Time Warped

by Claudia Hammond

  Also by Claudia Hammond

  Emotional Rollercoaster:

  A Journey through the Science of Feelings

  Published in Great Britain in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  Copyright © Claudia Hammond, 2012

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 790 7

  eISBN 978 0 85786 345 4

  Typeset in Plantin Light by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

  For Tim

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. The Time Illusion

  Your Time Is My Time – Time’s Surprises – Time Slows Down When You’re Afraid – Throwing People Off Buildings – Not the Kindest of Experiments – Hyperactive Time – Diving For Time – Five Times a Day for 45 Years – How to Make Time Stand Still

  2. Mind Clocks

  Electrifying the Brain – The Man Who Thought the Working Day Had Finished – The Perfect Sleep – Emotional Moments – The Oddball Effect – The Magic of Three – Heading for a Precipice Blindfolded – Is the Brain Timing Itself? – Operation Time

  3. Monday is Red

  Months Go Round In a Circle – The Millennium Problem – Colour-in History – The SNARC Effect – Do We See All Time In Space? – Time, Space and Language – Time and Space Mixed Up – When Is Wednesday’s Meeting? – The River of Time – Making Time Go Backwards – Mellow Monday and Furious Friday

  4. Why Time Speeds Up As You Get Older

  Autobiographical Memory – Total Recall – When Time Speeds Up – Life Through a Telescope – Take Two Items a Day For Five Years – Time-Stamping the Past – Everything Shook – A Thousand Days – The Reminiscence Bump – Remembering Moments, Not Days – The Holiday Paradox

  5. Remembering the Future

  Time-Travelling Into the Future – Can Your Dog Picture Next Week? – What Are You Doing Tomorrow? – Memories For Events That Never Happened – Suicide Island – Thinking About Nothing – An Erroneous Future – Bad Choices – Five Years to Reach the Word ‘Ant’ – One Marshmallow Or Two? – Future-Orientated Thinking – Looking Back, Looking Forward

  6. Changing Your Relationship with Time

  Time Is Speeding Up – Making Time Go Faster – Too Much To Do, Too Little Time – Failing to Plan Ahead – A Poor Memory For the Past – Worrying Too Much About the Future – Trying to Live in the Present – Predicting How You’ll Feel in the Future – In Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

  Albert Einstein

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN CHUCK BERRY finds himself at the edge of a cliff or at the top of a mountain, he likes to jump off. When he’s in a plane, he likes to jump out. This is not Chuck Berry the famous rock-and-roll singer, I hasten to add, but Chuck Berry ‘the Kiwi king of skydiving and base-jumping’. You may well have seen him in adverts for fizzy drinks. For Lilt, he jumped out of a helicopter while riding a bicycle – twice. Now he’s sponsored by Red Bull, but you can be sure that he experiences more than a caffeine rush as he falls through the air with a parachute, choosing not to open it until the last possible moment.

  For 25 years Chuck Berry has practised plummeting through the sky, whether skydiving, hang-gliding, microlight-flying or parachuting (once he even used a customised tent as a canopy); but his speciality is base-jumping. One of the more extreme ‘extreme sports’, it takes its name from the four categories of fixed objects from which you can jump – buildings, antennae, spans (bridges) and the earth (in practice, a cliff). Since 1981 there have been at least 136 fatalities; it is a sport so dangerous that one in 60 participants is expected to die doing it.

  For Chuck, the key to survival resides in his ability to control his mind. Before he leaps, he visualises the exact steps he will take to achieve a successful outcome. So while any of the rest of us who found ourselves teetering on the top of the world’s tallest building (the K.L. Tower in Kuala Lumpur) would be likely to picture all the things that could go wrong – getting blown into another building, opening the parachute too late, ending up a bloody mess on the street 1,381 feet below – Chuck carefully calculates the wind direction, decides on the optimal point to open his chute and pictures himself floating down to make the perfect landing on the selected spot. Of course it helps that he also does months of planning.

  With so many years’ experience, a Swift flight that Chuck took one New Year’s Day should have been easy. A Swift is a cross between a plane and a hang-glider and is said to combine the glorious soaring abilities of a glider with the convenience of being able to ascend into the air by simply running off the side of a mountain – no need for a plane to tow you up into the sky. What’s more it folds up small enough to fit on top of a roof rack. The front half looks like an elegant paper plane with extra-long, aerodynamic wings, while the body of plane is very short and the tail is missing altogether. There’s a little cockpit for the pilot, which covers only your head, shoulders and arms, and your legs hang out of the bottom to allow you to run down the hill. Picture Fred Flintstone running along the ground to start his Stone Age car – and then disappearing over the edge of the cliff and taking flight.

  For his flight in the Swift, Chuck chose Coronet Peak just outside New Zealand’s bungee-jumping capital, Queenstown. It was a beautiful summer’s day and the mountain was outlined against the deep blue sky like a theatre scenery flat. It should have been the perfect location, but for Chuck the idea of some gentle soaring in this awesome immensity was a little tame. Some aerial acrobatics would sharpen the thrill. So, riding a thermal, he took the hybrid glider up to a height of 5,500 feet and then plunged her into a steep nosedive. The plan was to cut the dive at the last possible moment and then bank up towards the heavens again. No problem, right?

