TIME | 1. DAYTIME
Monday 30 July 2007 11pm-midnight
We humans seem to run to the beat of time, often without being aware of how this is the case or how our perception of it may differ from another person's, from nature's rhythms or from our own internal clock. In the first episode of the series, string theory pioneer Michio Kaku witnesses one of the most extraordinary feats of timing in nature on a remote Californian beach.
We also meet a French caver who spent months in complete isolation to see what would happen to his sense of time - and discovered that we have an internal clock that drives our days. Michio self-experiments by being monitored over 24 hours to see how this clock shapes his whole body chemistry. And we test a family with a rare disease to uncover the very roots of the body clock itself.
Where does our sense of time passing come from? We all know it's critical - as comedians demonstrate at a Soho comedy club. Michio discovers this critical timer (the stopwatch) in a brain-scan experiment at Duke University. It seems that this 'sense' of time is plastic: crash victims report that time seems to slow under extreme stress. We conduct a unique experiment to test this - by dropping someone 150 feet. Meanwhile, back at Duke an experiment with cocaine and marijuana on rats reveals the chemical process by which our sense of time is altered.
Clay and Bethany McQuerry suffer from ASPS (Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome), a rare genetic disorder that makes their body clocks run fast
But time for us is even more than this. We have a unique knowledge of time. We 'know' past and future. It's an ability shared by no other animals... apart from a special few. King the Gorilla demonstrates his awareness of time to researchers in Miami. We meet a man with no memory and reveal how much we depend on being able to place ourselves in time. This special awareness of time raises some of the most important questions about time itself: Why does it only flow in one direction? Why can't we stop it, see it or hold it? And if it so elusive, then is it real or just a figment of our minds?
