November 29, 2024 • 27 mins
Unlock the secrets of "Mastering Time: The Art of Perception" with Jack Hopkins. Learn how to manipulate your sense of time for any situation using techniques that compare your actual experiences to preconceived baselines. Whether making a tedious task seem shorter or a cherished moment feel longer, this video covers methods to control your time perception. Visualize scenarios in ultra-slow motion or lightning-fast sequences to adjust your subjective experience.
Discover practical applications from everyday life to special events, and understand how your brain makes unconscious comparisons. Hopkins shares insights gained from his time on the oncology floor at the San Diego Naval Medical Center. Enhance your life by learning to manipulate your subjective reality and enjoy better experiences. This video provides actionable advice on how to practice and perfect these techniques, making time your ally in both work and leisure.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, where
stories about the power of focusand resilience are revealed by
the people who live thosestories.
And now the host of the JackHopkins Show podcast, jack
Hopkins.
Hey, this is Jack Hopkins.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I don't think there's a person around who has not had
the experience of maybe sittingin line at the bank in the
drive-thru or getting in line atthe grocery store and having
five minutes seem like an hour.
Maybe only four or five minutespassed, but in experiential
(00:46):
time, perceptual time, it seemedlike you were there forever.
But then we've also had kind ofthe opposite experience, right,
remember when maybe you firststarted dating and your parents
said all right, you be home by10 and it's eight o'clock when
(01:09):
you left the house, right, soyou go see your girlfriend, your
boyfriend, whoever you're goingto see and spend time with that
you enjoyed being with, and twohours seemed like it went by in
like 15 minutes.
It was just like boom and it'sover Now.
Wouldn't it be cool if we couldmanipulate that to our benefit?
(01:35):
Wouldn't it be cool if we knewhow to tweak the knobs inside
our own head so that we couldtake 10 minutes and make it seem
like an hour, when we reallyhad something that we enjoyed,
(01:56):
but we only had 10 minutes andwe wanted it to seem like it
took a lot longer.
And then wouldn't it be cool ifthere was something that we
knew from prior experience wasgoing to be a royal pain in the
ass, and it may have beensomething that was only going to
take 10, 15, 20 minutes, but italways seems like it takes two
(02:21):
fucking hours.
It'd be cool to be able tochange that, reverse that,
switch that around, play withthe knob, so to speak.
Right, well, guess what we can.
Here's the cool thing about ourperception of time.
When somebody says, oh my God,I went to the bank and it just
(02:44):
took so long, it went so slow.
Or on the opposite end, you say, man, they say I could go for
two hours and I went, and thatwas like no time at all.
It like went by in 10 or 15minutes.
Remember those conversations,or at least thoughts in your
(03:05):
head when you were a kid,teenager, right?
Anytime we say faster or slower,or that was slow, oh, that went
by fast, every time we aremaking a comparison.
Every time we are making acomparison and we are usually
(03:29):
making that comparison on theother-than-conscious level,
meaning we're not always awareof what we are comparing it to.
That part kind of stays silent.
But we have to be comparing itto something Otherwise.
But we have to be comparing itto something, otherwise we
wouldn't be able to know whetherit seemed slow or whether it
(03:52):
seemed fast or, you know,somewhere in the middle we
wouldn't.
We wouldn't be able to makethat judgment, because we always
have to compare in terms oftime.
We have to compare it to kindof a baseline or at least a
previous or prior experience,right?
So that's where we get kind ofthe magic, if you will, when it
(04:16):
comes to playing with our ownperception of time.
We are going to play with whatwe are comparing it to.
We are going to compare theactual experience to something
that we set up ahead of time.
What am I talking about?
(04:36):
Let's say, for example, maybelike Thanksgiving was coming up
soon.
For example, maybe likeThanksgiving was coming up soon
and you just happen to be fromyou know one of those families
that for the most part prettycool, but you got a couple real
(04:59):
sticks in the mud, or maybe justa royal pain in the ass that
you always dread, you know,thanksgiving dinner, because
you've either got that pain inthe ass grilling you with
questions and wanting to nitpickand argue with you, or
something of the sort, and itcan take a you know
45-minute-hour meal situationand make it seem like it lasts
(05:26):
forever, and you don't want itto seem like it lasts forever.
