Curious Time

Excerpt from "Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration of Consciousness" "We'd removed our watches and plunged our hands into the water. Once we did, we entered what we called Octopus Time. Feelings of awe are known to expand the human experience of time availability. So does flow, a state of being fully immersed in focus, involvement and enjoyment. Meditation and prayer too, alter time perception. And there is another way we alter our experience of time. We as well as other animals can mimick another's emotional state. This involves mirror neurons, a type of brain cell that responds equally whether we are watching another persons perform an action or whether we are performing that action ourselves. If you are with a calm, deliberate person, your own perception of time may begin to match his. Perhaps as we stroked her in the water, we entered into Athena's experience of time, liquid, slippery, and ancient. Flowing at a different pace than any clock. I could stay here forever, filling my senses with Athena's strangeness and beauty talking with my new friends. Except that our hands froze, so red and stiff that we couldn't move our fingers. Taking our hands out of Athena's tank felt like breaking a spell."

-Sy Montegomery