's different, again, it's just different.

I never really thought about, well, what is it gonna look like after I'm not playing music anymore, and where will I be and where will I live and what kind of things will I enjoy doing with my time?

For me personally, I don't want to, I want to enjoy the end years and not just get to them and realize, "Oh, no, what happened?"

So I'm planning on how am I gonna spend that time to make it as enjoyable as possible.

- Part of me thinks, yes, this is it in the sense that it isn't enough, in the sense that it is challenging enough.

There is enough of it left for me to explore.

There is enough undiscovered depths about some of these pieces of music that you learn from every time you get near them, whether it's in a practice session, in a rehearsal with the colleagues on stage during a concert.

So I think that's always going to keep me busy.

I think what I would like is this idea of constant growth, that there's always more that can be had.

So that's one aspect.

The other aspect is that I would sometimes like to find other ways to communicate with the world which is beyond our immediate environment and find other bridges to it, even though music is a wonderful way to get there.

I do believe that it's the bridge to spirituality, but there are many others, and sometimes I think I'd like to explore other ways of doing that.

♪ Some things in life ♪ Happen too slow ♪ Sometimes you don't ♪ Know which way to go ♪ One thing for sho' ♪ One thing that's real ♪ If and you ain't lovin' your woman ♪ ♪ Then someone else will - As soon as I turned 40, it was like I got sucked into some other universe where days went like as fast as a half a second.

And I remember growing up, my mom used to be like, "Time flies," or "Man, hardly enough time in the day," and I'd just be like, "There's a lotta time in the day.

What's she talking about?"

And then sometimes I wanna see, I don't have time to do it right now, I don't have time.

But I wanna take some time to see how I can slow down time.

Like, can I do it?

Because it seems like the days are getting faster.

♪ Though it happened too fast ♪ Parents gone broke ♪ See, that money don't last ♪ One thing for sho' ♪ One thing that's fate ♪ If and you don't, don't, don't show them you love them ♪ ♪ Will be too late ♪ If and you don't, don't, don't show them you love them ♪ ♪ Will be too late You're just like, "Damn, what a beautiful life I've lived.

Look at all that time.

How did it pass so fast?"

And you just slip through the moments not lingering and holding onto all the bad things that happen and all the negatives and the oppression and the traumas, realizing that they're there, but using your alchemy to shift that energy and to like slip through.

Time's however many years you live on Earth.

Time is this magical thing that we can't hold, you know?

As much as we try to, we break it into hours and minutes and days and years, it still exists way bigger than us, and it's just big, it's just huge, and it just can't be put into a capsule or whatever.

You can't have a time capsule for real.

(mellow country music) ♪ Green hearts, they may surround you ♪ ♪ Grey clouds might fill the sky ♪ ♪ Black thoughts might come to bury you ♪ ♪ And have you always asking why ♪ ♪ Might get a shaky feeling ♪ Something's been overlooked ♪ But every journey forward ♪ Two roads, two roads ♪ Two roads, but one you took ♪ Two roads, two roads, two roads ♪ ♪ One you took ♪ Two roads, two roads, two roads ♪ ♪ Ooh, ooh, two roads ♪ Two roads, two roads, two roads ♪ (calm music) (bright music)