Spring is coming so quickly.
Maybe it's not that spring comes so early, but because the ants in Cat Winter really have nothing to do.
According to the theory of the psychological perception of the passage of time proposed by French philosopher Paul Janet in 1897. When a person is constantly stimulated by new things, he will feel that time passes slowly. On the contrary, he will feel that time flows faster.
For example, the proportion of one year in people's memories is different. When you are 1 year old, 1 year is your entire life, and what you accept are basically new things. When you are 50 years old, one year is only 2% of your life, and all the things you encounter in life are commonplace. In this way, the longer your life is, the smaller the proportion of one year will be, and the fewer unknown things you will have no contact with. To put it into perspective, a 5-year-old child waiting 24 days for Christmas is equivalent to a 54-year-old person waiting for 1 year.
It seems that this psychological theory is also valid for the ants, at least for the protagonist.
The protagonist now sleeps in the nest every day, wakes up, eats, and sleeps after eating. All work has basically stopped, because apart from what he can do and has already done, the protagonist can't find any new work.
When the weather is nice, the protagonist will go out for a walk, but many times it is either wind or snow, or even the wind stirs up the snow, so the protagonist can only squat back in the lair.
This feeling of having nothing to do is very bad. The fluorescent bacteria all died in winter, and the dark nest only has a light source near the combustion chamber. Every day, the protagonist can only get up in the dark, eat in the dark, and stay in a daze in the dark.
Maybe other ants came here like this. Originally, there was no fire in the secondary nest, so they spent the winter in the dark nest year after year.
After all, the protagonist is a time traveler, and he has the human desire for light in his bones, so he will go outside as long as the weather permits. Even if you are shivering in the cold wind, it is better than being tortured to the point of madness by loneliness in a warm and invisible nest.
Loneliness, the demon that has been haunting the protagonist since time travel, is extremely powerful in this winter.
Lonely, because the protagonist is a time traveler.
He comes from another world with very little overlap in experience with this world. Even though the vegetation and insects in the two worlds are almost the same, observing everything from a human perspective and living in the microscopic world of ants are completely different experiences, and it is not much different from coming to a different world.
Lonely, because of the body of the protagonist.
Human beings have facial features, limbs, smooth and hairless skin, and developed vision. Ants, on the other hand, have compound eyes, large jaws, six limbs, and a hard outer carapace with bristles. The forms of the two are completely different, and their lifestyles are therefore very different.
The protagonist must struggle to survive in this completely different world using a body he has never used before. At first, he had to adapt to eating, sleeping and going to the toilet. No other ant can help him, he has to rely on himself.
Loneliness also comes from the desire to communicate.
Humans are group creatures that need to communicate. The main way of communication is through the vocal organs to produce complex and combined tones, that is, language.
Language is one of human talents. This talent is acquired innately by humans through biological evolution and genetics. It includes the rational ability and principles for language formation and is easily awakened by the external learning environment. Therefore, although humans have the talent to learn languages, they are not born with language skills. They also need to develop, learn, understand, and use acquired language mechanisms to form them.
But what would happen if a person who already has mature language habits is suddenly blocked from all channels of language communication?
There are two examples in linguistics:
A person committed a serious crime and fled. He was afraid that the matter would be exposed and he would be caught. From then on, he kept silent and pretended to be mute. He was caught and brought to justice after more than ten years on the run. During the interrogation, the police found that he had not spoken for more than ten years while pretending to be mute. Having become a true mute, not only is it difficult for him to speak, he also has a huge personality flaw, and he can only communicate with people by pen and paper.
With the popularity of smart phones, there are more and more people who have their heads down. A 17-year-old high school student is addicted to mobile phones all day long, which has led to language degradation. When facing classmates and teachers, he only communicates with words such as yes or no.
Language skills will deteriorate. Anthropologists believe that language is an instinct and a manifestation of thinking, and it will react on thinking. As a communication function, language has achieved mature functional development and ability development in childhood, but language ability will degenerate. In addition to the degeneration caused by damage to the brain or other functional organs, too low function Frequency of organ use and too low stimulation of language and thinking in the brain will cause the overall language ability to decline. Although the mode and degree of decline are different, they will all cause obstacles to communication.
Not speaking for a long time may cause the brain's language organization ability to decline, resulting in lack of language, grammatical errors, etc., and even aphasia during communication.
The protagonist is in such a state now.
Although the ants are originally unable to pronounce words, whether the protagonist was thinking in his mind or communicating with the ants' tentacles, they were all in the form of human language.
For example, when communicating with the tentacles of other ants, the messages sent by other ants are directly expressed in the consciousness. For example, the "tree" they say is the specific meaning and image of a "tree", not "bookstore-tree" This represents the Chinese pronunciation of "tree" or other language pronunciation.
When the protagonist receives the message from another ant called "Tree", he will first translate it into his own language in his mind. And before he sends the message to other ants, he also needs to convert the Chinese into the most basic consciousness. In other words, compared to other ants, the protagonist's brain is constantly translating two different languages or thoughts.
But now, because there is no one with whom he can communicate in Chinese for a long time, the protagonist has become more and more accustomed to communicating directly with other ants through consciousness. This caused him to use Chinese less and less frequently. Even when he was meditating, his brain was running at high speed and he no longer relied on Chinese as a tool, but instead used his instinctive consciousness. I don't know if this is luck or misfortune.
It is also for this reason that in this article that readers have seen, which records the most bizarre time traveler in history, dialogue appears in the first dozens of chapters (translated in the protagonist's mind), but rarely appears again in the later chapters, because The protagonist can already understand and respond without translation.
