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Artistic rendering of Da Vinci as Time Traveler Back Home
Of all people who have ever lived, if anyone has ever traveled
into the future, it would have had to have been Leonardo Da Vinci, the brilliant visionary and inventor from the 16th Century.

Perhaps artists are the best people to ask about time travel - many have reported a feeling of time being altered or suspended when they become absorbed in their creative activities. Some report that what felt like a matter of 2-3 hours really turned out to be 8-10. Where were they during those missing hours? In another dimension of space/time? This type of time suspension experience has led many to question the mysterious nature of consciousness as it relates to time.

In his book
"Time-A Travelers Guide," time travel expert Clifford Pickover states the brain is indeed a time machine, "Voluntary motions are not initiated by our conscious minds, and the brain does seem to have a time machine for antedating perceptions." Pickover's statements are based on numerous physiological experiments conducted and then published within scientific circles in a paper entitled, "Time and the Observer: the Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain," by Daniel Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne.

Real Time vs. Experienced Time Chart
Courtesy of Clifford Pickover, Time-A Traveler's Guide

According to Pickover, the results of these studies show that the brain projects mental events backwards in time in strange ways, "these studies show that the time line experienced by your conscious brain is often quite different from the objective time line of events occurring in your brain or in real life. In short, the time lines do not register and can develop kinks and order differences relative to another." So what does this misalignment of time lines mean? Pickover believes it should stimulate fascinating adventures and experiments in consciousness in the 21st Century.


Mental Time Travel Exercise

Here's a simple time traveler experiment you can perform each night before you fall asleep. Place yourself in a space and time where you can remember yourself being happy and carefree - perhaps one of the brightest moments in your life. Now, as you recall the environment first, and then the faces and circumstances surrounding the time frame, connect with the feeling you had. Feeling is the key to placing yourself back in a certain time of your life. Without being able to feel your emotions back then, it is merely nothing but a two-dimensional picture in your mind. This is a form of mental time travel, and if you connected with your true feelings then, you are officially initiated as having traveled back, using your brain/mind to enter into another time period to reexperience what you felt surrounding an event. After you feel comfortable with travel back into your own past, you can branch out using your imagination to reexperience events in history you have always longed to witness. Perhaps you will be able to penetrate some mysterious time warp field allowing your consciousness to breakthrough into a different time, past or future.

Keep Track of Your Internal Time Clock

If you want to get in tune with your own internal time clock, keep a journal handy and record those times when you felt time went by faster than you expected, and the circumstances surrounding this occurrences. Begin to note a pattern in what triggers time suspension in your life and note whatever impact it has, negative or positive, in your life.

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Source Info

Time - A Traveler's Guide, Clifford Pickover
Oxford University Press, Inc 1998