Time

Time in the bioenergetic framework is not an abstract measurement but a physical factor with energetic consequences. Its passage and perception are governed by metabolic rate, while aging is time's destructive function, the side of it that appears once cellular energy declines.

Time as a physical entity

Kozyrev's asymmetric time

The Russian astronomer Nikolai Kozyrev rejected the assumption that time is merely a statistical abstraction laid on top of physical events. In his doctoral dissertation (c. 1950) he argued that time is physically real and asymmetric, and that its passage introduces energy into a system rather than just measuring entropy:

What if we assume that the universe is not just running down, that it wasn't created at one moment like someone winding up a clock only to run down? What if we assume that time physically is a real, asymmetric factor in all systems?

— Ray Peat

Kozyrev predicted that planetary bodies emit heat in proportion to their mass rather than their distance from the sun, and that this causal transmission of time's asymmetry would diminish only with the first power of distance, unaffected by ordinary shielding. Satellite measurements since have found anomalous internal heat from Jupiter and other outer planets consistent with the prediction. He also measured what he called time production and absorption directly: dissipating processes, ones giving off heat, "produce time," while processes dropping in temperature "absorb time."

The neutrino sea

Horace C. Dudley proposed that time operates through a "neutrino sea" that associates with matter in proportion to its mass, so that nuclear energy release is the interaction of neutrinos with matter passing through time rather than a simple conversion of mass to energy. Dudley argued that the crystalline structure of matter governs how neutrinos resonate with it, producing a "space-filling resonance" that could account for otherwise unpredicted nuclear reactions; the physicist Anderson observed exactly this kind of non-random nuclear decay in a monolayer of carbon isotopes on aluminum foil, matching what Dudley had predicted from the orderly arrangement of the matter involved.

Time and consciousness

The metabolic basis of temporal experience

The experience of time is not fixed. It varies with metabolic state: higher metabolic rates give a richer, more expanded sense of time, while low-energy states collapse awareness into a narrow present.

The experience of time governs the way we behave, and our metabolism governs the way we experience time.

— Ray Peat

This same metabolic dependence runs through the enriched-environment research described at Creativity: rats raised in a stimulating, playground-like environment develop bigger, more capable brains than caged, understimulated rats, the physical basis for a richer as opposed to a narrower experience of time.

Peat set this metabolic view against Claude Shannon's 1948 information theory, which described consciousness as built from digital, all-or-none signals, a model in which time has only abstract significance, since a signal is either present or it isn't. Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, published the same year, took the opposite view: natural control systems work through continuous interaction with a noisy, changing environment, and understanding is a continuous analog of reality rather than a string of discrete symbols. The Russian physiologist P.K. Anokhin independently reached a similar conclusion, pointing to nerve physiology that the telegraphic, all-or-none model of the nervous system could not account for. Peat sided with Wiener and Anokhin: if consciousness is built from a flowing metabolism rather than digital signals, then temporal experience is inseparable from physiological state.

Time-spanning and insight

Consciousness requires time to complexify and to produce insight. Insightful perception depends on directly perceiving patterns that extend through time, and that growth function of time is opposed by a second, degenerative one:

Time is needed for consciousness to complexify, to have insights. But eventually, this growth function of time is directly subverted by another function of time, which insulates, lowers energy, shortens the time span of perception, and causes tissue degeneration.

— Ray Peat

Progesterone and temporal projection

Progesterone, as a central neurosteroid, is part of the metabolism that shapes consciousness as it projects itself forward into time. Consistent with this, progesterone facilitates exploratory, affective, and social behavior in normal mice, an effect that disappears in mice lacking the enzyme needed to convert progesterone into its active neurosteroid metabolites.

Aging as time's destructive function

Electric charge gradients

Harold Burr and, later, Robert Becker found that organ development is governed by an electric charge gradient in the organism, a gradient that declines with age:

Individual cells drift toward the inefficient oxygen-wasting mode of metabolism with increasing age. Tissue electrical resistance increases with age. Accumulation of material between cells and disorganization of cell water probably contribute to the poor conductivity.