In fact, you'd like for it tobe able to seem like man.
That took no time at all.
It was like done.
How do you do that?
If I were going to do that, whatI would do is I would close my
(05:52):
eyes and I would imagine beingat that Thanksgiving dinner with
those people present, and Iwould imagine everything on the
side of me, all of theinteractions, all of the voices,
all of the movements, anythingthat typically goes on in those
Thanksgiving dinners.
(06:14):
I would imagine it happening atlike ultra slow motion, slow
motion.
So the movements in terms ofwhat I in this pretend
visualization that I'm doing,the movements of the people on
(06:44):
the side of me at that tablewould be moving at about that
speed.
Right, that's what I'm going tohave it.
I'm going to play out 10, 15,20 seconds of this meal, with
everything that's happening inthe periphery going slow as
(07:07):
syrup, and then I'm going toopen my eyes and I'm going to do
another little five, 10 secondclip of that Same thing, maybe
even slower.
Then I'm going to open my eyesand I'm going to do another five
, 10 second clip of everythinghappening at about that speed.
(07:33):
I'm going to play that out infive or 10 second segments for
six or eight times.
Right, the whole thing take aminute and a half at most and
here's what happens.
And if you've never done thisbefore, then it sounds batshit
(07:57):
crazy.
I get that, but once you'vedone it you're going to be like,
holy shit, is it really thateasy?
I guess it is super slow speed.
(08:22):
Then when you actually go tothat meal and the people that
you rehearsed with are thepeople there and they're just
doing things at normalday-to-day speeds.
By contrast hear me again,because we always compare to
(08:44):
something else by contrast, thespeed of normal Thanksgiving
meal, conversation and movementsis going to be light years
faster than that ultra slowmovement that you played out in
your head of that Thanksgivingdinner, and it's not something
(09:09):
that you even have to focus onwhen you actually get to the
dinner.
You've already done your workthe day before.
Now you can just go to the meal.
You can just go to the meal andinteract because you've already
cued up your brain to make thatcomparison.
It's going to take the actualreal-life speed of everything
(09:29):
that's happening and it's goingto compare that to the most
recent file in your brain andyou don't have a literal file in
your brain, but that's thelanguage we will use to describe
that most recent experience.
And when you are engaging atthat Thanksgiving dinner,
(09:50):
unconsciously your brain istaking everything that's
happening and measuring itagainst that most recent file
and it's going to say, oh wow,this is like this is fast
compared to that.
And so your perceptualexperience of it then, both
(10:15):
while it's happening and thenlater in the day, after it's
over with and you're thinkingback on it, it's going to seem
like it just boom, blew by.
Man, that went fast.
Now, if you want to do theopposite and that is, let's say,
let's think of a good one.
(10:37):
Let's say that your favoriteactor or actress is going to be
doing a book signing right,let's say, it's Mark Hamill.
Mark Hamill played a huge rolein get-out-the-vote efforts this
year.
The name Mark Hamill is maybeas significant as it was in Star
(11:05):
Wars days, and rightly so.
So let's say, mark Hamill'sdoing a book signing and your
work schedule is screwy andyou've got an asshole for a boss
that won't let you off, eventhough they know you're a huge
Star Wars fan, and you've onlygot like 10 minutes.
10 minutes that includes juststanding there staring at Mark
(11:30):
Hamill and the maybe 15-20seconds that you actually get to
speak to him as he signs yourbook.
And this is such a big thing inyour life.
You don't want this to just goand then 10 seconds, 15 seconds,
(11:51):
it's over.
You want it to seem like you'resitting at the bank in line.
You want that short littlepiece of time.
You want it to seem like itlasts forever.
So what do you do?
You do the opposite of what youdid in the first scenario.
(12:15):
In your mind, you just closeyour eyes and there's no Look.
Don't get all hung up when youhear somebody say visualization,
or I visualized.
Don't think that they areclosing their eyes and seeing
these crystal clear looks, justlike the outside world images.
