Dogs live totally in the moment. They don't dwell on the past and they don't worry about the future. This may be one of the most charming and delightful things about them. But while dogs have no sense of linear time, they do have a very exact sense of cyclical time (probably related to circadian rhythms1), and it's pretty amazing.
Pavlov once did an experiment where he sprayed meat powder into the mouths of a dozen or so dogs at noon every day for 2 weeks in a row. Then on the 15th day, he didn't spray the powder yet they all still salivated exactly at noon. How does that happen?
One Friday afternoon, two weeks ago, a dog I know twisted his leg pretty badly and immediately began to walk with a limp. The vet found no permanent damage and said he would be fine in a few days. And he was. But a week later he began limping again, but only on Friday. By Saturday he was back to normal. (This is not uncommon in dogs.)
There was a time when, as soon as Final Jeopardy was over, I'd get up, put on my shoes, wake my Dalmatian Freddie, and take him out for our evening walk. Then after about 9 months, my schedule changed so I stopped waking Freddie at that time. And yet, like clockwork, he woke up on his own at exactly 7:25 each day, and continued doing so for several months until he finally got used to our new schedule.
Dogs have a very strong sense of cyclical time, which makes sense because it would be advantageous for predators to have this ability. However, it's equally clear that dogs don't have a sense of linear time. That seems to be a construct of more developed type of brain. In fact, I think the ability to use reason -- to see cause and effect, to put two-and-two together, etc. -- is dependent on 3 cognitive abilities: 1) the use of language, 2) a sense of oneself as being separate from one's environment, and 3) a clear sense of linear time. When studied in their natural state, dogs show no signs of possessing any of these abilities, so they can't have "reasons" for their behaviors, which means we have to examine their unique form of consciousness (or dognition, if you will) in terms of emotion not reason, and desire not intent.
Even for human beings, time is not an absolute; it's entirely subjective depending on our moods. "Are we there yet?" the kids will ask from the back seat. "Wow, the time just flew by!" we'll say at the end of a wonderful evening. And during moments of extreme trauma, "Everything just seemed to go into slow motion."
Einstein proved that time is not only subjective, it's relative to how fast you're traveling. He also said that the past and the future are illusions. In fact some scientists say that linear time may be nothing more than an artifact of a quantum wave collapse.
Physicist Nick Herbert says, "The present doesn't have any special status in physics. So, the fact that time seems to flow is a kind of illusion that our kind of existence gives rise to. ... If we just took the equations of physics as truth ... the universe would seem to be a kind of eternal, ever-present process."
That sounds exactly how dogs experience life: an ever present process with certain crests and valleys that cycle in a continuous circadian rhythm. If so then linear time would be like a series of particle-like moments, set in chronlogical order, cyclical time would be like a wave, and we're seemingly back in the realm of quantum physics. (New research suggests that quantum physics may explain the mysteries of the sense of smell, the process of photosynthesis, and other biological functions.)
In 1919, in Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist John B. Watson wrote, "The key which will unlock the door of any other scientific structure will unlock the door of psychology." In 1952, quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli2 was more specific: "It would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality." In fact Pauli spent a great deal of time trying to find the laws that would connect mind (energy) and matter.
One of the most fascinating things about Pauli's life is what's called the "Pauli effect," the supposed tendency for equipment to malfunction whenever he was in the lab. There was even one such mishap in Gottenheim, Germany, where Pauli had worked several years earlier. Pauli was living near Zurich at the time, though, which caused the scientists to joke that the malfunction couldn't have been caused by the Pauli effect. Yet they found out later that Pauli had been passing through Gottenheim on his way to Zurich, and was sitting in a railway car at the train station at the exact moment of the incident!
Despite his affection for and belief in the somewhat unscientific nature of the principle named after him, Pauli was also a perfectionist when it came to hard science. He was especially sensitive to confirmation bias, both in his work and the works of his fellow physicists. He's said to have been so infuriated by one badly-conceived paper that he coined the phrase "Not only is it not right, it's not even wrong."
Psychologist Carl Jung worked with Pauli on several attempts to formulate a workable theory connecting mind and matter. Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe what he called the "acausal connecting principle" that links mind and matter without any reference points in space or time. (There's that old bugaboo, Time, once again.)
In many ways time has always been a mystery. St. Augustine wrote, "What is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it, I know not." Certain drugs like LSD, peyote, etc., drastically change a person's perceptions about the passage of time, indicating that linear time really is a mental construct, not a fixed fact of nature. It has also been documented that some autistic persons have either no sense of linear time or a very different sense of it than the rest of us.
In Beyond the Silence: My Life, the World and Autism, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay wrote the following bit of poetry...
"Every move that I make shows how trapped I feel
Under the continuous flow of happenings
The effect of a cause becomes the cause of another effect...
But it is a world full of improbabilities
Racing toward uncertainty."
This brings us back to quantum physics, which describes a world full of vibrating probabilities. And it's only when we observe a phenomena that those probabilities "settle down" and become real.
"The door through which this happens," says Nick Herbert, "is measurement. ... but quantum physics doesn't tell us what a measurement is. Some extreme guesses are that consciousness has to be involved -- only when some entity becomes aware, do the vibratory possibilities change into actualities."
