Editorial-Time

Editorial



















Time








Gerry Leisman
Editor-in-Chief FNRE
Scientific Director
F. R. Carrick Institute for Clinical Ergonomics,
Rehabilitation, and Applied Neuroscience-US
The National Institute for Brain and Rehabilitation Sciences
Nazareth Academic Institute, Nazareth, Israel
University of the Medical Sciences, Havana, Cuba



"Do you have the time?" "Not this time." "How many times do I have to tell
you?" "Time and again." "The results are quite different than those
obtained the last time that you were in the office." "Your child is not
progressing at the rate that would expect from our developmental charts."
(Rate is a temporal concept.) "Should I have this surgery? I am 87 years
old." Circadian, ultradian, diurnal rhythms, frequency, pitch, hue,
menopause, menses, lunacy, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity (overactive in
units of time), shift work, cycles of life, "Are you regular?" All of the
aforementioned are set within the context of time.
Why do we wear watches? Is it to remind us of meetings? I should not
think so. If we were to be locked up in a cave for six months, we would
have a relatively accurate estimation of the amount of elapsed time over a
24 hour cycle over the six months [1]. So why the watch? Do we need to know
what time to have dinner? I would have thought that hunger based on
hypothalamic activation would have determined that. [2]
Time is a dimension along which events are ordered from the past through
the present into the future, and the measure of durations of events and the
intervals between them [3-5]. Religion, philosophy and science have all
been concerned with time. Medicine of course is concerned with regularity,
employers with shift work, restaurateurs with seating times, mental health
workers with, "The session is over." The definition of "time" for all
applications without circularity has consistently eluded scholars [6,7].
Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers.
One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the
universe—a dimension of independent of events, in which events occur
sequentially [8]. The opposing view of whom Leibniz [9] and Kant [10] were
its main proponents is that time does not refer to any kind of "container"
that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but
that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together
with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events.
This second view, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus
is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled.
Time is evidently measurable and even if time itself was not, what
happens within its units are critical and vital to measuring the attributes
of life itself. If a clinician is charging for his or her time, and we are
concerned about regularities, and the time we have on the planet is "so
short," then why on earth do we waste so much of it. There is a proverb
which says that killing time is not a murder; it is a suicide. It means, by
wasting time one is not harming others, one is harming oneself. Ordinary
people merely go on thinking how to spend their time. The wise and talented
make use of it fruitfully.
We celebrate time. We celebrate our birthdays, graduations and life
markers. We are doing precisely that here. We are celebrating within these
pages the successful completion of four issues of volume one and another
four issues of volume two. Two full years of our journal have been
completed. We pulled it off, we patiently got through our teething trouble
and we now have a serious archival source of the literature in Functional
Neurology and Rehabilitation Sciences.
If you are reading this issue, you should be proud that you are
celebrating our journal, our organization, and most importantly your
patience and therefore time.





References



1] Fraise P. Perception and estimation of time. Ann. Rev. Psychol.
1984;35:1-36.
2] Leibowitz SF. Reciprocal hunger-regulating circuits involving alpha
and beta-adrenergic receptors located respectively in the ventromedial
and lateral hypothalamus. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA. 1970;67(2):1063-
1070.
3] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language. Time. New
York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2011.
4] Ivey DG, Hume JNP. Physics. New York, NY: Ronald Press, 1974, p. 65.
5] LePoidevin, R. The experience and perception of time. In: Zalta EN.
The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. 2004.
6] Frank, A. Cosmology and culture at the twilight of the Big Bang, New
York,NY: Free Press, 2011, p. xv.
7] St. Augustine. Confessions. New York, NY: Simon and Brown, 2012.
8] Rynasiewicz R. Newton's views on space, time, and motion. Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford, CA: Stanford Unviersity Press,
2004.
9] Burnham D. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) Metaphysics. Space,
Time, and Indiscernibles. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/leib-met/#H7. Retrieved 2012-08-17.
10] McCormick M. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Metaphysics: Kant's
Transcendental Idealism. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantmeta/#H4. Retrieved 2012-08-17.