(12:39):
They're not.
They're thinking.
So if I tell you, close youreyes and visualize a flower, the
same thing is going to happenas if I say close your eyes and
think about a flower.
It's going to bring up the sameimage, the only difference
(13:00):
being is sometimes with somepeople, when you tell them to
close their eyes and visualize aflower, they'll go oh, I'm no
good at visualizing things, so Ijust usually leave visualize
out of the vocabulary and I justsay, okay, close your eyes and
think of a flower.
(13:20):
Boom, they've done exactly whatI needed them to do.
So same thing here.
You're just thinking about it,right, so don't get hung up on
it.
So what you would do, you'dclose your eyes and you would
think about meeting Mark Hamillat the book signing.
But what you would do is youwould have everything going on
(13:48):
in the periphery and right infront of you Every interaction,
every word that was spoken,every sound, everything.
You would have that going atlightning speed.
You would have it, just likeyou, almost no more than close
your eyes and it's over, right,that's how fast you've got stuff
.
Than close your eyes and it'sover, right, that's how fast
(14:09):
you've got stuff going in yourhead.
So you do it again.
You say, okay, round two ofmeeting Mark Hamill, the book
signing, eyes back open, and youdo that six, eight, 10 times,
and then you forget about it andthe next day you've got your
(14:34):
ten minutes that your boss wasso kind to let you have and you
get in line and you get up thereand you've got that 15, maybe
20 second window of a handshakeor a oh my God, you're my
(14:57):
favorite actor in the world andsigns the book, maybe last, like
I said, 10, 15, 20 seconds, butit seems like it lasts.
Like I said, 10, 15, 20 seconds, but it seems like it lasts a
lot longer.
It's like wow, and it's so realthat later if somebody told you
(15:23):
hey, you know you were only upthere for 15 seconds, right,
you'd be like bullshit, that waslonger than 15 seconds.
I guarantee you I was up thereat least a minute, maybe a
minute and a half.
They're like, no, that was 10,15 seconds.
(15:47):
They're like, no, that was 10,15 seconds.
Because you had cued your brainand set up a scenario where the
(16:09):
most recent file in your brainof thoughts of Mark Hamill at a
book signing everything moved solightning fast that once you
got there and everything washappening in real time the
real-time movements, thereal-time tempo of the
conversation, the movements wasso much slower than what your
(16:33):
brain was comparing it to as itwas happening that perceptually
it felt like a much longer time.
Does this work?
Is it real?
I do it all the time, all thetime.
(16:57):
Let me tell you where I firstused this with great success,
with other people with greatsuccess with other people, and
it was on the oncology floor atthe San Diego Naval Medical
Center where I was the seniorcorpsman.
Now there are lots of differentprocedures that go on, some of
(17:23):
them diagnostic, some of themtesting, sometimes just simple
blood draws.
That can run the gamut ofdegrees of how uncomfortable
they are or even painful.
And if you think about theperception of time, a lot of
(17:46):
what makes a bad experience badisn't just the level of
discomfort, but it's how longthat period of discomfort seems
perceptually Right.
So let's say that you're goingthrough a procedure that in
(18:09):
clock time only takes twominutes, but the procedure
itself is pretty damnuncomfortable and by default
human beings kind of really havesome shitty default modes so
that two minutes of clock timefor that procedure on default
(18:33):
mode will seem like 15-20minutes and it's uncomfortable
as hell.
So it's uncomfortable as hellby nature and now it feels like
it lasts 10, 15 minutes.
That's your perception of it,when in truth in real clock time
(18:54):
it only took two minutes.
Wouldn't it be nice?
How about this?
How about if we could just dialit back down to so that it
doesn't at least it doesn't seemlonger than the two minutes of
actual clock time experience.
But I mean, if we're going todo that, how about let's just
(19:14):
knock it down to where it seemslike it only took 30, 40 seconds
?
Can you do that?
I did it all the time.
I say I did it all the time.
I say I did it all the time Iguided people through the
process and they did it all thetime.
(19:35):
Of course it works.
Our entire experience of life issubjective.