  Wrong. The whole glider started shaking and bucking violently, and, as a former aircraft engineer, Chuck knew exactly what was happening. This was what was known in the trade as ‘flutter’ – a term devised by someone big on understatement – when the wings of an aircraft twist up and down repeatedly until eventually they flap themselves to death.

  Within moments, both wings had sheared off completely and Chuck found himself in freefall. Speeding towards the ground was usually his idea of fun. But this time there was nothing to slow his descent, nothing to break his fall, nothing to save him hitting the ground at breakneck speed. Even so, as he hurtled to earth – his GPS tracker would later show rescuers that he had fallen at a speed of 200km an hour – Chuck’s mind was capable of detailed, rational thought.

  Although he was now hanging outside the cockpit of a glider without wings, looking up, he saw that he was still attached to much of the wreckage. His mind went into overdrive. He remembers exactly what he was thinking:

  There had to be a way to get back into the remains of the glider. Why couldn’t he climb up into the cockpit? There had to be a way. Can’t I pull myself up? Surely. What would James Bond do? Come on, dude, do something! I have to do something. Don’t look at the ground. It’s too close. There’s no time. But there has to be a way. It must have been flutter. The lever! The lever for the emergency chute. If I can just get to the lever. It should be there! Surely it has to be there. How long have I been falling for? This is taking ages. There are the hills. Not much time left. Too windy to think. This is the most important
decision I’ll ever make. Do something! Save yourself! Get to that lever and pull!

  Now, bear in mind that this interior dialogue, all of these thought processes, all of this precise mental calculation, would later be revealed by Chuck’s GPS system to have taken place within a matter of seconds. But for Chuck it felt like a lot longer. He knew that he had to act fast, but he had enough time – plenty it seemed – to think and to take action. For the observer, the seconds flashed by. For Chuck, it seemed to extend almost endlessly. The same time-frame with two very different perceptions of time passing. His New Year’s Day glimpse of eternity is a perfect, if extreme, example of this book’s central theme: the subjectivity of the experience of time. In situations like the one he faced, time is weirdly elastic.

  We have all experienced moments in life where time becomes warped. When we are in fear of our lives, like Chuck, it seems to slow down. When we are enjoying ourselves, time ‘flies’. As the years go by, life feels as though it’s speeding up. Christmas comes round that bit faster every year. Yet when we were children, the school holidays seemed to stretch on for months.

  In this book I’ll be asking whether this stretching and shrinking of time is simply an illusion or whether the mind processes time differently at different moments of our lives. Time perception – the way we subjectively experience time, what time feels like to us as individuals – is an endlessly fascinating topic because time constantly surprises us; we never quite get used to the way it plays tricks on us. A good holiday races by; no sooner have you settled in than it’s time to think about packing to leave. Yet the moment you arrive home, it feels as though you have been away ages. How is it possible to have such contradictory experiences of the same holiday?

  At the core of this book is the idea that the experience of time is actively created by our minds. Various factors are crucial to this construction of the perception of time – memory, concentration, emotion and the sense we have that time is somehow rooted in space. It’s this last factor that allows us to do something extraordinary – to time-travel at will in our minds, moving backwards and forwards through time. I will focus on psychology and brain science, rather than the metaphysics and poetry of time, or the physics and philosophy of time – although sometimes it is hard to know where one field ends and another begins.

  Physicists tell us that the popular notion that time is segmented into the past, the present and the future is inaccurate. Time does not pass; time simply is. John Ellis McTaggart, a well-known philosopher of time, believed much the same thing,1 and versions of this idea underpin religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. But this book isn’t about the objective reality of time, but rather the experience of it, and I’m confident that you, like me, experience time as flow, rather than stasis. I’ll be concentrating on how the mind creates sensations of time; the time that neuroscientists and psychologists call ‘mind time’. This is a time that can’t be measured by an external clock, but is central to our experience of reality.

  I shall be revealing some of the imaginative methods that researchers in the emerging field of the psychology of time have used to study mind time. They’ve quizzed people on the dates of famous events, had them steer themselves towards precipices and even thrown them backwards off buildings. They haven’t been afraid to experiment on themselves either – spending months living alone in an ice cave without daylight, or measuring their own time estimation skills every single day for 45 years. Then there are those who have experienced events that have unintentionally revealed a great deal about time perception, like the man who lost the ability to imagine the future after a motorbike accident, and the BBC journalist who spent more than three months as a hostage without knowing whether he would ever be released.

  Combining these experiences with cutting edge research in psychology and neuroscience from around the world gives us an invaluable insight into the curious nature of time perception. We all know something of the malleability of time, and we don’t have to go to Chuck’s extremes to experience it. Psychologists have discovered some extraordinary things: among them the fact that eating fast food makes us feel impatient,2 the fact that people at the back of a queue are more likely to see time as moving towards them, while people at the front see themselves as moving through time; the fact that if someone has a raging temperature time goes more slowly.

