Modify the Phase Variance

It's a curious thing, time. Sometimes viewed as the fourth the dimension, it lacks the substance of the first three. In time's passage, happy moments can feel brief and bad ones eternal. Music is such a powerful medium for art because it's required to express itself entirely in time rather than a single instant (though it could be argued there are other more modern forms such as cinematography that do the same). The passage of time brings about the end of almost everything we feel is great.

Why do we need a concept of time at all? I don't mean this question in the sense of scientific advancement, but the fact that it exists in our minds. It's an inescapable fact that the idea of time is something created by our brains.

Well, on one level, there's our circadian rhythms. These internal clocks keep us active during the right (or for some people, wrong) times of the day. I haven't studied them in a while on account of not being very interested in them, but they do have the obvious evolutionary benefit of being awake when it's easiest to see food and avoid predators. Overall, I think the circadian rhythm is a pretty boring application for the concept of time, but there are some interesting disorders associated with it that I won't get into, also on account of not having studying them in a while.

A much more exciting application of a temporal sense is for planning (ironically taking place in the frontal and not the temporal lobe). People that have damage to the frontal lobe have difficulty with such basic tasks as baking a cake. They have no concept of the need to plan ahead and will try to start making a cake before purchasing the necessary ingredients, for instance. It's something so intrinsic to our nature to plan ahead. An idea of the duration of events and the space between them is intrinsically required to do this. Imagine being one of the first settlers of the American Midwest. If you have no idea of how long winter is and how to deal with the lack of incoming necessities, you wouldn't survive very long.

On an interesting side note, the frontal lobe is also the most major part of the brain for determining personality, as per the case of Phineas Gage. I won't talk about him in this post because I'm liable to discuss it in the future.

In any case, if you were wondering why you worry so much about the future, it's because of the planning bit that's necessary for survival. There's an interesting theory that depression caused by such is an over expression of a beneficial emotion, but I digress for today.