It's why it cracks me up whensomebody says, well, that's kind
of subjective.
It's why it cracks me up whensomebody says, well, that's kind
of subjective.
Our entire experience of lifeis subjectivity.
(19:56):
Whatever's going on inside ofour head and our body, that's
subjective experience, no matterhow you slice it.
What I do is teach people.
I don't teach peels, I teachpeople.
I teach people how to play withsubjectivity in a way that
benefits them.
(20:18):
Our default modes forsubjectivity suck.
Oh, every now and then you'llmeet this rare individual whose
default modes are optimal.
Most of the time, people'sdefault modes suck.
So if you don't intervene andtake intentional and conscious
(20:40):
effort to tweak something, yourdefault mode is going to suck.
Your default mode's going tosuck, which means when you get
that two-minute clock timeprocedure.
That hurts like hell.
It's going to seem, because ofyour default mode, like it took
10 friggin' minutes For it toseem like the two minutes that
it is, or, better yet, like 30to 40 seconds.
(21:04):
That's going to require knowinghow to go in and tweak your
subjectivity, which you canabsolutely do.
It's another one of thosethings nobody ever taught us.
Now you had to taketrigonometry or calculus, and
(21:25):
unless you are in a specializedfield, how many times have you
used that in life?
But oh my god, let's not teachsomebody how to run their own
mind.
Let's not teach them one, thatit's possible to tweak your
subjective experience, and two,let's sure don't teach them how
(21:47):
to do that.
My God, we might fool aroundand show people how to have
better lives and a betterexperience of life.
That would be awful.
That would be awful.
It's as simple as this.
If you want certain experiencesto seem like they last longer,
(22:13):
you can.
If you want other experiencesto seem like they blaze by in
the blink of an eye, you can.
Subjective experience it is ourexperiential reality.
(22:34):
But the other side of this samecoin is that subjective
experience isn't real.
How cool is that thatsubjective experience is our
experience of reality.
But that subjective experienceisn't real.
That excites the shit out of me.
(22:56):
That whole thought excites thehell out of me.
Why?
Because it means I can dowhatever I want to do with my
own subjective experience.
If I don't like the way I'mexperiencing something, just
knowing that the largest part ofhow I'm experiencing it is
(23:18):
subjective, I go thank God,because I get to change it, I
get to tweak it, I get to alterit, I get to manipulate it.
It's not this stuck staticthing.
If I want to experience that astaking half the time it really
takes, I can.
(23:39):
If I want this thing that takes30 minutes to seem like it went
by in 10 minutes, I can.
Just like anything else, I'llget better with practice and
before long I'll have it sostreamlined that really all I'll
have to do is just think I wantthat to go faster or I want
that to go slower, andunconsciously.
(24:03):
Everything that I've done somany times before through
conscious intention.
Now it's just kind of runningautomatically.
It's my new default mode.
I can just decide I want thatto seem like it just goes slow
and I want that to seem likeit's over.
You can do that.
(24:25):
You've already done it.
Look, here's the thing.
It's kind of crazy for me totell you.
You can do that, becauseanybody watching or listening to
this knows full well.
They've already done it.
Countless times in life You'vebeen sitting at the bank tapping
(24:48):
your foot thinking come on,come on, come on, my lunch
hour's about over and it seemedlike it's just dragging you.
Look at your clock and it onlytook like seven minutes.
But, my God, it felt like youwere sitting there in the sun
roasting for 30 minutes.
You were with a boyfriend, agirlfriend, the person that you
(25:11):
wound up marrying, and you onlyhad 30 minutes and it seemed
like in five minutes you had togo home or they had to go back
inside.
You've experienced thismultiple times.
You've experienced thesubjective reality not matching
clock time.
(25:33):
If you, as a human being, werenot capable of doing this on a
neurological level, you wouldn'tbe able to have those
experiences.
But you have, and it's not afluke.
You've had them multiple timesin life.
So the only thing I'm doing isshowing you oh, you know those
(25:58):
things you can already do, butyou're not sure just how they
happen or why.
