Looking forward to it

In the last few years since I completed grad school, I have been thinking about why history seems more difficult to reminisce than the future is to look forward to.

But this Economist blogpost from the other day highlights some new research in this area.

"They used to think that time does not have a direction, at least at the subatomic level, though they now agree that it does. Ordinary people, of course, have always known this. Nearly all cultures have a version of the arrow of time, a process by which they move towards the future and away from the past. According to a paper to be published in Psychological Science this has an interesting psychological effect. A group of researchers, led by Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago, found that people judge the distance of events differently, depending on whether they are in the past or future."

It's interesting how the psychology of time has been found to work similarly to the sound of moving objects. Events in times past seem "farther" than events in times to come. This raised a few questions for me:

Does "Earthly time" differ from "mental time"?
If there is a difference, what units are used for mental time?
If mental time is directional, must it have a start and finish?

Coincidentally, I picked up Henry Corbin's Cyclical time and Ismaili Gnosis last night and started reading it. The beginning mentions this difference between time and Time. More on this later.

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