Good afternoon.
I have been
resisting the temptation to get out into the yard and gardens to start cleaning
up the detritus from winter. It's
probably a little early to do so when there are still small mounds of snow and
ice here and there.
Why time
flies. An interesting explanation. I'm not sure I buy it, but here it is. A professor of mechanical engineering at
Duke, Adrian Bejan—so prima facie, at least, the source is perfectly
reputable—argues that the reason time seems to go by faster as we get older is
that we cannot process images as quickly with our brain as we get older. So time speeds up because of physics.
"People are often amazed at
how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth,"
said Bejan. "It's not that their experiences were much deeper or more
meaningful, it's just that they were being processed in rapid fire."
The gist of
the argument is that the nerves in our brain grow and grow, so it takes longer
for an image to make its way through our neural network. In addition, the neuron paths deteriorate as
we get older, so the electrical signals (that are part of the creation of
images in the brain) get slowed. Bejan
points out that infant eyes move much more quickly than adult eyes—and thus
absorb more information faster. "The
end result is that, because older people are viewing fewer new images in the
same amount of actual time, it seems to them as though time is passing more
quickly. . . . 'Days seemed to last
longer in your youth because the young mind receives more images during one day
than the same mind in old age.'"
I suppose
that's as good an explanation as any. We
who are past 40 have certainly experienced the phenomenon; the question is why
the perception. One wouldn't have
expected the answer to come from mechanical engineering.
* * *
Some time
ago I noted the work of anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin
Dunbar at the University of Oxford. He
hypothesized that there are limits to the number of people that most of us have
in various degrees of friendship. Here's
an excerpt from a New Yorker article
about the Dunbar numbers:
The Dunbar number is actually a
series of them. The best known, a hundred and fifty, is the number of people we
call casual friends—the people, say, you'd invite to a large party. (In
reality, it's a range: a hundred at the low end and two hundred for the more
social of us.) From there, through qualitative interviews coupled with analysis
of experimental and survey data, Dunbar discovered that the number grows and
decreases according to a precise formula, roughly a "rule of three."
The next step down, fifty, is the number of people we call close
friends—perhaps the people you'd invite to a group dinner. You see them often,
but not so much that you consider them to be true intimates. Then there's the
circle of fifteen: the friends that you can turn to for sympathy when you need
it, the ones you can confide in about most things. The most intimate Dunbar
number, five, is your close support group. These are your best friends (and
often family members). On the flipside, groups can extend to five hundred, the
acquaintance level, and to fifteen hundred, the absolute limit—the people for
whom you can put a name to a face. While the group sizes are relatively stable,
their composition can be fluid. Your five today may not be your five next week;
people drift among layers and sometimes fall out of them altogether.
In part
keying off Dunbar's work, a communications professor at the University of
Kansas investigated how long it takes
for someone to go from acquaintance to friend (of some degree). On the one hand, "the more time two
people spend together, the more likely they are to become friends. On the other
hand, there are people we see regularly but don't consider friends. So just how
many hours of togetherness does it take for an acquaintance to turn into a
friend?"
In a couple
of interesting studies, Professor Hall "found that it took about 50 hours
of interaction to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to
move from casual friend to friend, and more than 200 hours to qualify as a best
friend." If people spent no more
than 30 hours together, they didn't develop a friendship bond at any
level. However: just spending time together doesn't
necessarily lead to friendship. Many,
perhaps most of us, have spent many hours together with people where we
work(ed) but didn't become friends with them; either we didn't like them much
or (at least in my case) were happy to work with them but not interested in
developing any relationship outside work.
How people interact is also important,
no surprise. "'When you spend time
joking around, having meaningful conversations, catching up with one another,
all of these types of communication episodes contribute to speedier friendship
development.'" For instance, to ask
someone about what's happening in their life means there's interest in keeping
a relationship up to date. We don't
usually engage in that kind of conversation with many of the people we work
with or interact with in other settings except perhaps on a superficial level. We don't bother because we aren't interested.
