Since the perceived speed of time depends on alertness and arousal levels, it follows that the speed of time changes for each chronotype as the day goes by. Scientists have confirmed that the internal clock of morning-type people generally runs faster than that of evening-types. 94 For the morning person, alertness levels are normally at their highest in the morning and then start to drop towards the afternoon after a decent lunch, until it reaches its lowest levels in the evening. As the alertness levels drop, the brain’s information processing speed decreases and the internal clock slows down, so time intervals shrink, and time appears to pass quickly. For the morning person, the afternoon is often over in a flash. Feeling that time is abundant early in the day, morning larks tend to be more productive in the morning than the afternoon. Therefore, an hour in the morning will generally feel longer than an hour in the afternoon.
The opposite happens for a night-type person. Alertness levels are low in the morning and increase towards the afternoon, reaching their highest level in the evening. This means that the brain’s information processing and internal clock start to speed up as the day goes by, so time intervals stretch and time gradually slows down as the day passes. For night owls, mornings fly by and afternoons drag, which makes them more productive in the second half of the day.
A number of studies have confirmed that alertness and concentration levels in each chronotype affect performance. A study on professional Olympic swimmers, who tend to be night owls, found that they were 2.7 seconds faster when swimming 100 meters at 10:00 p.m., than swimming the same distance at 6 a.m. Another study looked at 16 Major League Baseball players—nine owls and seven morning larks—and compared their game statistics from nearly 7,500 innings during the 2009-2010 seasons. The results indicated that when morning larks played early games (before 2 p.m.) or when night owls played night games, they both hit higher scores than when game times conflicted with their chronotypes. The performance of night owls suffered the most when they played in day games. 95
With that in mind and, since it is not easy to change your chronotype, it would be advisable to organize your life around your concentration curve for optimal performance. This means playing to your strengths and using your prime time for the activities that require higher levels of concentration, while shifting the less demanding activities to that time of the day when your concentration levels are low. Match your work routine to your chronotype to optimize productivity and slow down time when you needed it most.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Especially for people who get up late, since society is generally calibrated for the early risers. Schools, businesses, and hospitals normally start between 8 and 9 o’clock, and sometimes even earlier. Therefore, late risers often experience a mismatch between their chronotype and society. They accumulate a sleep deficit over the course of a week, which is only partially recovered on the weekend. This explains why night owls tend to drink more coffee to stay awake during the day, and more alcohol to help them fall asleep at night. To improve performance and reduce sleep deficit, more companies are now introducing flextime, allowing employees to alter the start and finish of a working day.
Because teenagers tend to be night owls with different sleeping patterns than children, in 1997, seven high schools in the Minneapolis Public School District shifted the school start time from 7:15 a.m. to 8:40 a.m. A long-term study was then carried out that involved assessing 18,000 high school students to see how this affected their school performance. 96 The results indicated that students were less sleepy, more alert, less depressive, and had better grades than those students whose school schedule was not adjusted. This is, incidentally, the reason why modern high schools in the U.S. who still start at 8:00 a.m. do not start core subjects before ten o’clock in the morning.
Matching your chronotype to your lifestyle has clear benefits but, when mismatches occur, you can use them to your advantage. In fact, mismatches can sometimes be beneficial, especially when it comes to inducing creativity. In one study, 428 participants had to solve analytical problems, some of which required logical thinking and some of which required moments of creative thought. What the researchers found was that participants, scored highly on creative problems when they took the tests at their non-optimal time of the day. It seems that creative ideas flourish when people are mentally tired, in a similar way to how taking a break from a problem can produce unexpected insights. 97 This leads us to another important personality trait that affects the speed of time.
“Match your work routine to your chronotype to optimize productivity”
Impulsive or Self-Controlled?
Are you generally impulsive or self-controlled? Patient or impatient? This personality trait is also a direct product of the speed of your internal clock. Impulsive people tend to perceive time as moving slowly compared to patient and more restrained people. 98. This affects a lot of the decisions you make, especially those where you have to choose between an immediate or delayed reward. For instance, if you were considering going on a diet, you would assess the health benefits and improved appearance, against the temporary loss of pleasure in eating certain foods. If it was going to take you one month to reach your targeted weight, you would consider the “loss” of all those tasty foods that you would have eaten in that month. If you were an impulsive person, your slower internal clock would cause the forthcoming month to appear longer than it really is. So the “loss” in food pleasures would be amplified in your mind, and you would be more likely to give up on the diet.
