The chief premise I employ on this website is that place has a primacy over time, which is often irrelevant to our lives.
Sure, you’ll probably note that much of our “emplacement” derives from a schedule. We find ourselves, for example, in bed “at night,” at the lunch table “at noon,” and on the beach “during summer,” all time designators and all inextricably tied to why we find ourselves where we do. You, for example, have set aside reading this blog until time afforded you the moment to sit before a smart device or computer screen. Yet, there are those conditions in your life that are not time-dependent, but are, rather, place dependent. How time passes for you—not how a clock turns—might best be exemplified in “a watched pot never boils” or in “the accident seemed to take place in slow motion,” or even in “I can’t believe how fast the year went.” All these demonstrate that regardless of the aging of your cells, the biological clocks that determine your often fluctuating circadian rhythms, and your meeting schedules, that time is malleable, not just in an Einsteinian sense of dilating, but in a meaningful way in your personal living. It is malleable as a product of both conscious and unconscious brain activity.
If I had to choose a chief reason that time plays second fiddle to place, I would note that time always occurs in a place, and that ultimately, there was no time until there was a place—call it the Cosmos—for its “unfolding,” as we are wont to say. And as we know from the late genius, time changes under the influence of both gravity and velocity, demonstrated in a number of clever experiments with clocks on Earth and in orbit, near sea level and on mountaintop. Time isn’t really “keeping time” as our underlying Newtonian selves want us to believe. It isn’t absolute.
Of course, you might argue that place, too, is malleable. With that I have no argument simply because by being in a place, I alter it. Examples abound, but let me note that you have been in many classrooms, the nature of which appears to be affected by the occupying populace. As a former professor, I experienced “the same” lecture hall or lab only to discover that it was only in superficial appearance identical semester after semester, the nature of it as a “place” having altered with the subject, the sometimes fully occupied but often less so with empty seats representing “blown off” attendance, and the collective interest, disinterest, or ability of the students. The same place, a lab, for instance, took on one character for dedicated majors and graduate students that it did not take on for general education 100-level freshmen (Oops! Sorry, freshhumanbeings).
Place, the universe in general or your living room in particular, does not, like time, constitute an Absolute. But it is the entity that for us personally shapes time. It is for us “where time occurs” in its slow or fast manifestations. We might see that as matter clumps or de-clumps, place changes, but it frequently maintains a rudimentary and recognizable sameness that emerges from our mental mapping. And when the brain finds itself in the midst of unfamiliar matter in unfamiliar arrangement, it goes into Amerigo Vespucci mode, it becomes explorer and cartographer. It marks territories like other animals, committing to memory not just the “arrangement” of objects, but also their character. Place is infused with personal meaning.
It’s in the context of the foregoing that I read with interest an experiment by Zheng, et al. on the phenomenon of “neural repulsion” and spatial memory. * Neural repulsion is a process by which the brain experiences similar environments differently, even more differently than it experiences dissimilar environments. You have experienced such “repulsion” when you have gone into a chain grocery store that differs in some details from the store where you usually shop. The term repulsion has nothing to do with your attitude, but has everything to do with your brain’s ability to retrieve the details of a place and to make comparisons with similar places. The researchers found that the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex interact when the brain attempts to retrieve spatial memory in the context of discovering differences between two similar places. The role of the hippocampus appears to be “involved in detailed and differentiated memory representation to resolve interference when encountering multiple similar environments” [the two different grocery stores, for example]. The medial prefrontal cortex appears to represent “a common spatial scheme across different learning environments to facilitate spatial memory retrieval.” Both brain regions play specific roles but seem to work in unison when we shop in a different store and find ourselves a bit disoriented because the products displayed in the more familiar store aren’t displayed exactly similarly in the unfamiliar, but somewhat similar, other chain store.
Now, I’ll leave you to consider the neurological ramifications of the process (see article) while I note psychological and philosophical ramifications.
Yes, place can change. And yes, it can change, in fact, will change with the passage of time. As in Ella Winter’s expression that Thomas Wolf turned into a title, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
Although it is true that every time you reenter your abode, familiarity suffuses you—your brain might pick up a subtle differences, such as the presence of cold air or smoke from a neighbor’s charcoal fire that wafted in through a window you forgot to close upon leaving. But places as we come to know them, to map them, remain in memory. In that sense, you might not be able to go home to the exact place you left, but you will always be in the mental neighborhood. And just as place imbues in you an attitude, so you imbue in place a character, an ambience.
There will be places that will engulf you in what seems to be, ironically temporarily, a lasting oneness, that again, ironically, transcends time. Sea air on a warm summer day during a beach vacation, all the details of place more significant than time. Your favorite chair in your most comfortable spot. The colors into which you walk as you return to a familiar place.
Why not end with an anecdote?