Well, I'm going to show you howto take those things that
already happen, so you'vealready proven to yourself that
you can experience.
Because you've experienced them, I'm going to show you the how
and why of it.
(26:18):
It's really simple.
And then you get to decidewhether something goes fast or
whether it goes slow, becauseyou know how, and it's as simple
as that.
This is Jack Hopkins, and Iwish you a very happy
(26:41):
Thanksgiving and I'll see youagain soon.
Welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, where
stories about the power of focusand resilience are revealed by
the people who live thosestories.
And now the host of the JackHopkins Show podcast, jack
Hopkins.
Hey, this is Jack Hopkins.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I don't think there's a person around who has not had
the experience of maybe sittingin line at the bank in the
drive-thru or getting in line atthe grocery store and having
five minutes seem like an hour.
Maybe only four or five minutespassed, but in experiential
(00:46):
time, perceptual time, it seemedlike you were there forever.
But then we've also had kind ofthe opposite experience, right,
remember when maybe you firststarted dating and your parents
said all right, you be home by10 and it's eight o'clock when
(01:09):
you left the house, right, soyou go see your girlfriend, your
boyfriend, whoever you're goingto see and spend time with that
you enjoyed being with, and twohours seemed like it went by in
like 15 minutes.
It was just like boom and it'sover Now.
Wouldn't it be cool if we couldmanipulate that to our benefit?
(01:35):
Wouldn't it be cool if we knewhow to tweak the knobs inside
our own head so that we couldtake 10 minutes and make it seem
like an hour, when we reallyhad something that we enjoyed,
(01:56):
but we only had 10 minutes andwe wanted it to seem like it
took a lot longer.
And then wouldn't it be cool ifthere was something that we
knew from prior experience wasgoing to be a royal pain in the
ass, and it may have beensomething that was only going to
take 10, 15, 20 minutes, but italways seems like it takes two
(02:21):
fucking hours.
It'd be cool to be able tochange that, reverse that,
switch that around, play withthe knob, so to speak.
Right, well, guess what we can.
Here's the cool thing about ourperception of time.
When somebody says, oh my God,I went to the bank and it just
(02:44):
took so long, it went so slow.
Or on the opposite end, you say, man, they say I could go for
two hours and I went, and thatwas like no time at all.
It like went by in 10 or 15minutes.
Remember those conversations,or at least thoughts in your
(03:05):
head when you were a kid,teenager, right?
Anytime we say faster or slower,or that was slow, oh, that went
by fast, every time we aremaking a comparison.
Every time we are making acomparison and we are usually
(03:29):
making that comparison on theother-than-conscious level,
meaning we're not always awareof what we are comparing it to.
That part kind of stays silent.
But we have to be comparing itto something Otherwise.
But we have to be comparing itto something, otherwise we
wouldn't be able to know whetherit seemed slow or whether it
(03:52):
seemed fast or, you know,somewhere in the middle we
wouldn't.
We wouldn't be able to makethat judgment, because we always
have to compare in terms oftime.
We have to compare it to kindof a baseline or at least a
previous or prior experience,right?
So that's where we get kind ofthe magic, if you will, when it
(04:16):
comes to playing with our ownperception of time.
We are going to play with whatwe are comparing it to.
We are going to compare theactual experience to something
that we set up ahead of time.
What am I talking about?
(04:36):
Let's say, for example, maybelike Thanksgiving was coming up
soon.
For example, maybe likeThanksgiving was coming up soon
and you just happen to be fromyou know one of those families
that for the most part prettycool, but you got a couple real
(04:59):
sticks in the mud, or maybe justa royal pain in the ass that
you always dread, you know,thanksgiving dinner, because
you've either got that pain inthe ass grilling you with
questions and wanting to nitpickand argue with you, or
something of the sort, and itcan take a you know
45-minute-hour meal situationand make it seem like it lasts
(05:26):
forever, and you don't want itto seem like it lasts forever.
In fact, you'd like for it tobe able to seem like man.
That took no time at all.
It was like done.
How do you do that?