That is why extroverts and night owls tend to be overweight. The popular image of fat people being fun and jolly is actually based on scientific fact. A study of around 30,000 Japanese people aged between 40 and 64 found that extroverts were mostly overweight whereas introversion was closely associated with being underweight. The study concluded that being impulsive is the strongest indicator of obesity, and extroverts tend to be sensation seekers and risk-takers that easily get bored. 99 Any future time interval that is imagined in the mind of an extrovert or night owl will prospectively feel longer, due to their slower internal clock.
One way to determine if you have an impulsive personality would be to ask yourself a hypothetical question such as: “Would you prefer $1,000 right now or $2,000 in a week?” These types of decisions are influenced by how you perceive time. Impulsive people tend to put less value on delayed rewards, in comparison to patient people, who postpone impulsive urges of immediate gratification for a much better reward later on. Impulsive people will prefer smaller and immediate rewards to larger and delayed rewards because they estimate time durations as being subjectively longer. If your time perception causes you to feel that a future reward is further away than it is really is, you will assess the cost as too high and you will prefer a more immediate outcome.
Anything that extends the perceived duration of an imagined future time interval will make you more impulsive. It could be a sad emotional state that decreases your mental arousal level and the speed of your internal clock. Or it could be a built-in feature of your personality. The greater the expansion of time durations in your mind, the more anxious you will be that the future reward is far from being attained. In such cases, you will be motivated to choose the immediate satisfaction over the delayed reward. This brings us to the last personality trait that influences our speed of time: trait anxiety.
Trait Anxiety: How Often Do You Worry?
In the previous chapter on emotions, we saw how anxiety slows time. This is the effect of short-term “state anxiety,” which nearly everyone experiences from time to time. Some examples are being nervous about an upcoming school exam, or your medical test results, or your financial situation.
However, anxiety can also be long-term. People who are constantly worried about their health, for instance, to the point of paranoia, suffer from “trait anxiety.” These people tend to be nervous at the slightest cause for worry. Their anxiety tends to be much more intense, and are sometimes accompanied by panic a
ttacks. Most people, for instance, might feel nervous when meeting a very important or famous person. But people with trait anxiety would be anxious before meeting anyone new. Another example is being nervous about traveling to a new place or moving into a new city. That would be state anxiety. But someone with trait anxiety would faint at the idea of moving to any new place. This intense nervousness, produced by the built-in trait anxiety, is what causes time to slow down even more for people with this personality type.
We all have some level of “trait” anxiety in our personalities, even those of us who boast nerves of steel. It is important to understand how much trait anxiety is in your personality, how it influences your experience of the speed of time, and to find ways to counteract that.
A simple, free psychological test that is available at http://www.subscribepage.com/speed-of-time-test will give you an idea of where you are on the anxiety scale, as well as measure the other personality factors that affect the speed of time in your mind. 100 Treatments for trait anxiety range from simple psychological treatments, such as graded exposure and fostering an optimistic attitude, to more complex treatments like medical attention for severe anxiety disorders. Trait anxiety will slow time in your mind even more than the occasional state anxiety, so it is advisable to take a quick test and find out how much time distortion this is causing you.
Recap
Several aspects of your personality affect the speed at which you perceive time. Your brain’s internal clock will run faster if you are an introvert, a morning lark, patient and self-controlled, not easily bored, or someone who worries a lot. As a consequence, when you look back at the time you have spent doing something (retrospective time experience), it will often seem to have dragged. That is because your brain has covered more time internally than the rest of the outside world. As for prospective experience of time, your faster internal clock will make you feel that you have less time for activities you are planning to complete in the future. You will therefore perceive time as more scarce and feel constantly rush.
In contrast, your brain’s internal clock will run more slowly if you are an extrovert, a night owl, impulsive, or boredom-prone. When you look back at the time you spent doing something, it will retrospectively seem to have flown by. This is because your brain covered less time internally then the rest of the world did. The duration of activities you were engaged in will tend to shrink in your mind. On the other hand, when planning ahead, your slower internal clock will need more time to produce durations for activities you are planning in your mind. Future duration will stretch and you will not feel hurried since you will feel that time is abundant and you can complete tasks in less time than is actually needed.
That said, knowing how your personality traits affect your experience of time can be used to your advantage. Certain traits are genetically inherited and cannot be changed, but you can work around those to suit your ultimate goals. You can try, for example, to organize your work around your chronotype and concentration curve. If you get bored easily, distraction will only waste your time. Instead, you can learn to spend time in a more meaningful way by converting boring activities into flow-inducing ones, as seen in Chapter 5. When you have no choice but to go through routine, you can slow things down by finding value and intrinsic motivation in doing things for their own sake. If you tend to worry a lot, you can try to get into the habit of thinking positively to shorten the duration of those anxious moments. The quick Speed of Time online test can measure your personality traits and give you an idea about how fast time runs in your mind. http://www.subscribepage.com/speed-of-time-test
Another factor that effects time perception, and which we will explore next, is the effect of certain mind-altering drugs and medications. By directly tinkering with the brain’s chemicals processes, time can be made to slow down, speed up, or even freeze to a complete halt! In the next chapter, we will explore that, keeping in mind that, in no way, do I endorse the use of any harmful drugs for that purpose.
