In fact Alan Johnston spent almost four months in that flat, but at the time he had no idea how long he would be detained, or whether he would live or die. ‘Suddenly time becomes like a living thing, a crushing weight that you have to endure. It’s endless, since you don’t know when you’re going to be freed, if ever. There’s this great sea of time ahead of you that you have to keep ploughing through.’ To pass the hours, Alan invented mind games, setting himself tasks such as developing the best possible intellectual attack on the idea of apartheid, or trying to write poetry and stories in his head. But with no pen and paper to record his thoughts, it became an exercise in memory, ‘If you write seven crap lines of poetry, you’ve got to remember them before you can move on to the eighth and then when you’ve written the ninth line you’ve got to ask yourself whether you still remember line five.’ Eventually Alan developed his own mental strategy for coping with the hours, a strategy that used the concept of time itself – one I’ll return to later in the book.
There were two elements holding sway over Alan’s life as a hostage: his captors and time. In this chapter I’ll examine the conditions under which time can become so warped that it slows down to the unbearably protracted pace experienced by Alan Johnston. It is not surprising that time dragged for him, locked in one room and deprived of all stimulation, but I’ll also be covering other, more peculiar, circumstances where time expands. It is the mysterious flexibility of time that makes it so fascinating, but before we get to that, let’s consider why our ability to sense the passage of time is so important, both to us as individuals and as part of society.
Accurate timing is essential for communication, co-operation and human relations in more ways than you might expect. It’s obvious that any activity involving two or more people requires the co-ordination of timetables, but even something as apparently simple as a conversation demands split-second timing. To produce and understand speech, we rely on critical timings of less than a tenth of a second. The difference between the sound of a ‘pa’ and a ‘ba’ is all in the timing of the delay before the subsequent vowel, so if the delay is longer you hear a ‘p’, if it’s short you hear a ‘b’. If you put your hand on your vocal cords you can even feel that with the ‘ba’ your lips open at the same time as you feel your cords start to vibrate. With the ‘pa’ the vibration starts a moment later. This relies on timing accurate to the millisecond. Even the timing between syllables can be crucial to a phrase’s meaning. With Jimi Hendrix’s lyric, ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky,’ just a fraction of a second difference in timing is what gives you the famous mondegreen, ‘Excuse me while I kiss this guy.’ In order to co-ordinate limb and muscle movements we need to estimate milliseconds, while the appraisal of seconds allows us to do everything from detecting rhythm in music or kicking a ball to deciding whether it’s faster to walk along the travelator at the airport or on the floor around the side. (Answer: it depends. Researchers at Princeton University found that taking the travelator usually slows you down because you tend to reduce your pace, or – more irritatingly – get stuck behind people who stop walking as soon as they get on. An empty travelator will get you across the airport faster than walking on the floor alongside it, but only if you don’t decide to stand still yourself.)
Our sense of timing isn’t perfect, yet on the whole our brains are able to conceal this, presenting us with a world where time usually feels smooth and consistent. A badly-dubbed film has to be quite bad for us to notice the discrepancy; studies have shown that if the mismatch is anything below 70 milliseconds our brain goes along with our expectation that if we can see a person’s mouth moving and we can hear a sound that matches it, then they must be occurring simultaneously. Yet once people are told that they don’t match, they can then work out whether the pictures are ahead of or behind the sound. So it’s not that we can’t detect these discrepancies, it’s that unless we are alerted to a problem the brain assumes that sound and sight fit together because that’s what we’re used to. Some of our senses are better at timing than others; it’s much easier to remember an auditory rhythm tapped out in Morse code than the same series of dots and dashes written down.
The rabbit illusion in the box below is one you can try on someone else.
Find a volunteer, take their forearm and get them to look away. Using the end of a pen, tap very fast several times in the same spot near their wrist and – without breaking the rhythm – tap several times nearer the inside of their elbow. Then ask them what you did.
The chances are they will say that you made a series of taps at regular intervals along their arm from wrist to elbow. Even though you didn’t touch the middle of their forearm the brain makes certain assumptions about the distance and the timing of the taps. Likewise if you turn a light on and off very fast it appears to flicker, but if you do it even faster there’s a point at which it appears to be perpetually switched on; our brains try to make sense of the flicker by perceiving it as a constant light. We are tagging events in time in order to make sense of them.
Computers with accurate timing in the millisecond range have made it a great deal easier for scientists to investigate the time intervals that the brain can and cannot detect. In the 1880s the Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner was determined to calculate the shortest time a human could differentiate between two sounds. To do this he used a Savart wheel, a metal disc with teeth all the way round that produce a loud click as the wheel turns. If the wheel goes fast enough then, like the flickering light bulb, the sound appears continuous. Exner wanted to establish the minimum time interval at which humans could still hear separate clicks. He tried the same with electrical sparks and found our senses varied dramatically – when watching sparks, people found it hard to differentiate, but when it came to listening to clicks people could differentiate between two clicks with only a five-hundredth of a second between them.4
These are impressive millisecond judgements, but our abilities at time perception go way beyond this. The subjective experience of time relies on the ability to put that millisecond moment into context. As the philosopher Edmund Husserl said in his study of the phenomenology of time, we hear a song one note at a time, but it is our sense of the future and the past – our memory and our anticipation – that makes it a song.5 The experience of time feels personal, a part of our consciousness that we find hard to put into words. St Augustine wrote ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, then I know. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know it not.’ Yet we constantly refer to abstract ideas involving time – six months, last week or next year – and everyone knows what we mean. The notion of time is both personal and shared.