  There’s also my own theory of the ‘Holiday Paradox’, which explains the phenomenon I referred to where holidays pass quickly, yet feel as though they lasted a long time afterwards. We constantly observe time in two ways – while it’s happening and then in retrospect. Most of the time this dual viewpoint serves us well, but it provides the key to many of the mysteries of time. When the two perceptions – prospective and retrospective – fail to tally, time feels confusing.

  I will be revealing the results of my study into the way people visualise time in their minds. You may be surprised to learn that one in five of us imagine the days, the months, the years and even the centuries laid out in precise patterns in the mind’s eye. The variety in the way people visualise time is intriguing too – with centuries standing like dominoes or decades shaped like a slinky. Why do some people see time like this and what effect does it have on their experience of time? And I’ll be addressing a question that has no right or wrong answer but still divides us – is the future coming towards us or are we endlessly moving along a timeline towards the future?

  Today we can calculate the time more precisely, more minutely, than ever before. The caesium clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States is so accurate that in the next 60 million years it will neither gain, nor lose, a second. A few years ago it could only do that for a mere 20 million years. The clock of the mind is more elusive. It seems to govern our experience of time, yet appears not to exist. For decades scientists have searched for evidence of an internal clock. Over a 24-hour period, circadian rhythms regulate our body clock, keeping us in synch with day and night through exposure to daylight, but there is no single organ dedicated to sensing the seconds, minutes or hours passing. Nevertheless our minds can measure time. We can estimate a minute fairly accurately. We constantly deal with different time-frames – a moment ago, middle age, the past decade, the first week of term, every Christmas, two hours’ time – which we juggle effortlessly in our minds. Meanwhile we are building up a long-term sense of the decades passing, and of our own life history and where we fit into the earth’s history.

  The latest findings from neuroscience are beginning to give us clues as to how our brains can sense time without any single organ devoted to the purpose and in Chapter Two I will examine these competing neuroscientific theories. But it may be that what fascinates you more is how your conception of time affects the way you think and the way you behave. Although according to the calendar time only goes in one direction, in our minds we constantly leap about from the past to the future and back again. If you wish, you can read this book in the same way. While I think I’ve set it out in the right order, you don’t have to follow me. If you have ever wondered how good you are at making decisions based on how you might feel in the future, Chapter Five beckons. If you’ve ever been in an accident and experienced time standing still, in Chapter One you can find out why. If you want to know why time feels as though it’s speeding up or why world news events always feel as if they happened a year or two longer ago than you thought, then Chapter Three may be for you.

  To conclude, I will explore how all this research might be useful in our everyday lives. We construct the experience of time in our minds, so it follows that we are able to change the elements we find troubling – whether it’s trying to stop the years racing past, or speeding up time when we’re stuck in a queue, trying to live more in the present, or working out how long ago we last saw our old friends. Time can be a friend, but it can also be an enemy. The trick is to harness it, whether at home, at work, or even in social policy, and to work in line with our conception of time. Time perception mat
ters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organise life, but the way we experience it.

  Finally, a word about the word ‘time’. Naturally a book about time will use the word a lot. Were I from the Amondawa tribe in the Amazon that would be a problem. They have no word for time, no word for month and no word for year. There is no agreed calendar and there are no clocks. They do refer to sequences of events, but time does not exist as a separate concept. By contrast, the word ‘time’ is used more often than any other noun in the English language.3 This reflects our fascination with time – and is one reason why I’ve written this book. But the ubiquity of the word presents some difficulties – as it is all too easy to use time all the time. You see the problem? To avoid confusion, I may sometimes seem pedantic about terms or utilise jargon from psychology. There are also phrases, such as future thinking, which, for the sake of precision, at times, I will use repeatedly. I hope you will bear with me.

  Now, I’m sure you’re wondering what happened to Chuck Berry, our base-jumping glider pilot who was left suspended in the air, his body falling and time dilating. I’m afraid you won’t find out right away, as there are many other issues to explore. But at the end of the next chapter, we will use our ability to travel back in time in our minds and we’ll learn how it all worked out for Chuck.

  WHEN THE BBC reporter Alan Johnston was held captive in Palestinian-controlled Gaza, he had plenty of time to fill but no accurate method of measuring it. With no wristwatch, no books, or pen and paper, his only means of guessing how much time had passed was by studying the lines of light visible through the shutters and the shadow that moved slowly across the walls as he willed each day away. The five Islamic calls to prayer also allowed him to work out the rough time of day, but he soon lost track of the date. ‘I made a mark on the door in the traditional clichéd prisoner way, but for a while I was worried about what the guard might do if he saw these marks on the door of his flat. He was going through quite bad moods at the time, so I started making etching lines on the edge of my toothbrush instead, but it was still quite easy to become uncertain about the date and soon I was adrift from time.’