And the
point is? Hall argues that "you
have to invest" time. There is
ample research demonstrating the importance of friendships to a healthy
life. "Having friends helps to keep
us healthy, both physically and mentally. On the other hand, a lack of social
connectedness is as bad for us as smoking or obesity." (ß
I don't know if that specific claim is backed up by evidence, but it makes
sense to me on its face. I know that the
morbidity and mortality statistics for single older men are scary.) So, he
says, people need to make it a priority in life to spend time with people.
I wonder
how communication on social media counts.
My speculation is that it can be an additional, or supplemental, way to
stay in touch with people who are already friends, but that it doesn't
contribute more than an iota to the development
of friendships. Few people use social
media for any exchanges of substance, so they wouldn't fall in the category of
meaningful conversations. The same is
probably true for email, although that can be used for more substantive
exchanges if both parties are willing; in my case, for example, when Kathy and
I first met, for several months in the evenings after work we exchanged
hundreds of emails on topics important to building a relationship. Those emails couldn't substitute for personal
interaction, of course, but they sure helped clear up a lot of questions anyone
has in that context. We could elaborate
on our answers and exchanges in face-to-face conversations.
The New Yorker article again:
As constant use of social media has
become the new normal, however, people have started challenging the continued
relevance of Dunbar's number: Isn't it easier to have more friends when we have
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to help us to cultivate and maintain them?
Some, like the University of California, Berkeley, professor Morten Hansen,
have pointed out that social media has facilitated more effective
collaborations. Our real-world friends tend to know the same people that we do,
but, in the online world, we can expand our networks strategically, leading to
better business outcomes. Yet, when researchers tried to determine whether
virtual networks increase our strong ties as well as our weak ones (the ones
that Hansen had focussed on), they found that, for now, the essential Dunbar
number, a hundred and fifty, has remained constant. When Bruno Gonçalves and
his colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington looked at whether Twitter
had changed the number of relationships that users could maintain over a
six-month period, they found that, despite the relative ease of Twitter
connections as opposed to face-to-face one, the individuals that they followed
could only manage between one and two hundred stable connections. When the
Michigan State University researcher Nicole Ellison surveyed a random sample of
undergraduates about their Facebook use, she found, while that their median
number of Facebook friends was three hundred, they only counted an average of
seventy-five as actual friends.
There's no question, Dunbar agrees,
that networks like Facebook are changing the nature of human interaction. "What
Facebook does and why it's been so successful in so many ways is it allows you
to keep track of people who would otherwise effectively disappear," he
said. But one of the things that keeps face-to-face friendships strong is the
nature of shared experience: you laugh together; you dance together; you gape
at the hot-dog eaters on Coney Island together. We do have a social-media
equivalent—sharing, liking, knowing that all of your friends have looked at the
same cat video on YouTube as you did—but it lacks the synchronicity of shared
experience. It's like a comedy that you watch by yourself: you won't laugh as
loudly or as often, even if you're fully aware that all your friends think it's
hysterical. We've seen the same movie, but we can't bond over it in the same
way.
With social media, we can easily
keep up with the lives and interests of far more than a hundred and fifty
people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections
to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the
expense of more profound ones. We may widen our network to two, three, or four
hundred people that we see as friends, not just acquaintances, but keeping up
an actual friendship requires resources. "The amount of social capital you
have is pretty fixed," Dunbar said. "It involves time investment. If
you garner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed
amount of social capital more thinly so the average capital per person is
lower." If we're busy putting in the effort, however minimal, to "like"
and comment and interact with an ever-widening network, we have less time and
capacity left for our closer groups. Traditionally, it's a sixty-forty split of
attention: we spend sixty per cent of our time with our core groups of fifty,
fifteen, and five, and forty with the larger spheres. Social networks may be
growing our base, and, in the process, reversing that balance.
