The impenetrable beauty of Time (IV)

“Nachdem […] sich ihre Taschenuhren im Winter und allgemein unter Kampfbedingungen als sehr unpraktisch erwiesen, setzte sich die Armbanduhr beim Militär und schließlich auch in der zivilen Gesellschaft schnell durch und war bei Kriegsende zum allgemeinen Standard geworden.”

“In the psychological literature on timing, by far the most influential model has been the internal clock model (Creelman 1962; Treisman 1963).

Internal clocks are hypothetical mechanisms in which a neural pacemaker generates pulses; the number of pulses relating to a physical time interval is recorded by a counter. Internal clock models are generally centralized: one clock is used for all timing tasks. Centralized and distributed mechanisms can be subdivided into models in which the same neurons are timing all intervals or models in which different neurons time different intervals.

For example, we can use the same watch to time both 100 or a 500 msec intervals. However, one could imagine a system in which the initial event triggered an array of watches, each one devoted to a fixed interval: 100, 200, …, 500 msec. In this review, the former model will be referred to as a clock model and the latter as a labeled line or an interval-based model (Ivry 1996).”

Dieser Beitrag ist auf Englisch, doch einiges an der Zeitmauer gibt es auch in der hervorragenden Kultur- und Verwaltungssprache Deutsch zu lesen.