“Nature watchers and land workers are more attuned to circular time”
OPINION
Is spring a new beginning, a fresh start? Or is it more like a return to a familiar place? While some of the greatest minds have contemplated the concept of time for over a century, their theories don’t always match up to our everyday experience of time and how it passes in nature.
For most of us, time is experienced as a linear sequence of events that flow from the present into the past, while possible futures are laid out before us. But what about in nature itself? Take a hatching chick. It enters a straight-line race, where life is a sequence of unique events that cannot be repeated or reversed. The chick grows, matures and then dies. That’s life, as they say.
Some cultures and ways of life, however, find a cyclical view of time more useful. Certainly, nature watchers and land workers tend to be more attuned to circular time, where life and its rhythms are shaped by the perpetual ebb and flow of cycles and seasons. This apparent circular flow is what gives organisms a chance to return, reappraise and build on experience in order to pass adaptive traits along an ever-evolving spiral of life.
Chronognosis (in Latin, chrono is time and gnosis is knowledge) is the perception of the passage of time, and particularly refers to casting your mind back in order to relive specific past events or anticipate the future.
Described as ‘mental time travel’, this was once thought to be a uniquely human ability, allowing us to transport ourselves back to what we were doing and where we were when an impactful event took place. Some research, however, suggests that at least some other species have a version of ‘what-where-when’ mental time travel.
Western scrub jays are intelligent and long-lived corvids that have the habit of storing, or caching, their surplus food to get them through leaner times. Their remarkable ability to recover hidden food supplies over weeks and months has been well-documented, but is this simply down to creating a ‘mental map’, or did the birds have a sense of time passing?
Researchers tested their abilities by offering perishable and non-perishable food items, and found that the birds adjusted their retrieval behaviour according to how quickly the dif
