131: It’s That Time, Again

Isn’t it odd that your mind perceives periods of time differently.  When you anticipate something with pleasure, it seems to take forever to come about.

Well . This blog post is about time - and connected with last week’s by also being about music.  (Quite philosophical for a dog, eh?)

This week I have had yet another haircut.  They seem to come about every few days though TOWTSH assures me its every 6 weeks or so. In fact, it was that that made me think about the passage of time - and the perception of it.

Of course, there is a multitude of factors that affect our perceptions of time.

When we are young, for example, time moves very slowly.  Waiting for a birthday or Christmas takes an eternity.  As we age, this changes until, in old age, as TOWTSH (who is very, very old) will tell you, time races on and events that seemed to be on the far time horizon are suddenly here.

For dogs, this is relative. We only have small brains and short memories but the principle remains.  It takes forever to get to teatime or the next walk.

Anyway, back to the time-music link. I was listening to a programme on the radio (or wireless as some of my beans’ friends still insist on calling it) and this guy explained why humans can perceive, listen to ,and compose music - when other animal species don’t (even though some birds can have musical calls.). 

His explanation is that only humans have sophisticated and selective memory and the intelligence to predict the future. When humans hear a musical note, it is in the  ‘here and now’.  But they can remember the last note they hear and even predict the one they will hear next (if they have heard the tune before).   This is why humans perceive melody - a great gift.

I’ll probably be back to more mundane issues next week, but I know that 7 of my readers like an intelligent comment occasionally.