Chapter 9
Messing with Time
The Effect of Drugs and Mental Disorders
O time, suspend your flight!
― Lamartine, 1820
Intellectual Rave Club
On a cold December night in 1846, in a remote quarter in the middle of Paris, a number of leading Parisian intellectuals gathered in a recently formed club. Great writers and artists including Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix and many others enter an old house on Ile Saint Louis for their monthly meeting at the Club des Hashischins (Club of the Hasheesh Eaters). The purpose of the meeting is to explore the mind-altering effects of the recently discovered marijuana herb.
Fifty years earlier, Napoleon had invaded Egypt on his way to India and his troops had discovered the cannabis plant, which they brought back to France after being expelled in 1801. The plant was an instant hit, especially with the aristocrats and nobility. The club ran for about five years and the intellectuals reported a mixture of experiences like euphoria, hallucination, and extremely rapid flow of ideas. Charles Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du Mal, and one of the founding members of the club, wrote,
. . . a new stream of ideas carries you away. It will hurl you along in its living vortex for a further minute; and this minute, too, will be an eternity, for the normal relation between time and the individual is completely upset by the multitude and intensity of sensations and ideas. You seem to live several men’s lives in the space of an hour.
He also notes that,
. . . your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute. Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the slightest perceptible sound. The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is color; in colors there is a music. This fantasy goes on for an eternity. A lucid interval and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only a minute.
The club broke up in 1849, but not after it had done its work with the publication of the first scientific book on cannabis by Dr. Morceau. The book De Hachish et de l'Alienation Mentale contained interesting recounts about the time-distorting experiences that resulted from cannabis consumption. The French doctor, Charles Richet, summed it up nicely when he said that, “with hashish the notion of time is completely overthrown. The moments are years, and the minutes are centuries.”
People from various cultures report similar experiences with numerous drugs and their influence on the perceived speed of time. In 1955, psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond, who coined the term “psychedelic,” conducted a famous experiment, in which he administered 400 mg of mescaline to British Member of Parliament, Christopher Mayhew, and recorded his experience on camera. In the BBC documentary, The Beyond Within, Mayhew described how “half a dozen times during the experiment, he had a period of time that did not end for him” and that the experiment “took place outside [of] time.” In his famous book Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey similarly noted that opium intoxication resulted in distortions to the flow of time, to the extent that he “sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; no, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time!”
It is well established that psychedelic drugs interact with certain neurotransmitters and affect the level of electrical activity in the brain. Marijuana, for instance, acts as a dopamine stimulant that boosts the neurons’ firing rate and speeds up brainwave frequencies. 101 This, in turn, affects the speed at which the world is perceived and twists the experience of time. Intoxication causes the internal clock to tick faster so that durations expand and time appears to pass slowly. 102, 103 One study found that an audio clip that is 10 seconds long appears to last 12 seconds when under the mild influence of marijuana. 104 The music industry is notably associated with the use of marijuana, or “weed,” due to its time-distorting properties that augment both musical performances and appreciation. To a music perform
er or listener, the time-expanding effect makes music more pleasant and enjoyable. Every musical note appears more intense and seems to last longer. The effect on someone who never smoked marijuana is a sudden heightened sense of alertness and slowing of time, all of which are indicative of a boost in information processing speed. 105 However, this time-expanding effect actually reverses in frequent smokers of marijuana. With long-term usage, the opposite effects are observed and time appears to speed up.
To demonstrate the effect of drug stimulants on time perception, neuroscientist Warren Meck carried out an interesting experiment at Duke University in Durham. He experimented with rats that were trained to press a lever to receive a food reward after a period of 12 seconds. To investigate how drugs affect the rats’ time perception, he put the rats on cocaine, which is a dopamine stimulant, and found that they started pressing the lever too soon. Cocaine made their internal clock tick faster so that they felt the 12 seconds were already over when only eight seconds had actually passed. In contrast, when he put another group of rats on haloperidol, which is a dopamine blocker, they started pressing the lever too late, indicating that they thought less time had elapsed than actually had. The drug slowed their internal clock to the extent that it took 16 seconds for them to feel that 12 seconds had elapsed. 106 Drugs that stimulate dopamine receptors slow down time and stretch durations, while depressants that inhibit those receptors, speed it up.
The Power of Time Perception Page 14
