The Psychology of Connecting to Deep Time
The resting heart rate for the average adult is somewhere between 60 and 100 beats per minute.
But imagine your heart beats once every few centuries. Your life stretches over millions of years. At this tempo, everything familiar to human experience moves far too quickly to register. A person is born, lives, and dies in what feels to you like a fraction of a second. Entire civilizations rise and crumble between your breaths. But you can see things no human ever could. Mountains rise and fall like ocean waves. Continents drift across the Earth's surface like clouds. The constellations of the Milky Way rearrange themselves into new shapes across the sky. Species materialize, flourish, and vanish, and the grand story of natural selection plays out right before your eyes.
This is the Millennium Man, a thought experiment devised in the 1860s by the scientist Karl Ernst von Baer. Von Baer, a polymath who studied Arctic permafrost and later became known as the father of embryology, posed a deceptively simple question in a lecture titled Which Conception of Living Nature is the Right One?: What if humans perceived time running at a radically different rate?
He imagined two hypothetical people. The first, the Minute Man, experiences everything at a vastly accelerated pace, his entire lifetime compressed into about forty minutes of our time. To him, our world would appear nearly frozen. A bullet would hang near-stationary in the air, hovering alongside glistening raindrops.
The second, the Millennium Man, lives at the opposite extreme. Geological time. Planetary time. Time is so slow that a human life, from the perspective of a mountain, is something like a flash of sunlight on a pond. Gone before you'd notice it was there.
What it means to take The Long View
In discussing this thought experiment in his book The Long View, science journalist Richard Fisher observes that we've gotten remarkably good at one of these perspectives. We've mastered the Minute Man's view through camera technology. You can do it with your smartphone. Slow motion, high-speed capture, frame-by-frame replay of a hummingbird's wings.
The Millennium Man's perspective, however, remains almost entirely out of reach. We can simulate the movement of tectonic plates through theoretical models, but actually experiencing what it would feel like to inhabit that timescale, to watch the Andes rise and erode like sand dunes, is beyond our sensory capabilities. This is the perspective of deep time.
In a recent conversation, Fisher extended the thought experiment further. "If you were to step into the shoes of different objects within nature that have different time frames," he said, "a fly is living faster than you in some respects. And then a mountain, from the mountain's perspective, you're just a flash of sunlight on a pond. It has no sense of human life or anything like that. It's just way too short." The mountain can't perceive us for the same reason we can't perceive the mountain's life: the timescales are simply too far apart.
That asymmetry is telling. We've become extraordinarily skilled at manipulating time on human terms. Speeding it up, slowing it down, measuring it, packaging it. But stepping outside human time altogether, inhabiting what nature's own rhythms actually look and feel like, remains profoundly difficult. And as we'll see, it's getting harder, not easier.
The Deep Psychology of Timescapes
As Fisher writes, industrialization didn't merely synchronize people. Instead, it "opened up the possibility that the future itself could be exploited." The digital age has taken this logic and run with it, to the point where the future has been completely swallowed.
The French historian François Hartog argues that the West has fully abandoned the idea of future-oriented modernity. We've entered, in his phrase, un présent monstre: a monstrous present. "The future is not a radiant horizon guiding our advancing steps," he writes, "but rather a line of shadow drawing closer." Other scholars have converged on similar conclusions, describing the present as "tyrannous," "ever-broadening," "omnipresent," and "all-pervasive."
You can feel this in the most mundane corners of daily life. Social media is perhaps its most visceral expression. As Fisher observed, “if you're scrolling through reel after reel, your sense of time goes out the window. You can lose half an hour, an hour, just moving through short clips, each one dissolving into the next”.
As we’ve seen, research in neuroscience reveals why this matters at the level of the brain. Our neural architecture processes experience across different temporal response windows: quick-fire sensory experiences, on the order of seconds, are constrained to primary sensory regions, while slower, more drawn-out experiences, unfolding over minutes or hours, engage higher-order regions involved in integration and meaning-making.
Fast media like TikTok, where the average video lasts forty to fifty seconds, never activates these longer windows. Each clip is self-contained, leaving no trace in working memory, no accumulation of relevant detail over time. No matter how long you watch, nothing builds. The philosopher Hartmut Rosa described this as a "frenetic standstill": an endless present which is superficially novel but ultimately static.
How we experience time is how we experience everything.
The Crucial Role of Mental Time Travel
Here's why this matters more than it might seem.
In his book, Fisher references the psychologist Thomas Suddendorf’s ideas about "mental time travel": the ability to recall past episodes and construct future events, playing and replaying memories in the theatre of the mind, and projecting ourselves and others into possible futures. This capacity, Suddendorf argued, made us who we are, and was a vital skill underpinning our evolutionary success.
Think about what this meant on the savanna. Two early hominids approach a bear's cave. One walks in blind. The other hesitates, having imagined, in a quick flash of mental simulation, what it would be like to be eaten. The one who hesitated survived. After communication became possible, these early humans could share memories of food sources, pass on warnings of predators, flag dangerous locations to be avoided. Natural selection did the rest. Mental time travel was the advantage that made everything else possible.
This capacity is foundational. And the concern, ultimately, is this: if our temporal range is being systematically compressed by the technologies we've built, by the incentive structures we live within, by the sheer velocity of modern life, we're losing access to something fundamental about what it means to be human. Fisher worries about this openly, particularly in regard to AI and the general acceleration of culture. As he put it, the speeding up of things risks a gradual loss of our ability to think deeply, like a muscle that atrophies from disuse. The friction of slow thought, the experience of sitting with difficulty, of inhabiting time rather than racing through it, is precisely what our technologies are engineered to eliminate.
We've inherited a world that has progressively stripped away our connection to deeper temporal horizons. And in turn, we’re losing our ability to enjoy a richer, more capacious experience of time. The timescapes that once connected us to natural rhythms, to geological patience, to the long continuity of generations, have been overwritten by industrial and now algorithmic time. Von Baer's Millennium Man, who could watch mountains rise and species unfold, feels more foreign to us than ever. We are firmly, perhaps irrevocably, Minute People, adherents of the tempo of the scroll, the quarterly report, the next notification.
At the same time, however, there may be a way to stretch the walls.
In Part 2, we'll explore how encounters with what philosophers have long called the sublime, especially encounters with deep time, may be one of the few remaining forces capable of cracking open our temporal horizons. The Millennium Man's perspective may be beyond our direct experience. But as we'll see, it's not beyond our broad perspective of the world; our experience of deep time.
And accessing it may be more important now than ever.
Photo by Alexey Demidov via UnSplash
This is the first in a two-part series on the psychology of deep time. You can find the next piece here, on how it connects to the psychology of the sublime.
References for The Psychology of Deep Time
Burke, E. (2009). A philosophical enquiry into the sublime and beautiful. Routledge.
Fisher, R. (2023) The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time, Wildfire Press
Fisher, R. (April, 2026) Personal Interview via Zoom