If I were going to do that, whatI would do is I would close my
(05:52):
eyes and I would imagine beingat that Thanksgiving dinner with
those people present, and Iwould imagine everything on the
side of me, all of theinteractions, all of the voices,
all of the movements, anythingthat typically goes on in those
Thanksgiving dinners.
(06:14):
I would imagine it happening atlike ultra slow motion, slow
motion.
So the movements in terms ofwhat I in this pretend
visualization that I'm doing,the movements of the people on
(06:44):
the side of me at that tablewould be moving at about that
speed.
Right, that's what I'm going tohave it.
I'm going to play out 10, 15,20 seconds of this meal, with
everything that's happening inthe periphery going slow as
(07:07):
syrup, and then I'm going toopen my eyes and I'm going to do
another little five, 10 secondclip of that Same thing, maybe
even slower.
Then I'm going to open my eyesand I'm going to do another five
, 10 second clip of everythinghappening at about that speed.
(07:33):
I'm going to play that out infive or 10 second segments for
six or eight times.
Right, the whole thing take aminute and a half at most and
here's what happens.
And if you've never done thisbefore, then it sounds batshit
(07:57):
crazy.
I get that, but once you'vedone it you're going to be like,
holy shit, is it really thateasy?
I guess it is super slow speed.
(08:22):
Then when you actually go tothat meal and the people that
you rehearsed with are thepeople there and they're just
doing things at normalday-to-day speeds.
By contrast hear me again,because we always compare to
(08:44):
something else by contrast, thespeed of normal Thanksgiving
meal, conversation and movementsis going to be light years
faster than that ultra slowmovement that you played out in
your head of that Thanksgivingdinner, and it's not something
(09:09):
that you even have to focus onwhen you actually get to the
dinner.
You've already done your workthe day before.
Now you can just go to the meal.
You can just go to the meal andinteract because you've already
cued up your brain to make thatcomparison.
It's going to take the actualreal-life speed of everything
(09:29):
that's happening and it's goingto compare that to the most
recent file in your brain andyou don't have a literal file in
your brain, but that's thelanguage we will use to describe
that most recent experience.
And when you are engaging atthat Thanksgiving dinner,
(09:50):
unconsciously your brain istaking everything that's
happening and measuring itagainst that most recent file
and it's going to say, oh wow,this is like this is fast
compared to that.
And so your perceptualexperience of it then, both
(10:15):
while it's happening and thenlater in the day, after it's
over with and you're thinkingback on it, it's going to seem
like it just boom, blew by.
Man, that went fast.
Now, if you want to do theopposite and that is, let's say,
let's think of a good one.
(10:37):
Let's say that your favoriteactor or actress is going to be
doing a book signing right,let's say, it's Mark Hamill.
Mark Hamill played a huge rolein get-out-the-vote efforts this
year.
The name Mark Hamill is maybeas significant as it was in Star
(11:05):
Wars days, and rightly so.
So let's say, mark Hamill'sdoing a book signing and your
work schedule is screwy andyou've got an asshole for a boss
that won't let you off, eventhough they know you're a huge
Star Wars fan, and you've onlygot like 10 minutes.
10 minutes that includes juststanding there staring at Mark
(11:30):
Hamill and the maybe 15-20seconds that you actually get to
speak to him as he signs yourbook.
And this is such a big thing inyour life.
You don't want this to just goand then 10 seconds, 15 seconds,
(11:51):
it's over.
You want it to seem like you'resitting at the bank in line.
You want that short littlepiece of time.
You want it to seem like itlasts forever.
So what do you do?
You do the opposite of what youdid in the first scenario.
(12:15):
In your mind, you just closeyour eyes and there's no Look.
Don't get all hung up when youhear somebody say visualization,
or I visualized.
Don't think that they areclosing their eyes and seeing
these crystal clear looks, justlike the outside world images.
(12:39):
They're not.
They're thinking.
So if I tell you, close youreyes and visualize a flower, the
same thing is going to happenas if I say close your eyes and
think about a flower.
It's going to bring up the sameimage, the only difference
(13:00):
being is sometimes with somepeople, when you tell them to
close their eyes and visualize aflower, they'll go oh, I'm no
good at visualizing things, so Ijust usually leave visualize
out of the vocabulary and I justsay, okay, close your eyes and
think of a flower.