YOUR TIME IS MY TIME
Each society forms rules about time that its people share and understand. In many parts of the world, including Europe and the US, if a ticket for a play says 7.30 p.m. it is customary to arrive earlier than the specified time, but if a party invitation says 7.30 p.m. you are expected to arrive later. The sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel believes that these social rules provide us with a means of judging time.6 We learn to expect a play or show to last about two hours and anything longer starts to feel as though it is dragging, whereas the same period of time would feel too short to count as a morning’s work. If we unexpectedly see someone at the wrong time we might not even recognise them. Cultures develop shared ideas of appropriate timings; how long you should stay when invited into someone’s home, even how long you should know a partner before you consider marrying them. Exceptions surprise us. I remember sitting at a lunch in Ghana on a table with six men, two of whom (one local and one from Scotland) surprised the rest of us with their tales of marriage proposals on first dates. (In case you are wondering, both the women they asked said ‘Yes’, and both marriages are still going strong more than two decades later.)
Routines give us a sense of security. They are so important that the mere act of breaking them can disrupt a person’s concept of time and, in extreme cases, even cause terror. At Guantanamo Bay it
was standard practice to make the timing of meals, sleep and interrogation unpredictable, defeating a prisoner’s urge to count time and thereby inducing anxiety. Knowing the exact date was of no practical use to Alan Johnston, yet he knew he needed to try to keep track of the calendar. This desire for predictability and control is nothing new. In the early Middle Ages, Benedictine monks decided that predictability was essential to living a good and godly life and would ring bells at fixed intervals and carry out regular services to create a shared routine.
Time dictates the pattern of our lives – when we work, when we eat, even when we choose to celebrate. Just as the Benedictine monks knew when to expect the bells to ring, we each form appropriate temporal schemata for our own lives, which overwrite each other as they go out of date. (As soon as you have a new school timetable, it’s very hard to remember the previous one.) Some of our temporal schemata are controlled by the changing patterns in the seasons, so inevitably winter and summer are particularly salient time-frames. Others are defined by our culture, so if I were to be dropped in my street at a random time and asked to guess the time, the day of the week and the month, then a combination of nature and culture would provide external cues to all three; if there is little traffic, few people walking by and no sign of life in the barber’s, then it must be a Sunday. The temperature and the presence or absence of leaves on the sycamore trees will give a clue as to the time of year, and if the sun is out, its position in the sky would give a rough indication of the time of day.
The cyclical nature of the calendar helps us to organise time in our minds. When you are at school, the academic timetable punctuates the year, a punctuation that can have a lasting emotional impact (from which some teachers never escape). The American psychiatrist John Sharp has noticed that a number of his clients feel worse at the end of the summer – a hangover from years of back-to-school dread. Surprisingly, in the temperate climates in the northern hemisphere suicide rates are higher in the spring, as though deep despair sets in when the promise of spring fails to deliver respite from a spell of misery.
As you’d expect, the effect of the seasons varies depending on where you live, as do attitudes towards time. To investigate this the social psychologist Robert Levine compared the tempo of life in 31 countries around the world using three indicators. First, he measured the average walking speed of random pedestrians walking alone in the morning rush hour along a flat street with wide pavements. How fast did people choose to walk? Window-shoppers were excluded on the basis that they dawdle, and the streets selected were not so congested that the crowds would slow people down. Second, he wanted to compare the efficiency of an everyday task, so he measured the time taken to request a stamp in the local language, to pay for it and to receive the change. Finally, to establish the value placed on time-keeping in each culture, the accuracy of 15 clocks on the walls of banks in each city was checked. Combining these measures gave him an overall score for pace of life. It may not surprise you to learn that the USA, northern Europe and South East Asian countries had the fastest tempos, but Levine’s findings weren’t all so predictable. The efficiency of stamp-selling in Costa Rica brought the country up to thirteenth place in the tempo charts (funnily enough that’s the exact opposite of the experience I had buying a stamp there, but then that’s why we have systematic research on these things, rather than relying on anecdote). Even within the same country the variation can be extreme. On comparing 36 cities in the USA, in this instance combining walking speeds and clock accuracy with the time taken to obtain change in a bank, Boston came out fastest, while the home of showbiz, Los Angeles, was slowest, let down by particularly laid-back bank clerks. Everyone expected New York to come out on top, but in a 90-minute observation period during the early 1990s, the researcher witnessed one pedestrian dealing with a mugger and another with a pickpocket, which might have slowed them down.
