3/ Do Infants Learn Time Properly?

THE FUTURE OF TIME

by Sean O'Donnell, Ph.D.

Few people doubt that our knowledge of time in the centuries to come, will be very different from what passes for temporal understanding nowadays.

To know where you may be going however, it helps to realise where you have been coming from!

In these articles I will therefore strive for systematic and simplified exploration, of all major sectors of time knowledge as currently known to science. I will not address relatively trivial matters such as more efficient time management. Instead I will seek greater comprehension, and hopefully consolidation, of time's larger mystery overall.

This project derives from “The Mystery of Time”, an AdultEd course conducted by me at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) – 1988 to 2,000 AD.

3/ Do Infants Learn Time Properly?

SUMMARY

It may well be that our notions of time are not so much obvious reflections of reality - but rather an untested set of notions we pick up as infants through adult precepts and language. Which also leaves entirely open the possibility, that such infant learning may be crucially mistaken at one or several points.

If so, we may need to question and re-test several common beliefs about time (often no more than unquestioned assumptions at best). And thence commence to reconsider the whole topic of time anew.

In this way we might find some currently missing viewpoint or centrepiece, around which the Jigsaw of Time might finally be pieced together properly. And from which a fully coherent new Science of Time (best termed kronology and/or kronosophy?) might then emerge....

The sixth possible reason why there is still no proper “science of time” may be the most important, though partly a combination of others already discussed:

So perhaps infants “learn time” wrongly when starting off, and so grow up with mistaken notions about the temporal throughout their later adult lives? This is a possibility by no means as farfetched or unfounded as might at first appear.

PIAGET'S CONCLUSION

For one thing it's inherent in a question first posed by the great physicist Albert Einstein, to pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget over 60 years ago. The former wanted to know whether common notions of time are innate or learned. Are they ideas inherent in reality - or alternatively learned as we grow to make sense of experience over the first few years?

Piaget was conducting a research program which laid the foundations for modern child psychology, one summarised in several books like The Child's Conception of Time (1969). And his answer to Einstein was that our comprehension of time is not so much an innate perception of reality, but rather a set of notions learned from surrounding adults, through enculturation and language over the first few years.

Indeed one might almost say that the child starts off as a little relativist – a follower of Einstein with little comprehension of passing time. But then it grows up as a Newtonian absolutist – one who subscribes to the common notion that time definitely passes by!

So that maybe we all as infants have “learnt time” wrongly from the start?

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE

Relevant to this possibility is the proto-IndoEuropean language family – in use perhaps 8,000 years ago. This was the forerunner of Greek, Latin, and most modern European languages in which science has historically evolved.

But compared with other language systems like AmerIndian, the I.E. family is a uniquely tensive one. It's unusually replete with many fine divisions of tense and temporality - 'soon',' not yet', 'long agone' etc. - not commonly found elsewhere.

It also expresses unchecked assumptions such as 'Time passes' (to which we may query 'passes what or who?') Mostly such expressions seem to have have descended without much question, from the primitive ideas of those first IndoEuropeans 8,000 years ago. And so we grow up with our time thoughts moulded by such unchecked notions, assumptions and beliefs.

More definitely in any case, the language we use to describe our thoughts on temporality is still very much primitive, pre-scientific and confused. It doesn't begin to compare in sophistication with the terms used in more developed sciences like physics or chemistry, wherein numerous clear concepts are precisely defined.

Wherefore language must constitute another major piece of the overall Time Jigsaw, and as such one I will consider later in more detail.

THE TIMELESS SUBCONSCIOUS?

To a certain extent too this possibility – i.e. that human infants may “learn time” wrongly - is supported by a conclusion which Sigmund Freud made several decades before Piaget. He observed that “the processes (of the unconscious) are timeless, are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time, in fact bear no relation to time at all.”

If so, at least some of our common notions on time may be just stratagems to help us comprehend reality, ones imposed by the conscious mind to save it from being totally overwhelmed? Or as the common saying goes: “Time is Nature's way for keeping us sane.”

Finally this major possibility, that we may have somehow “learned time” wrongly, is also inherent in the viewpoint now increasingly expressed by modern philosophers like S.Barbour, H.Price, R.Le Poidevin. Broadly this can be summarised in the general statement that “Time does not pass, though we may think it does.”

LET INFANTS “LEARN TIME” ANEW?

But one of the very few people ever to have suggested a pragmatic approach to this problem of time learning was Dublin scientist J.L.Synge in 1959. He was a major relativist (follower of Einstein) who had edited the papers of renowned Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton (1805-65) from a century before.

Hamilton was probably the first of all scientists ever, to call for a “New Science of Pure Time” as far back as 1833.

Synge's era was also that of the early Space Race between America and Russia. This led him to deplore the traditional great scientific imbalance between space and time which I have considered earlier. And he combined his arguments in a cogent article in New Scientist magazine – A Plea for Chronometry – 1959 – p.434

But Synge had new reason beyond Hamilton for re-issuing the call for a whole new “Science of Time”. This was a great problem raised by Einstein's two theories of relativity, a problem still notably unresolved. For, as with those philosophers I've just quoted, these theories seem to insist inescapably that time doesn't pass in reality. And this despite all our common and strong impressions that it does.

Some fifty years ago Synge was therefore proposing that a new viewpoint on time was urgently required – a proposition with which current scholars increasingly agree. But to achieve this new viewpoint he made the novel suggestion that we should start right back at the dawn of consciousness during infancy. There we should give those newborn infants chronometers (which measure time) to play with, instead of those traditional building blocks (which focus their attention more on space)!

Hopefully such infants might then grow up more cognisant of time than space to start with – and in so doing achieve that new temporal viewpoint still so urgently required! However this proposal by Synge was of course never taken up, presumably because it must seem both impractical and socially unwise.

A more practical course towards the same end (though one he never suggested) is however feasible. This would be for intelligent adults to strive and divest themselves of all about time that they had ever learned – and thence commence to consider reality anew. Or “sit down before reality like a little child “ as Einstein was wont to advise.

Again this is a very promising possibility to which I will return. It's also of course a potential pragmatic development from those several current philosophies which deny that time passes in reality. Otherwise such philosophies remain entirely theoretical, not at all pragmatic or practical so far.

KRONOLOGY OR KRONOSOPHY?

Finally Synge suggested that his proposed new Science of Time might best be called chronometry. But this is a term long used to describe just simple clock measure-ments, not anything more basic or widespread.

I therefore propose that either kronology (Lit: time study) or kronosophy (Lit: time wisdom) would be more apt terms. The hard k in both words would be required because chronology (the ordering of dates) and chronosophy (mystic time wisdom) are already long in use. Though both of these latter would have only very limited relevance to the greater study of time overall.

Further kronology might best describe pragmatic time studies, and kronosophy whatever more theoretical conclusions might derive therefrom.

Finally that words are a “shorthand for thought” is a semantic principle widely used in practice, if not so often realised. And now that we two new and related names suggested for the putative Science of Time, the whole thing seems thereby more concrete and realisable.