Between Fast and Slow Time: Approaching the Mechanisms of the Mind through Bergson

2026/10/31

Even in the "now" of you reading this text, multiple times are flowing. There is the infinitesimal time of your eyes following the characters, the few seconds it takes to grasp the meaning of a sentence, the dozen or so years you have spent acquiring language, and the tens of thousands of years over which humanity has developed language. Time is usually thought of as flowing like a single line from the past to the future, with us existing at a point on it called "now." However, the "now" that is actually lived has a thickness where multiple times of different speeds overlap. I focus on this overlapping (multi-time scales) to study the relationship between time and the mind.

The starting point is the French philosopher Henri Bergson. His arguments regarding lived time (duration), as distinct from clock time, have often been interpreted as a matter of subjective experience. However, reading his works reveals a much bolder vision. Red light vibrates approximately 400 trillion times per second. There is an overwhelming history there that would take over 25,000 years to count one by one at the smallest interval the consciousness can distinguish. When we see red in a single glance, these vast vibrations are condensed into a single color. Perhaps the mind is not some mysterious thing outside of nature, but an aspect of nature born from the gap between fast and slow time.

1859, the year Bergson was born, was also the year Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was published. The late 19th century was a dawn period when Biology, psychology, and sociology began to take shape as academic disciplines, all of which were searching for something that Physics could not fully capture. At that time, fundamental questions about memory and the mind were being explored through rich dialogues with various adjacent fields. In this era of low barriers, Bergson also forged his own philosophy while engaging successively with psychology, aphasia research, evolutionary theory, and sociology. Reconnecting these links that were visible before the fields became fully divided, together with cognitive science, artificial intelligence, Biology, and Physics—that is the "Extended Bergsonism" we are advancing.