(13:20):
Boom, they've done exactly whatI needed them to do.
So same thing here.
You're just thinking about it,right, so don't get hung up on
it.
So what you would do, you'dclose your eyes and you would
think about meeting Mark Hamillat the book signing.
But what you would do is youwould have everything going on
(13:48):
in the periphery and right infront of you Every interaction,
every word that was spoken,every sound, everything.
You would have that going atlightning speed.
You would have it, just likeyou, almost no more than close
your eyes and it's over, right,that's how fast you've got stuff
.
Than close your eyes and it'sover, right, that's how fast
(14:09):
you've got stuff going in yourhead.
So you do it again.
You say, okay, round two ofmeeting Mark Hamill, the book
signing, eyes back open, and youdo that six, eight, 10 times,
and then you forget about it andthe next day you've got your
(14:34):
ten minutes that your boss wasso kind to let you have and you
get in line and you get up thereand you've got that 15, maybe
20 second window of a handshakeor a oh my God, you're my
(14:57):
favorite actor in the world andsigns the book, maybe last, like
I said, 10, 15, 20 seconds, butit seems like it lasts.
Like I said, 10, 15, 20 seconds, but it seems like it lasts a
lot longer.
It's like wow, and it's so realthat later if somebody told you
(15:23):
hey, you know you were only upthere for 15 seconds, right,
you'd be like bullshit, that waslonger than 15 seconds.
I guarantee you I was up thereat least a minute, maybe a
minute and a half.
They're like, no, that was 10,15 seconds.
(15:47):
They're like, no, that was 10,15 seconds.
Because you had cued your brainand set up a scenario where the
(16:09):
most recent file in your brainof thoughts of Mark Hamill at a
book signing everything moved solightning fast that once you
got there and everything washappening in real time the
real-time movements, thereal-time tempo of the
conversation, the movements wasso much slower than what your
(16:33):
brain was comparing it to as itwas happening that perceptually
it felt like a much longer time.
Does this work?
Is it real?
I do it all the time, all thetime.
(16:57):
Let me tell you where I firstused this with great success,
with other people with greatsuccess with other people, and
it was on the oncology floor atthe San Diego Naval Medical
Center where I was the seniorcorpsman.
Now there are lots of differentprocedures that go on, some of
(17:23):
them diagnostic, some of themtesting, sometimes just simple
blood draws.
That can run the gamut ofdegrees of how uncomfortable
they are or even painful.
And if you think about theperception of time, a lot of
(17:46):
what makes a bad experience badisn't just the level of
discomfort, but it's how longthat period of discomfort seems
perceptually Right.
So let's say that you're goingthrough a procedure that in
(18:09):
clock time only takes twominutes, but the procedure
itself is pretty damnuncomfortable and by default
human beings kind of really havesome shitty default modes so
that two minutes of clock timefor that procedure on default
(18:33):
mode will seem like 15-20minutes and it's uncomfortable
as hell.
So it's uncomfortable as hellby nature and now it feels like
it lasts 10, 15 minutes.
That's your perception of it,when in truth in real clock time
(18:54):
it only took two minutes.
Wouldn't it be nice?
How about this?
How about if we could just dialit back down to so that it
doesn't at least it doesn't seemlonger than the two minutes of
actual clock time experience.
But I mean, if we're going todo that, how about let's just
(19:14):
knock it down to where it seemslike it only took 30, 40 seconds
?
Can you do that?
I did it all the time.
I say I did it all the time.
I say I did it all the time Iguided people through the
process and they did it all thetime.
(19:35):
Of course it works.
Our entire experience of life issubjective.
It's why it cracks me up whensomebody says, well, that's kind
of subjective.
It's why it cracks me up whensomebody says, well, that's kind
of subjective.
Our entire experience of lifeis subjectivity.
(19:56):
Whatever's going on inside ofour head and our body, that's
subjective experience, no matterhow you slice it.
What I do is teach people.
I don't teach peels, I teachpeople.
