According to fundamental laws of physics, time is just another coordinate – hash marks along a line with scarcely a preferred direction or flow.

Yet the mind perceives time as an irreversible stream, moving from past to future, experienced in the present. Manipulating time may make for good science fiction, but it's hardly conceivable to those unfortunates who don't have a Tardis or H.G. Wells' secret recipe.

How can science bridge the gaping gulf between these two versions of time?

This week, about 50 scientists gather in the Slovakian town of Tatranska Lomnica for a four-day workshop to explore this issue. Addressing psychological, mathematical, physical and "borderline" research, the event is a crossroads of disciplines and paradigms.

For instance, Metod Saniga of the Slovak Academy of Sciences combines mathematical models and pathology reports of schizophrenic, drug-induced and other abnormal perceptions of time.

Studying patients with a disjointed sense of time, akin to the protagonist in the movie Memento, may seem an odd way to unveil the nature of space-time. But to Saniga, co-director of the conference with Rosolino Buccheri of the Instituto di Astrofisica in Palermo, Italy, this is one of the most promising roads forward.

Saniga discovered the brain is hard-wired to perceive space and time as interconnected. "Pathology in time is always accompanied with a pathology of space, in a sense that space either loses dimensions or acquires other dimensions," he said.

"When time seems to stop, people often feel as if space becomes two-dimensional. On the other hand, when the subject feels they perceive the past, present and future (all at once), they simultaneously have the impression that space has infinite dimensions."

In his 1999 presentation (appendix here) at the first Nature of Time workshop, Saniga described these states as two forms of what he calls a "pure present" experience. In one case the present is indefinitely frozen, while in the other the present seems to encompass both past and future events as well.

He illustrates both pathologies with case studies published in Italian, German and English psychological journals.

His current work also encompasses studies of near-death experiences. He found that most of those who've crossed over to the other side and back tell similar tales. For that brief moment of near-death, time loses its meaning.

"A great fraction describes their feelings as beyond any concept of time and space," he said.

Perhaps similar to the pure awareness that some experienced meditators report, this brief atemporal moment often drastically changes the life of the person who experiences it.

"What is shocking for them is what they believed before to be absolute – three-dimensional space and time flowing at a constant rate – all of a sudden, this belief is shaken," Saniga said.

Yet incorporating these varied experiences into a larger model is another matter entirely. Mathematics professor Jonathan D.H. Smith of Iowa State University said he hasn't seen a satisfactory mathematical framework so far.

Neither Saniga's analysis nor conventional models of the mind nor even the quantum consciousness approach of workshop participant Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona quite fits.

"I'm skeptical at the moment – but I'm willing to be convinced," Smith said.

On Tuesday, Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam presented a report that shook a few foundations.

He repeated and amplified earlier work that studies emotional responses to shocking or erotic imagery, seconds before the subject sees the randomly timed stimulus.

Bierman's first study, published in 2000 in the book Toward A Science of Consciousness III, found his subjects' skin conductance change one or more seconds before the disturbing or sexually explicit images appeared. Yet when mundane images randomly mixed in with the shocking ones were shown, subjects' skin "presponded" differently.

Bierman's work may have revealed a crude ability to sense the future, much like the "precogs" in the forthcoming Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, even if this skill only spans a few heartbeats.

On Tuesday he presented new magnetic resonance imagery from a similar experiment that confirms this result. More strikingly, he also found the same "pre-sentiment" effect when he re-examined two related studies performed by other independent research teams.

Although neither team set out to study this temporal anomaly, Bierman discovered that an anomaly was indeed there.

Presenting these studies last month at a conference on consciousness in Tucson, Arizona, Bierman said scientists cannot ignore such results, simply because they run afoul of current models of the mind.

"I'm willing to explore any theoretical framework," he said. "I'm completely driven by the data."

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