Title — The Observer Spiral: A hypothesis about the shape of lived time, offered for criticism
Corey Ferreira
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) November 10, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.24123139 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Proposes that subjective time is well described by an Archimedean spiral centered on the experiencing subject, with angular position corresponding to the phase of a circadian attention cycle and radial position to the cost of "rendering" experience. The authors argue that this model yields, without further assumptions, phenomena such as time dilation in novel settings, contraction in routine, proportional shortening of subjective years with age, time-of-day memory cueing, déjà vu as angular recurrence, and the efficacy of fixed-hour ritual. |
Abstract
We propose that the subjective structure of time is well described by an Archimedean spiral centered on the experiencing subject. Angular position corresponds to the phase of a periodic attention cycle, which at the human scale is the circadian day; one full turn is one day. Radial position corresponds to the cost of constructing ("rendering") the current experience, which is near zero for familiar, predicted situations and grows with novelty and distance from the subject's cached environment. Because the arc length of one turn grows linearly with radius, the model yields without further assumption: the apparent dilation of time in novel settings, its contraction in routine, the proportional shortening of subjective years with age, time-of-day cueing of memory, the phenomenology of déjà vu as angular rather than positional recurrence, and the efficacy of fixed-hour ritual. Memory and anticipation are modeled as rotation within the center (facing a direction and reading its radial history) rather than as travel. The model is phenomenological and makes no claim about physical time. Five experiments are proposed that would falsify it. An appendix generalizes the model to nested periodic observers and adds three further predictions.