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This analysis suggests a reason for sensory enhancement under marijuana, a movement of attention from consciousness processes to awareness processes. We usually think of attention as synonymous with consciousness, but it is an uneasy synonymy. Consciousness seems to be more than attention, but we cannot describe a consciousness without attention. Perhaps it is possible for attention energy to move into sensory processes and operate less in the decisional, deliberative processes of consciousness. If this happens it would provide much more energy for attending to sense data, and we could expect the sensory experience to be more vivid and more detailed.
Intensity of sensory experience seems related to the total proportion or amount of attention which is involved in the process. If attention is used in conscious or unconscious processes in making decisions, remembering, evaluating, etc., then this much is removed from the awareness of the sense experience. Thus it may be that one of the causes of sensory enhancement under marijuana is that attention energy moves from consciousness processes into awareness processes, which amplifies the experience.
TIME DISTORTION
Besides sensory enhancement, the other most immediate effect of marijuana is a change in the perception of time: events take longer to occur. Bach's first Brandenburg Concerto lasts hours. An hour seems to have passed, but the dock records 25 minutes. The person's internal fantasies are long and involved, but only a few minutes have passed in government time. In this state the fantasies and music do not move at a faster pace---they move at their own usual rate, though often more fluently and more dearly. The impression is that external time must have slowed down, while the internal experience continues at the same rate. There is not the impression of speed or rapidity, but that the time available to the user is magnified.
There are similar effects in normal experience. Time spent at a boring talk seems to pass more slowly, and one thinks in dismay, "What, only five minutes have passed since I looked at my watch?"
A method used by Linn Cooper (1956) to induce time distortion under hypnosis is useful to note here. A metronome set at one beat per second is used. The hypnotized subject is told that the metronome is slowing down to one beat every two seconds, every five seconds, once a minute. Verbally or conceptually we can now say that the subject's internal rate has remained the same, but external time relative to the subject has slowed down. Has the subject's own pace actually speeded up? I do not know, and I can think of no reliable criteria for determining this. Brain wave research shows that the basic alpha rhythm can be speeded up by a flickering light (called photic driving), but not very much, and not even to twice its normal rhythm. Cooper's subjects report that they do mentally imagine the amount of thoughts appropriate to the expanded time available, including counting imagined objects. This may be a convenient hallucination or it may be an accurate description of what they do. (Even calculation of real problems would not be a valid test because calculating geniuses can answer complex mathematical problems almost instantaneously, and this ability may be available under hypnosis, though it has never been reported to my knowledge under marijuana or hypnosis.) In this procedure under hypnosis and also in marijuana the subjective experience of time is disconnected from the marking of social or government time.
The effect under marijuana is analogous to effects in visual and sound modalities. Visual scenes often have more depth, sounds are heard with more dimension; so too with time-there is an expansion of the fabric of time so there is a feeling of depth instead of the usual two dimensional flow.
The explanation of this sometimes given by marijuana users is that more is happening: they are thinking faster or more thoughts are occurring in the same time period. This could cause external time to be relatively slower. Although it need not be the case that internal processes change at a faster rate it is possible that a person is aware of more perceptions in a given amount of time as a result of the enhancement of sensory data. With visual enhancement more details of the movements of the self and others are attended to. This means that more information is perceived in the same amount of time. This is also true of proprioceptive and tactile responses. Time is somewhat conditioned to a normal rate of information input in particular contexts. One has a "standard rate of intake" and if the amount of information is increased for a unit of time, then one of the responses may be that time is going slower. To be conscious of any change in experience there must be a comparison with previous similar situations. Thus if the time experience while high is compared with a similar normal experience, or with a time pace constructed from normal experience, it may be perceived as slower.
A more important cause for time distortion under marijuana can be found by noting how persons normally judge the passage of time, then investigating the changes in these criteria caused by marijuana. This is rather difficult because no one knows how we judge time. Nevertheless there are some relevant observations which can be made.(1)
Notice the situations in which time seems to alter for many persons in everyday experience and out-of-the-ordinary experience. These are situations in which the experience itself is the focus of attention, they are not means to extrinsic goals. Persons totally involved in making love seem to have no awareness of how much time may pass. Persons in a state of anger do not become aware of time lapse until the emotion subsides or ego controls are invoked. Psychotherapy hours in which emotional material is covered seem to be out of time awareness. Mystics become unaware of the passage of time during meditation, as do persons having peak experiences (Maslow, I964). In dreams, daydreams, fantasies, ecstasy, and strong emotional states, the sense of time is absent or changed. And in the state of pure awareness, as I have used the term, there is no perception of the rate of time. These are all personal experiences in which conscious attention is not dominant, and immediate experience, rather than goals, expectancies, plans, and decisions, is predominant. Time perception is a socially reinforced response. The experiences and states I have described are not states which are socially conscious; they are not internally subordinated to social time or schedules. Anger cannot be paced with conscious control, nor can ecstasy. Feelings, fantasies, dreams, and awareness do not incorporate the sense of time which is built up by and maintained in the consciousness. Thus when one is experiencing such content there is no marking of the passage of time, and to the extent this material is the content of awareness, the less social time is noted. Immediate experience is always timeless; time is perceived in relation to the uses of experience in controlling or predicting the future or interpreting the past, the present being perceived in relation to past or future. This is one of the major functions of consciousness. In a normal conscious state when the internal or external input is to be changed or manipulated the time required is automatically projected, based on past experience. This imposes the knowledge of time on the consciousness. One of the effects of marijuana is to reduce the strength of expectancies and goals which are socially reinforced. Thus non-time experiences are increased in relative strength and time oriented associations are decreased, which creates the sense that time is expanded.
Some indication that this is what occurs may be seen in reports of marijuana users that time passes instantaneously. One girl reported that when high she suddenly discovered 45 minutes had passed without her realization of this. And there are reports of listening to music when the individual realizes the music had stopped, without his remembering hearing the selection as it was playing. What happens in these cases is that most of the person's attention is in non-time processes, so that time passage is not noted until the social consciousness returns. Then it seems that no time has passed, since there was no process noting its passage. Just as in sleep, amnesic hypnosis, or anaesthesia, there is no consciousness of the duration of the state, and the conscious time flow seems unbroken from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking.
When observing sensory stimuli, listening to music, fantasying, etc., there is the feeling of expanded time because the outside experiences are overwhelmed by the mental, internal experience which is not marking time and there is no way to gauge their pace. The quantity of the time change varies. If the user is almost totally involved with the awareness processes, with little conscious attention, then there will be little sense of duration, and long periods of clock time will go by quickly.
Events themselves are timeless, in that they are always in the present---they do not echo their past nor presage their future states; we alone do that to them, for ourselves. And we ourselves do not experience the past or the future; we experience memories or expectancies, which may be realistic or fantasies. So our experience of the passage of time is based on our comparison of present experience with our remembrance of the past, usually the immediate past, or our anticipation of the future and how we get there. |
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