ABSTRACT
Reading—as any reader generous enough to have finished this book may be painfully aware—is a temporally extended process, but, as Jorge Luis Borges points out, the felt length of this extension is highly variable. ‘Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in [dollars], because all [dollars] are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.’ 1 The flow of time depends, crucially, on interactions with the environment—with your friends, your devices, or your reading material. This is no small quirk of cognition: humans have evolved to experience time variably, and in coordination with their surroundings, to best adapt to their ecological niche. The experience of time shapes, and is shaped by, our every interaction with the world.
