{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Chasing Leviathan","title":"The Psychology of Human Temporality | Dr. David Gilden","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4757,"description":"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? \nDr. 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. \nDr. 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. \nIn 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...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/oFG5X3hnTWeg1jpjktisRS_sI049dZZYEQFpaR8md3g/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzIxNDQ2LzE2MzMx/MTQ3MTctYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}