Many famous artists and sports figures are known to perform only when in a state of flow. Historical sources suggest that Michelangelo may have painted the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel in this kind of mental state. Some say he painted for days at a time and was so absorbed by his work that he lost track of time. He did not even eat or sleep until he passed out. He would then wake up re-energized and start to paint again, in a state of complete absorption. Likewise, the great Formula 1 champion, Ayrton Senna, was also known to experience flow during races. In an excerpt from an interview that he gave during the qualification rounds for the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix, he describes his flow experience:
I was already on pole and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And suddenly I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. 41
But what is it about flow experiences that makes time run so much faster? The common element in all flow experiences is total absorption in an activity, which diverts attention from passing time. The amount of information that can be processed by our brains within a certain time interval is limited by the level of electrical activity and brain processing speed. We are constantly choosing where our attention goes out of the huge variety of possibilities. While in a state of flow, the focus is so intense that discomforts are not felt and negative thoughts do not enter the mind. The brain is too busy focusing to keep track of other things. Nearly all of our brain’s available processing power is devoted to one activity and very little is available to time keeping. As a result, the attention counter gate of our internal clock gets narrow and starts missing the ticks emitted. This causes activity durations to seem shorter and thus time runs faster.
“The common element in all ‘flow’ experiences is total absorption, which diverts attention from the passing time causing it to pass swiftly”
Encouraging “Flow”: Motivation, Goals, and Challenges
An equally significant aspect of flow-inducing activities is the required level of motivation, since this affects the amount of fun generated. Fun comes in two types. There is low-motivation passive fun such as relaxing on a beach or watching a movie. And there is high-motivation active fun that involves elements of desire and excitement that motivate us to act, such as adventure activities, hobbies, social interactions, and sports. Researchers find that time moves much more quickly when fun is of the second type, i.e. highly motivated and goal-oriented fun. They also agree that there is greater satisfaction in high-motivation activities that involve a challenge and reward.
To investigate this, researchers came up with an interesting experiment to understand how the two aspects of fun affect our time experience. At the University of Alabama, psychology students were shown pleasant images that were either low on motivation (like flowers) or high on motivation (like desirable desserts) and they had to determine which images were displayed for the longest time. As expected, students felt that the flower images were displayed for a longer duration than the dessert images. 43 What was even more interesting was that the duration of desirable dessert images was perceived to be shorter in direct relation to the amount of time it had been since the students last ate. Students who were hungry had high motivation for food, and so they judged the dessert images as passing more quickly compared to students who had recently eaten. The greater the desire and motivation, the faster time passed. This confirms that time flies when we are engaged in activities that involve active high-motivation happiness. Just being content or satisfied does not speed up time as much, but being excited and actively pursuing the things you desire does.
Activities involving high-motivation challenge and rewards occur when people are doing their favorite hobbies. However, very rarely do people report flow in passive leisure activities, such as relaxing or watching television. In fact, television distracts the brain without creating the kind of challenge that can lead to flow. According to scientists, due to low-motivation, you would have to watch TV for 15,000 hours to generate 30 minutes of brain activity! Whereas reading for 10 minutes is much more mentally engaging because it fires up the imagination and stimulates the kind of brain activity that promotes flow. So how do we enter the state of flow and speed up time?
People tend to experience flow when there is a set of clear goals with specific rules. Examples of this might be tennis, chess, or poker, because these games have set objectives and rules with intrinsic rewards that put players in a self-contained world. The same happens when someone is playing a musical instrument, performing a religious ritual, or climbing a mountain.
To enter flow, you have to set a goal. Once the goal and challenges are clearly defined, you should work on possessing the skills that perfectly match those challenges. The optimal goal is the one that balances your skills against the challenge and keeps you fully engaged. Let us say that you have always wanted to play the guitar. An early beginner course will be boring if you already know how to play. When the challenge is low, you will be bored, the outcome is relaxed, and time will drag. If you have had a few beginner lessons, this course would be easy. You might not be bored but you would not be stimulated or experience flow. As a complete novice, you would be stretched but would also feel motivated and satisfied. Being constantly stretched is where you want to be. It is what keeps you in a state of flow and speeds up time. The crucial factors in “flow” are total absorption, full engagement of skills, focused attention on achieving the goal, and intrinsic motivation for the reward. With this in mind, almost any activity, no matter how dull, can produce flow. Let us now look at the time spent at work, for instance, and how to induce the kind of flow that makes it time worth spending.
Creating a Sense of “Flow” at Work and at Home
Most people have times in their lives when they see work as dull, stressful, and meaningless. If we had the opportunity, many of us would prefer to work less. But time spent at work does not have to be this way. In fact, research shows that people find more “flow” on the job than in free time. This is to be expected, since work usually has clear objectives and rules of performance, which are lacking in free time. It also has reward in the form of bonuses and satisfaction in the form of achievements.