— Ray Peat

The high concentration of free electrons at high elevations may increase lifespan by helping maintain the high-efficiency cell structure associated with youth. Vitamin C, as a source of high-energy electrons, supports normal fetal development even when respiration is blocked by drugs.

Carrel, Selye, and environmental renewal

Alexis Carrel kept a fragment of chicken heart tissue dividing for decades past the chicken's normal lifespan, a demonstration still cited by eyewitnesses ("a little piece of chicken heart foolishly throbbing after all occasion for throbs had long ceased"). Carrel's tissue-culture work led him to conclude that changes in the surrounding fluid, not a fixed cellular clock, were the major factor in aging. Hans Selye ran the complementary experiment: he implanted a glass tube under a rat's skin, where an isolated filament of tissue grew cut off from normal circulation. Left alone, that tissue aged rapidly; drained of its accumulated fluid at regular intervals, it stayed young for the rat's entire lifespan.

Carrel connected the same principle to blood serum itself. Lecomte du Noüy had worked out equations for the body's regenerative activity at different ages, finding that a 21-year-old heals about twice as fast as a 40-year-old, and Carrel tied that decline to measurable changes in the blood:

The proteins of blood serum become more abundant and their characters are modified. It is chiefly the fats which give to serum the property of acting upon certain cell types and of diminishing the rapidity of their multiplication. These fats increase in quantity and change in nature during life.

— Alexis Carrel, quoted by Ray Peat

Young versus old blood

Blood serum from young animals supports better cell growth in vitro than serum from older individuals, in two specific ways:

1. The albumin in old blood is in a more oxidized state.
2. Red blood cells in older individuals are paradoxically younger, since they are more fragile and replaced sooner.

A gerontologist rejuvenated an old dog by removing its blood, discarding the serum, and replacing the cells in saline solution; the dog regained all normal functions. More recently, simply diluting old blood plasma, while holding albumin constant, was shown to reproduce the anti-aging effects of parabiosis (surgically joining old and young animals' circulatory systems), evidence that accumulated factors in old blood, not the absence of "youth factors," drive aging's effects.

The rate of living theory (debunked)

A persistent myth holds that a higher metabolic rate shortens lifespan, like a candle that burns brighter but shorter. This "rate of living" theory dominated early 20th-century gerontology and shaped caloric-restriction research. Within a given species, though, the opposite is true:

A study of 18 strains of mice found a clear association between a higher metabolic rate and greater longevity.

— Ray Peat

Birds bear this out across species too: despite a body temperature of 104°F against a mammal's 98°F, and a faster metabolism, birds generally outlive mammals of similar size, a medium parrot lives about 70 years against roughly 2 for a similarly sized rat, and passerine birds burn about four times more total energy per gram of tissue over a lifespan than mammals do. The "rate of living" confusion comes from comparing different-sized animals across species, elephants against mice, rather than metabolic variation within one species. Children, whose metabolic rates run at least 50% higher than adults', show the same pattern in their superior resilience, learning ability, and recovery from injury.

Learned helplessness, methylation, and the imprinting of time

Learned helplessness is what happens when an organism's model of time collapses: an animal that cannot escape a threat, even briefly, stops trying to escape the next time it is threatened, at any point afterward. Martin Seligman popularized the concept in 1967 from exactly this kind of experiment, the same year the CIA officially phased out its MKULTRA program. The overlap wasn't just chronological: Seligman's lectures have been attended by psychologists working at Guantanamo Bay, and he later received a Pentagon grant of $31 million to train soldiers against learned helplessness under the label "comprehensive soldier fitness."

At the cellular level, this same collapse of the future is epigenetic. Excess methylation shuts down the genes responsible for renewal, and the process accelerates with aging:

Too much methylation turns off the genes of renewal. There are lots of products pushing the idea that we need more methylation. One of the main methyl donors is methionine... if you deprive animals of a major part of their normal methionine, they live 30 or 40 percent longer.

— Ray Peat

Learned helplessness and aging are the same process seen at two scales: both are the progressive silencing of an organism's developmental future, one hormonally and one at the level of gene expression.

See also

• Aging
• Learned helplessness
• Creativity
• Progesterone
• Henri Bergson
• Consciousness
• Metabolic rate
• Enriched environment