After spending a sabbatical leave studying oceanography and living in Miami with my young family, I returned to our house in Pennsylvania. The condo where we temporarily lived in southwest Miami was, as so many such places are, rather colorless and unadorned. In a temporary dwelling there’s no call for wall hangings for which one might have to pay for nail holes. We lived in a world of white paint on wall surrounding a nondescript, though new and clean, carpet. When we returned to our home in Pennsylvania, the children, excited to be in what they remembered, all remarked almost simultaneously, “I didn’t remember how colorful our house was.” The familiar place—though soon to become familiar again—was seen through both their hippocampi and medial prefrontal cortexes as retaining some features remembered and some features seemingly new. I’ll bet you have had similar experiences with spatial memories of place. In fact, the very nature of memory, in my view, is that we don’t, in fact, remember time except in the context of place. I’ll ask you as I ask on the frontispiece of this website, to remember time to the exclusion of place. Think of ten minutes ago without thinking of place. You see, the primacy of place reveals itself in that we spend our variable-speed time in some place. Thus, waiting in a long line in the grocery store drags on; searching for products in an unfamiliar, but similar store, seems to take a long time; driving to the vacation takes longer than driving home—anticipation making the difference in time’s passing, but always passing in a place.
So, why not another anecdote, one that I told elsewhere? I think of an old priest who taught in the private high school I attended. He was a well known translator with a reputation for understanding, if not speaking, more than twenty languages. Every time I saw him enter a room regardless of the number of times he had been in that room, I saw him look around as though he were entering it for the first time. In retrospect, I now wonder whether or not his hippocampus or his medial frontal cortex was dominating the interaction in his brain’s perception of place. I’m wondering now, also, whether or not his apparent enthrallment with every place into which he walked wasn’t his way of living in an Eternal Present that all of us probably experience whenever we encounter a new place. Why were even supposedly familiar places so seemingly new to him? Is it because time freezes as we map new details or previously undetected details?
No more anecdotes, just a request: Ask yourself two questions. How does place, that combination of matter, energy, and character, affect your perception of time? How do small differences in places that are largely similar affect your attitude?
Note:
*Zheng, Li, Shiyao Gao, Andrew S. McAvan, Eve A. Isham & Arne D. Ekstrom. Partially overlapping spatial environments trigger reinstatement in hippocampus and schema representations in prefrontal cortex. Nat Commun 12, 6231 (2021). Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26560-w#citeas Accessed November 17, 2021.
Sure, you’ll probably note that much of our “emplacement” derives from a schedule. We find ourselves, for example, in bed “at night,” at the lunch table “at noon,” and on the beach “during summer,” all time designators and all inextricably tied to why we find ourselves where we do. You, for example, have set aside reading this blog until time afforded you the moment to sit before a smart device or computer screen. Yet, there are those conditions in your life that are not time-dependent, but are, rather, place dependent. How time passes for you—not how a clock turns—might best be exemplified in “a watched pot never boils” or in “the accident seemed to take place in slow motion,” or even in “I can’t believe how fast the year went.” All these demonstrate that regardless of the aging of your cells, the biological clocks that determine your often fluctuating circadian rhythms, and your meeting schedules, that time is malleable, not just in an Einsteinian sense of dilating, but in a meaningful way in your personal living. It is malleable as a product of both conscious and unconscious brain activity.
If I had to choose a chief reason that time plays second fiddle to place, I would note that time always occurs in a place, and that ultimately, there was no time until there was a place—call it the Cosmos—for its “unfolding,” as we are wont to say. And as we know from the late genius, time changes under the influence of both gravity and velocity, demonstrated in a number of clever experiments with clocks on Earth and in orbit, near sea level and on mountaintop. Time isn’t really “keeping time” as our underlying Newtonian selves want us to believe. It isn’t absolute.
Of course, you might argue that place, too, is malleable. With that I have no argument simply because by being in a place, I alter it. Examples abound, but let me note that you have been in many classrooms, the nature of which appears to be affected by the occupying populace. As a former professor, I experienced “the same” lecture hall or lab only to discover that it was only in superficial appearance identical semester after semester, the nature of it as a “place” having altered with the subject, the sometimes fully occupied but often less so with empty seats representing “blown off” attendance, and the collective interest, disinterest, or ability of the students. The same place, a lab, for instance, took on one character for dedicated majors and graduate students that it did not take on for general education 100-level freshmen (Oops! Sorry, freshhumanbeings).
Place, the universe in general or your living room in particular, does not, like time, constitute an Absolute. But it is the entity that for us personally shapes time. It is for us “where time occurs” in its slow or fast manifestations. We might see that as matter clumps or de-clumps, place changes, but it frequently maintains a rudimentary and recognizable sameness that emerges from our mental mapping. And when the brain finds itself in the midst of unfamiliar matter in unfamiliar arrangement, it goes into Amerigo Vespucci mode, it becomes explorer and cartographer. It marks territories like other animals, committing to memory not just the “arrangement” of objects, but also their character. Place is infused with personal meaning.
