Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 12/3
-- Publishers Weekly, 12/3/2007
The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity
Stefan Klein, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. Marlowe, $25 (368p) ISBN 9781600940170
A witty, engrossing journey through the science, culture,
concept and nature of time, the latest from German science journalist
Klein (The Science of Happiness) is a treatise on temporality brimming with insight. Exploring
the extensive research on time perception—from Michel Siffre
subjecting himself to months alone in a pitch-dark cave to the
burrowing behavior of single-celled euglena—Klein amasses hard
evidence, amusing anecdotes and unlikely consequences of the enormous
disparity between time as we perceive it (inner time) and time as we
conceptualize it (i.e, clock time). For example, an investigation into
the slippery idea of “the present” indicates that
“The Now is an Illusion,” synthesized by the mind from
disparate, often non-simultaneous sensory elements: “The brain
can delay the present by up to a half-second” in order to
compensate for the relative speed of, say, sound over sight.
Klein’s suggestions for slowing down arise seamlessly throughout
the book from the biological and physical data (well documented in
chapter notes and a thorough bibliography), and the epilogue pares them
down to six individual steps. Sure to give readers fresh perspective on
their everyday lives, Klein’s concepts are well illustrated in
copious examples from literature and popular culture, and
Frisch’s fluid, flawless translation makes his text as
captivating as it is enlightening. (Nov.)