I teach people how to play withsubjectivity in a way that
benefits them.
(20:18):
Our default modes forsubjectivity suck.
Oh, every now and then you'llmeet this rare individual whose
default modes are optimal.
Most of the time, people'sdefault modes suck.
So if you don't intervene andtake intentional and conscious
(20:40):
effort to tweak something, yourdefault mode is going to suck.
Your default mode's going tosuck, which means when you get
that two-minute clock timeprocedure.
That hurts like hell.
It's going to seem, because ofyour default mode, like it took
10 friggin' minutes For it toseem like the two minutes that
it is, or, better yet, like 30to 40 seconds.
(21:04):
That's going to require knowinghow to go in and tweak your
subjectivity, which you canabsolutely do.
It's another one of thosethings nobody ever taught us.
Now you had to taketrigonometry or calculus, and
(21:25):
unless you are in a specializedfield, how many times have you
used that in life?
But oh my god, let's not teachsomebody how to run their own
mind.
Let's not teach them one, thatit's possible to tweak your
subjective experience, and two,let's sure don't teach them how
(21:47):
to do that.
My God, we might fool aroundand show people how to have
better lives and a betterexperience of life.
That would be awful.
That would be awful.
It's as simple as this.
If you want certain experiencesto seem like they last longer,
(22:13):
you can.
If you want other experiencesto seem like they blaze by in
the blink of an eye, you can.
Subjective experience it is ourexperiential reality.
(22:34):
But the other side of this samecoin is that subjective
experience isn't real.
How cool is that thatsubjective experience is our
experience of reality.
But that subjective experienceisn't real.
That excites the shit out of me.
(22:56):
That whole thought excites thehell out of me.
Why?
Because it means I can dowhatever I want to do with my
own subjective experience.
If I don't like the way I'mexperiencing something, just
knowing that the largest part ofhow I'm experiencing it is
(23:18):
subjective, I go thank God,because I get to change it, I
get to tweak it, I get to alterit, I get to manipulate it.
It's not this stuck staticthing.
If I want to experience that astaking half the time it really
takes, I can.
(23:39):
If I want this thing that takes30 minutes to seem like it went
by in 10 minutes, I can.
Just like anything else, I'llget better with practice and
before long I'll have it sostreamlined that really all I'll
have to do is just think I wantthat to go faster or I want
that to go slower, andunconsciously.
(24:03):
Everything that I've done somany times before through
conscious intention.
Now it's just kind of runningautomatically.
It's my new default mode.
I can just decide I want thatto seem like it just goes slow
and I want that to seem likeit's over.
You can do that.
(24:25):
You've already done it.
Look, here's the thing.
It's kind of crazy for me totell you.
You can do that, becauseanybody watching or listening to
this knows full well.
They've already done it.
Countless times in life You'vebeen sitting at the bank tapping
(24:48):
your foot thinking come on,come on, come on, my lunch
hour's about over and it seemedlike it's just dragging you.
Look at your clock and it onlytook like seven minutes.
But, my God, it felt like youwere sitting there in the sun
roasting for 30 minutes.
You were with a boyfriend, agirlfriend, the person that you
(25:11):
wound up marrying, and you onlyhad 30 minutes and it seemed
like in five minutes you had togo home or they had to go back
inside.
You've experienced thismultiple times.
You've experienced thesubjective reality not matching
clock time.
(25:33):
If you, as a human being, werenot capable of doing this on a
neurological level, you wouldn'tbe able to have those
experiences.
But you have, and it's not afluke.
You've had them multiple timesin life.
So the only thing I'm doing isshowing you oh, you know those
(25:58):
things you can already do, butyou're not sure just how they
happen or why.
Well, I'm going to show you howto take those things that
already happen, so you'vealready proven to yourself that
you can experience.
Because you've experienced them, I'm going to show you the how
and why of it.
(26:18):
It's really simple.
And then you get to decidewhether something goes fast or
whether it goes slow, becauseyou know how, and it's as simple
as that.
This is Jack Hopkins, and Iwish you a very happy
(26:41):
Thanksgiving and I'll see youagain soon.
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