I suppose
none of this is revelatory, but I've thought about it in connection with class
reunions. I'm a member of the committee
planning our 50-year reunion this coming September and I've attended most of my
high school class reunions (every five years since we graduated). I concluded early on that they're a lousy
place to re-engage with people or to make new friends. Hall's work demonstrates that a 10-minute
chat with a classmate at a reunion won't lead to a friendship at any level
unless both people follow up repeatedly.
The parting lines "we'll have to stay in touch" or "we'll
have to get together" may be a disguise for exiting a conversation with no
intention of getting in touch with the person—but even if they are genuinely
meant, unless they are followed up
actively, no matter the good intentions, they will be meaningless.
Given that
state of the relationship world, I've been nudging classmates together in
casual lunches in various groupings in the expectation that some of them could
become friends, either with me or with each other. If it's true that it takes 50 hours just to
move from acquaintance to casual friend, it's an uphill battle in terms of
reconnecting at recurring monthly lunches, much less at a one-time reunion
event. I wonder if that 50 hours can be
reduced if (1) both people decide that they want
to move beyond acquaintance toward a friendship at some level, and (2)
common background demographics pave the way, at least in part (e.g., high
school classmates shared a school experience and, at least for those of us in
public schools in the 1950s and 1960s, came from the same geographic area of a
city).
In any
event, aside from reunions and such, the work of Hall and Dunbar provide an
interesting way to think about your friendships and how you spend your time.
* * *
Awhile ago
Elliott sent me an email out of the blue.
Sitting in bed at about 1 a.m. wondering:
We know that in the vacuum of space you can accelerate to a
speed of X, shut off your propulsion system, and you will continue to drift
indefinitely in a straight line at a speed of X. At least until you collide
with something or enter a gravitational field that alters your trajectory.
Because in space there is no resistance or friction. So why then is it not
possible to leave the gas on and accelerate all the way to light speed?
In theory it is possible, or at least partially. You could,
with an indefinite fuel supply, accelerate all the way there. Problem is we don't
have effective enough fuel to realistically accomplish this because light speed
is really fast and takes a long time to accelerate to. Which I knew. There's
also that issue with physics about what happens to solid matter as it
approaches light speed which I don't completely understand but I do know exists
and is a barrier. Though in this case not actually relevant to my particular
question.
But in my late night internet browsing I discovered there's
another barrier I didn't know about which seems obvious now: Space isn't really
empty. Not the obvious planets and stars and whatnot. But the 'vacuum' of space
is not entirely empty. It's full of nearly-microscopic particulate matter left
over from any number of things, as well as trace quantities of gasses and the
like.
Normally these bits of dust don't factor into equations of
human made objects in space. But as you approach even a fraction of the speed
of light, suddenly those invisible gas molecules and grains of space sand
become bullets relative to you. At a certain speed you are effectively ramming
your space vessel into a constant and endless torrent of machine gun fire, even
when flying through 'nothing.' So even if you calculated a path around any
asteroids and moons you would still be ripped apart by real, physical objects
long before you ever got to the point where the density of your matter and all
that Einsteinian stuff becomes relevant.
I don't know what normal people think about when drifting to
sleep but this is me on a regular basis.
I told him
that I ponder much more mundane matters, like the disposition of rocks and
minerals and where to spread the mulch when spring appears and I can work in
the gardens. His discovery, however,
does suggest that inter-galactic travel, if it ever happens, will have to be
via some undiscovered mechanism that doesn't take thousands of years or subject
a ship to machine-gun fire from microscopic pieces of matter in space.
* * *
I and many
of the people I know are suffering from Weltschmerz. The term seems to have variable definitions;
the two that I kenned are "a mood of weariness or sadness about life
arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering" and "mental
depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with
an ideal state."
But if I
exercise the privilege I have of being able to ignore the world for periods of
time, then I am reasonably chipper. I
hope you are as well.
-- Gary
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