At the time of the study the countries with the fastest tempos were also the countries with the strongest economies. This raises the question of which comes first – do people in active economies move faster because time is perceived to be more valuable, or did the fast pace of life lead to economic success? There’s no doubt that energy and speed can help some businesses, but in some cases there is a limit to the extent to which the speed of your work can increase the market for your goods. However fast you make umbrellas, if it never rains where you live, no one will buy them. So the relationship between tempo and gross domestic product is best seen as a two-way interaction. Speed leads to some economic success, but economic success also requires people to move faster and makes a society more reliant on the clock.
TIME’S SURPRISES
So our minds create for us an experience of time which not only feels smooth on the whole, but which we can share with others, allowing us to co-ordinate our activities. Despite this, time never stops surprising us. The reason time is so fascinating is that we never appear to become accustomed to the way it seems to play tricks on us. Throughout life, we find it warps. We comment on weeks that seem to rush by, while others drag. We fly into a time zone that is behind us and create the illusion of cheating time, of living a few hours of life twice. Fly the other way, and we wonder what happened to the time we missed. Despite the longer evenings we get when the clocks go forward in spring, there is still a nagging feeling that an hour has been stolen from us. And when the clocks go back in the autumn we feel a sense of satisfaction at gaining an extra hour which marginally lengthens the weekend. The White Night festival in Brighton on the south coast of England, and its sister event Nuit Blanche in Amiens in France, were established to explore the theme of how you might use that extra hour in the middle of the night. You can do everything from listening to music in an aquarium to learning to knit in a bar. Although our rational side is well aware that this extra hour is just a trick of the clock, we still feel we are losing or gaining time, and this begins to illustrate how much of our relationship with time is based on illusions we create in our own minds.
In 1917 the wonderfully named researchers Boring and Boring conducted an experiment in which they woke up sleeping people and asked them to estimate the time, something the participants (including Mr and Mrs Boring themselves) were usually able to do successfully to within 15 minutes. But not everyone can do this. Although most of us find time slightly mystifying, for some of us it is utterly inscrutable. Eleanor is 17 and tells me she has never quite ‘got time’. She is aware that she cannot judge its passing in the same way that everyone else seems to. When she wakes up in the morning, unlike the people in Boring and Boring’s study, she has no idea what time it is and this continues all morning. She does not seem to sense time moving on. ‘I don’t know the time until lunchtime, when I start feeling hungry. I deliberately look for clues like that to work out how much time is passing.’ At school she finds that while other people are able to make a rough guess, she can get the time wrong by several hours. Without checking the clock she has no idea whether a lesson is near the beginning or about to end. She inadvertently leaves her mother waiting where she has come to collect her because time doesn’t feel as though it’s passing, so she forgets to check her watch. So far the inconvenience has been mainly for her patient parents, but now that she’s taking exams, she’s beginning to notice the problems this lack of time perception can cause. While other students plan how much time to spend on each question, unless Eleanor constantly monitors the clock she doesn’t notice that it might be time to move on. Her case illustrates that we don’t all share the exactly the same concept of time. Eleanor also has dyslexia and this could hold the key to her difficulties with time perception. There is an intriguing link between the two, one which I’ll return to when I discuss how the brain measures time.
For Eleanor time is constantly surprising, but in some circumstances it can be just as unnerving for the rest of us. We marvel, somewhat anxiously, at where the weekend went and how fast other people’s children seem to grow up, or despair at how time drags in an airport qu
eue. Imagine you are watching the final five minutes of a football match, and how differently that time passes depending on whether your team is winning or losing. If they’re 1–0 down five minutes simply isn’t long enough. If they’re 1–0 up, time appears to stretch, giving the other team far more chances to level the score than they deserve. Think of a journey and how the way back always seems shorter. With fewer new memories to fill the time, everything seems familiar and it feels as though the distance is much shorter, unless, as the nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist William James observed, you are retracing your steps because you have lost something. Then it seems endless. Time plays tricks on our minds.
As young children grow up, these mysteries of time are something they begin to observe for themselves. I asked two brothers what they had noticed about time passing. ‘When you have to brush your teeth for two minutes that seems like a long time, but when you’re watching TV two minutes goes really fast,’ said eight-year-old Ethan. His 10-year-old brother Jake observed, ‘If you’re waiting for someone in the car while they go shopping it seems longer than if you do the shopping yourself.’ These children have already noticed that time is deeply subjective. Our sense of time passing can even depend on the way we feel about our physical well-being. The psychologist John Bargh gave people anagrams to solve, then noted the time it took them to walk to the lift to go home after the experiment. Half the people were given anagrams of everyday words, but half were given words that might be associated with older people, such as ‘grey’ and ‘bingo’. When these people walked to the lift, these subtle hints about old age had primed them to such a degree that it changed their sense of timing and they walked more slowly.7
Time Warped Page 2
