What will our sense of time and space be like in 30 years?

Throughout history, humans have excelled at one skill above all others: our ability to adapt to whatever our environment presents us with. And often those adaptations have involved inventing technologies that have allowed us to survive — and even thrive — in environments that might have killed our ancestors.

To cope with changeable weather, we invented clothing, constructed homes and central heating. Agriculture allowed us to stay in one place. Radios and televisions allowed us to communicate important messages to vast numbers of people. And so on.

Yet, for all our evolution, we haven't been able to escape several hard-wired concepts that still govern much of how we live.

One of those is time. Another is space. But how we relate to time and space is being challenged now. Technologies like virtual reality and new modes of communication are rewriting our notions of personal space, and how our bodies manage the passing of time.

So, what happens when our technology advances to such a point where we are forced to adapt to it, and not the other way around?

That, arguably, is what is happening to our personal senses of time and space.

"Human perception of time is based on human metabolic processes, and technology makes us speed up artificially," Anastasia Dedyukhina said. She's an expert on digital distractions and the founder of a company called Consciously Digital, based in London, England.

"One of the most obvious examples is if you work in the way when you're switching between tasks, or when you're constantly reading the news, and then you're checking emails, and then you're doing something else — at some point you may feel a bit of anxiety. You may feel that you're short of breath. It's cortisol, the stress hormone, and its level is going up."

And although technologies, like smartphones, are intended to allow us to complete tasks quicker, which in theory should give us more downtime, instead, most of us jam more work into that time the smartphone has saved. "So it's not that we spend this time contemplating or taking care of ourselves," she added.

And looming on the virtual horizon sits the metaverse, the all-encompassing virtual space moguls like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg have promised.

Borrowing from the Canadian science-fiction author William Gibson, David Morris describes the metaverse as a sort of "consensual hallucination," where the realities of physical time and space could become irrelevant.

"I hope they've asked the question, 'what time zone is the metaverse going to be in?'," Morris, a philosophy professor at Concordia University and the author of The Sense of Space, told Spark host Nora Young.

"In the metaverse, we're going to be in one world where we're no longer going to be absorbed in the daylight of where we are, but in some other time of this place that's nowhere."

The metaverse and other incoming technologies also force us to reckon with our own senses of personal space, said Harvard psychiatrist and neuroscientist Daphne Holt.

All animals have a sense of personal space, she pointed out, and that also seems to extend into virtual reality.

Holt recently did a study during the pandemic about whether people's personal space, which had expanded in the real world thanks to social distancing, had also expanded in the virtual world. Surprisingly, it did. "So people need more space now than they did before the pandemic, when they're encountering an avatar in virtual reality," she said.

Dedyukhina said she expects, within the next several decades, that beyond the metaverse, we may even have control over releasing our own hormones via implants and nanobots. The bigger issue, she added, will be a further stratification of society into those who are willing to experience this, and those — likely a minority — who don't want any part of it.

"I think we will be relying more and more on technology to regulate our own internal rhythms, which, for me, is not something that I would like to see, but I definitely see that this will be sold to people."

Written and produced by Adam Killick.