If you are not happy with the time you spend at work, you need to find ways to create a state of flow in what you do. This involves paying close attention to every detail of your job and asking yourself how it can be done in a faster and more efficient way. You could be a receptionist, a doctor, an accountant, or a construction engineer. Regardless, you need to convert a dull routine job into a meaningful one that fulfills your need for novelty and personal accomplishment. You have to set clear goals and challenges that match your skills. If the challenge is too easy for your skills, you will not find any satisfaction in accomplishing it. If the challenge is too hard, you will have to either learn new skills, get help, or else risk being stressed. Viewing your work as a goal by itself will allow you to enjoy life while being responsible to others in society. Buddhist writings advise us to “act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.” With this in mind, work can be both serious and playful, making it possible to be both responsibly engaged and carefree at the same time.
And what about free time? After a long hard week at work, you finally get to the weekend; how can you find a state of flow in that? When spending time at home, alone or with your family, there is no clear goal or purpose. No skills are involved in enjoying free time, which is why most people find it hard to find flow when they have nothing specific that engages their attention. Free time is sometimes harder to enjoy than work! From an evolutionary perspective, we developed a nervous system that has evolved to expect dangers, obstacles, and challenges and is not used to prolonged periods of free time. We need to learn how to use our free time
to achieve goals that contribute to our life satisfaction, and this means doing the things we enjoy.
As we saw, leisure time can be active (high-motivation), like playing sports, creating art, or engaging in conversation, or it can be passive (low-motivation), like watching TV and movies, listening to music, or lying on the beach. We saw in Chapter 1 how spending our free time on certain activities can be considered a waste if it does not add much to life fulfillment. This is not to say that spending time on passive leisure is a poor use of time. Of course, peaceful relaxation can be exceedingly rewarding, but being immersed in a challenge is more likely to make us happy and will be perceived as time well spent.
Flow-inducing activities also create richer memories or “memory markers” when compared to passive fun activities. You might enjoy watching TV for a couple of hours, but a few days later, when you try to recall that time, there may be no trace of it in your memory. Whereas, a couple of hours spent on a hiking trip could produce many more memories that will last for years in your mind. In a later chapter, we shall explore in more detail how creating memory markers is critical to the way we perceive our time in the past and essential to our overall life satisfaction. Memories enrich our past, causing it to appear longer than it really is. In contrast, passive fun does not create enough memory anchors, making the past appear shorter than it is.
A recent study by Csíkszentmihályi and his team found that when watching TV, American teenagers experience a mental state of flow only 13 percent of the time, but 34 percent of the time when doing their favorite hobbies and 44 percent of the time when they are involved in sports or games. 44 As expected, active leisure has a greater potential to produce states of flow than passive leisure. But what is strange is that those same teenagers prefer to spend more of their free time staring at a screen rather than doing sports or other hobbies! The same results apply to adults. Why is that? Why do we spend more of our free time doing something that has little chance of making us feel good?
The answer is that an activity that produces a state of flow normally requires an initial investment of attention and dedication before it begins to be entertaining. If you play the piano, for instance, you will recall that before you actually started enjoying this flow-inducing activity, you had to endure at least an hour of tedious practice every day. If you are a good tennis player that often gets into the “zone” while playing, you would remember the long hours you had to spend practicing to reach the level you are at. It takes some effort to become a musician, poet, explorer, inventor, scientist, or artist that can spend time in a state of flow. So if you lack the dedication and discipline to surmount the initial hurdle, you will likely settle for something like watching TV, which is less entertaining but more accessible. But remember that every second you spend honing a flow-inducing skill goes a long way into making your free time less boring and more enjoyable. The initial effort might seem too much but it is well worth it. Csíkszentmihályi, author of the book Flow, puts it well when he says: “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. The best moments usually occur when our minds are stretched to their limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” It is the full immersion in flow experiences, rather than passive happiness, which makes for excellence in life.
Recap
Let us sum up what we have covered so far. Time slows down or speeds up in direct proportion to the degree of attention and mental focus that we devote to its passing. When we are aware of the passing of time, the “experienced duration” expands and time slows down, as is evident from activities that involve an element of anticipation or a heightened awareness of time. When our attention is distracted from tracking time, the experienced duration shrinks and time flies. Due to our limited span of attention, the more difficult or complex the thing you are doing, the more distracted you will be from tracking time and the faster it will go by.
To slow down time, be mindful and focus on the present moment. To speed up boring situations, avoid time cues or anything that makes you aware of the passing of time. Focus instead on the activity in hand and time will pass more quickly. Living the perfect moment involves a mental state of total absorption, relaxed focus, and gratification. This is referred to as a state of “flow” and it occurs when we are mindfully immersed in an activity to the extent that we become totally oblivious to the passage of time. It might sound contradictory, but to make the most of your time, lose track of it. Activities that produce flow can occur at work, during leisure time, and in almost any situation that involves clear goals, challenges that match skill level, and an immediate reward. Low-motivation passive activities, like watching TV or relaxing on the beach, are necessary sometimes, but do not produce the same satisfaction as high-motivation active and flow-inducing activities.
