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Sarah Schnellbacher's picture

Time Does Exist

In my Biological Psychology class at Haverford we have recently been discussing sleep and circadian rhythms. If a person is removed from the sun then her natural circadian cycle switches to a 24.75 hr day. Although this extra 45 minutes to the day can quickly cause an individual to become off track with the sun, I don't think it is a large enough time difference for her to lose touch with the concept of time. She would still become sleepy in cycles and eat at other regular times based on hormone levels. She would still experience REM sleep and thus would still form memories. The presence of cyclical natural light is not a determiner of memory building; if it were, astronauts would have no memories of space. I also don't think that human tallying is the only indicator of time. If you look at any tree's rings, you can tell exactly how old each tree is by looking at the number of growing seasons. In oceanography we were just discussing a sea worm that forms a tube with a groove at each new growing period. The chambers indcate that these worms are as much as a thousand years old. Time is not a human concept because nature records time.

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