Radiolabs on Time

(So I didn't realize that you wanted us to post responses to these on our blogs, I thought they were just going to be discussed in class.  I only say that because I wish my response could be more candid and less the memory of my initial response.  I apologize for misunderstanding or not paying close enough attention to the directions)


Both the radiolabs "Time" and "Beyond Time" were incredibly interesting.  Overall, radiolab does an excellent job and I am now addicted to listening to them.  In the "Time" episode, the slowing of the Beethoven piece is really fascinating.  I began messing with Audacity software and slowing down other songs so I could try and hear something different out of songs I already knew.  I couldn't tell if what I was hearing when the music was slowed down was the actual parts in the songs that are inaudible because of the speed or if they were just the digital software creating noise when the songs were slowed down to a massive degree.
I didn't realize how recently standardized time was created.  It was really interesting to hear the story of a town that all had different times; the bank varying from the butcher.  I have a little trouble imagining this and I would assume that it would be incredibly frustrating.  The excerpt about the athletes being in the zone was pretty awesome.  Everyone has felt the feeling of time flying by or time dragging, but the athletes seemed to have experienced this at a greater level.  It relates to the Oliver sacks patients that time is actually traveling much slower or much faster for them.  This except is kind of terrifying.  If a person is living with a different perception of time, than they are actually living in a different world, where communication is just not possible.  This part made me think of the validity behind many of stories in Einstein's Dreams. 
The Jad and Robert’s goofy little explanation of the theory of relativity really really helps to clarify the theory for me.  This part is actually what made me want to read Hawking’s "A brief history of time".  Before I had taken that theory as factual but not completely understood it. 
In "Beyond Time", I found the section on the artist Terri Wilcox to be kind of silly.  I thought that the artist was being slightly naive.  There is no way to truly live in a different time; he is just living in nostalgia of that time.  He's being overly reverent of a time that he truly knows nothing about. He only knows about it through mediation of books and stories. 
I also thought that the idea of discovering fate in the fact that it take a little while for your brain to transmit signals to your finger was slightly absurd.  Of course if takes a while for your brain to transmit those signals and for the action to take place.  There are a lot of steps that take place in order for your body to react in a way that someone is telling it to.  For one the language that is being told to you has to be deciphered for the meaning and then the correct neurotransmitters must be signaled.  The light on the brain scan that occurs way before the action is probably a part of the brain simple reacting to someone directing information towards them, which happens before the directions are completely spoken.  There are so many other ways of describing the brain scans that fate seems very far off as a conclusion.