It is now time to look at another very important factor that affects our time perception, which, when taken to extremes, can almost freeze time altogether!
Chapter 6
Time in Slow Motion
The Effect of Alertness
As an object hurtles through space, time is altered relative to its motion and speed
― Albert von St. Gallen Heim
The Timing of Amazing Athletes
Few baseball players in the history of the Major League were as skilled at batting as Hall of Famer, Tony Gwynn. During the course of his baseball career, Gwynn was a nightmare for his pitching opponents, wielding his bat to produce record-breaking statistics. To the audience, a typical ball would be whizzing and curving towards the plate at around 100 mph, faster than the eye can see but, to Gwynn, it seemed like it was in slow motion, as he hit it with extreme ease. His intent fixation on the ball, his determined focus in tuning out any distractions around him, and his deep concentration, somehow enabled him to perceive the ball as if time had slowed down. No wonder Gwynn has often been referred to as the greatest hitter since Ted Williams. Other famous athletes and sports stars, such as Tiger woods in golf, Michael Jordan in basketball, and Rafael Nadal in tennis, often report similar experiences. In these games, talented players seem to experience the ball coming toward them much more slowly than average people do. So what is happening here? What is so different about their brains that allows them to control the speed of time and slow it down to their advantage?
As we have seen in Chapter 3, the perceived speed of time depends on how fast our brain can process sensory information and how fast it “records” the world around us. That information processing speed relies on the level of brain electrical activity which, in turn, is a reflection of how alert and attentive we are. Psychologists refer to alertness as “mental arousal,” which is a measure of how fast we are able to react to external stimulations. Alertness and attention are very closely related, since the level of alertness determines how much attention we can focus on a task. They both depend on how energized or tired we are and on the level of electrical activity in our brain, which is measured as EEG brainwaves.
When brain neurons are excited, they produce a sharp state of alertness and focused attention that can considerably influence our time perception. Higher levels of mental arousal mean that the brain is more sensitive to detecting, processing, and retrieving information from memory. Processing more information in a shorter period causes time to stretch and can explain why successful sport people, with their higher innate level of alertness and excellent concentration skills, perceive time as running slower than normal. They perform such amazing feats because of their superior focus and faster information processing (faster ticking internal clock) that stretches time intervals. This produces the experience that time must have been running slow.
Sport scientists have discovered that athletes’ alpha brainwave frequency tend to be naturally higher than average people, especially before peak performances. Golfers and basketball players experience bursts of alpha brainwaves shortly before their best shots. In one study, researchers measured the brainwaves of both karate champions and fencin
g experts at rest, with their eyes closed, and compared them with ordinary people. The results indicated that the athletes generally emit stronger alpha brainwaves, which implies they can react and process sensory information faster. 43 Their brain engine is essentially running at a higher rpm when idle at rest. The result is a faster internal clock and a sense that time is flowing more slowly. Illegal performance-enhancing drugs and stimulants that are often used in sports produce the same effect on alertness and information processing speeds, causing time to slow down. This will be considered further in Chapter 10.
Scientists also found that professional athletes can detect faster flickering lights compared to an average person. We previously saw how houseflies and birds that detect extremely fast flickering lights experience time in slow motion. Well, famous athletes may not come close to beating a fly’s flicker limit, but their eyes possess an enhanced ability to track fast-moving balls during games. This allows them to process the motion of the ball at a higher temporal resolution, and forces their flow of time to expand, allowing them relatively ample time to react. Ted Williams, arguably the greatest baseball hitter of all-time, once said he could see the laces on a baseball flying at 90 mph!
The Alertness Spectrum
Our alertness level is directly related to our brain’s electrical activity and EEG brainwaves which, in turn, determine the speed at which we “record” the world, and define how fast we experience time. Using EEG recordings, researchers in Germany confirmed in 2012 that the apparent speed of time varies depending on where we are on the spectrum of conscious experience. 44 The more alert we are, the slower time seems to run and vice versa. In one study, participants were requested to estimate time intervals while connected to EEG scanning machines that measured their alertness. This ranged from fully alert, to relaxed, drowsy, and very sleepy. The results confirmed that time appears to slow down when alertness levels are high. The faster the brainwaves, the higher the alertness level, and the faster information is processed, which stretches time intervals, hence, the slower time passes. 45 In contrast, when the participants were less alert, their brainwaves were slow and time passed quickly. This is evident from several typical every day experiences. Let us look at a few examples.
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