It’s in the context of the foregoing that I read with interest an experiment by Zheng, et al. on the phenomenon of “neural repulsion” and spatial memory. * Neural repulsion is a process by which the brain experiences similar environments differently, even more differently than it experiences dissimilar environments. You have experienced such “repulsion” when you have gone into a chain grocery store that differs in some details from the store where you usually shop. The term repulsion has nothing to do with your attitude, but has everything to do with your brain’s ability to retrieve the details of a place and to make comparisons with similar places. The researchers found that the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex interact when the brain attempts to retrieve spatial memory in the context of discovering differences between two similar places. The role of the hippocampus appears to be “involved in detailed and differentiated memory representation to resolve interference when encountering multiple similar environments” [the two different grocery stores, for example]. The medial prefrontal cortex appears to represent “a common spatial scheme across different learning environments to facilitate spatial memory retrieval.” Both brain regions play specific roles but seem to work in unison when we shop in a different store and find ourselves a bit disoriented because the products displayed in the more familiar store aren’t displayed exactly similarly in the unfamiliar, but somewhat similar, other chain store.
Now, I’ll leave you to consider the neurological ramifications of the process (see article) while I note psychological and philosophical ramifications.
Yes, place can change. And yes, it can change, in fact, will change with the passage of time. As in Ella Winter’s expression that Thomas Wolf turned into a title, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
Although it is true that every time you reenter your abode, familiarity suffuses you—your brain might pick up a subtle differences, such as the presence of cold air or smoke from a neighbor’s charcoal fire that wafted in through a window you forgot to close upon leaving. But places as we come to know them, to map them, remain in memory. In that sense, you might not be able to go home to the exact place you left, but you will always be in the mental neighborhood. And just as place imbues in you an attitude, so you imbue in place a character, an ambience.
There will be places that will engulf you in what seems to be, ironically temporarily, a lasting oneness, that again, ironically, transcends time. Sea air on a warm summer day during a beach vacation, all the details of place more significant than time. Your favorite chair in your most comfortable spot. The colors into which you walk as you return to a familiar place.
Why not end with an anecdote?
After spending a sabbatical leave studying oceanography and living in Miami with my young family, I returned to our house in Pennsylvania. The condo where we temporarily lived in southwest Miami was, as so many such places are, rather colorless and unadorned. In a temporary dwelling there’s no call for wall hangings for which one might have to pay for nail holes. We lived in a world of white paint on wall surrounding a nondescript, though new and clean, carpet. When we returned to our home in Pennsylvania, the children, excited to be in what they remembered, all remarked almost simultaneously, “I didn’t remember how colorful our house was.” The familiar place—though soon to become familiar again—was seen through both their hippocampi and medial prefrontal cortexes as retaining some features remembered and some features seemingly new. I’ll bet you have had similar experiences with spatial memories of place. In fact, the very nature of memory, in my view, is that we don’t, in fact, remember time except in the context of place. I’ll ask you as I ask on the frontispiece of this website, to remember time to the exclusion of place. Think of ten minutes ago without thinking of place. You see, the primacy of place reveals itself in that we spend our variable-speed time in some place. Thus, waiting in a long line in the grocery store drags on; searching for products in an unfamiliar, but similar store, seems to take a long time; driving to the vacation takes longer than driving home—anticipation making the difference in time’s passing, but always passing in a place.
So, why not another anecdote, one that I told elsewhere? I think of an old priest who taught in the private high school I attended. He was a well known translator with a reputation for understanding, if not speaking, more than twenty languages. Every time I saw him enter a room regardless of the number of times he had been in that room, I saw him look around as though he were entering it for the first time. In retrospect, I now wonder whether or not his hippocampus or his medial frontal cortex was dominating the interaction in his brain’s perception of place. I’m wondering now, also, whether or not his apparent enthrallment with every place into which he walked wasn’t his way of living in an Eternal Present that all of us probably experience whenever we encounter a new place. Why were even supposedly familiar places so seemingly new to him? Is it because time freezes as we map new details or previously undetected details?
No more anecdotes, just a request: Ask yourself two questions. How does place, that combination of matter, energy, and character, affect your perception of time? How do small differences in places that are largely similar affect your attitude?
Note:
*Zheng, Li, Shiyao Gao, Andrew S. McAvan, Eve A. Isham & Arne D. Ekstrom. Partially overlapping spatial environments trigger reinstatement in hippocampus and schema representations in prefrontal cortex. Nat Commun 12, 6231 (2021). Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26560-w#citeas Accessed November 17, 2021.
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