So what are the major factors that cause time to warp? The first is emotion. An hour at the dentist feels very different from an hour working up to a deadline. If we look at pictures of serene faces we are quite good at guessing how long we watched them for, but show us a series of frightened faces and we overestimate the time that passed. However, the best illustration of the power of emotion to skew our perception of time is more dramatic – the slowing down of time when you are fighting for survival; when, like Chuck Berry falling through the sky, you are genuinely in fear for your life, one minute becomes elastic and can feel like fifteen.
TIME SLOWS DOWN WHEN YOU’RE AFRAID
Alan Johnston had long known that kidnapping was a risk that came with the job of a foreign journalist in Gaza. It was an eventuality he had rehearsed in his mind before it happened in real life. When that fated day came around, and he saw a man get out of a car holding a pistol, his initial thought was, ‘So this is how being kidnapped feels and this time I’m not just imagining it.’ Then for a while everything went into slow motion. ‘You can almost stand back and watch yourself going through it,’ he told me.
Several weeks after he was captured, his captors gave him a radio. One night he heard a story on a BBC World Service news bulletin that made time slow down once more. ‘They said that I’d been killed.’ He began to think that perhaps the kidnappers’ public relations department had got ahead of itself and released the news too early. Was this what they were planning to do tonight? ‘It seemed more likely that they would want to keep me alive because that would be more useful to them, but when you’re lying in the dark hearing that message going out to the world and they say they’ve killed you, there’s a part of you that wonders if they’re going to do it. Maybe tonight’s the night.’ For Alan, this felt like the longest night of his four months in captivity. Time definitely slowed down.
When people are afraid they might die, whether in a situation like Alan’s, in a plummeting glider like Chuck Berry’s, or in a car accident, they often report that the event lasted far longer than was possible. Somehow in just a few seconds they find the time to consider a great number of topics in detail. They think through their past, they speculate on the future and all the while they scan their memories for any piece of knowledge from anywhere which might help them to survive. This experience of time deceleration through fear is well-established, and – provided you feel frightened – time can distort even in a non-life-threatening situation. When people with spider phobias were instructed to look at spiders for 45 seconds (I am amazed they ever agreed to take part in this experiment), they overestimated the time that had passed. The same happened with novice skydivers. If they were watching other people, they gauged the duration of the fall to be short, but once it was their turn, time seemed to move more slowly and they overestimated the minutes they spent in the sky.
THROWING PEOPLE OFF BUILDINGS
Is this deceleration of time simply an illusion, or does the way we process time actually slow down when we are in fear for our lives? If the brain does process time differently when we are terrified, then it should also be able to process sights that are usually too rapid to see with the naked eye. To discover whether this is true, all you need to do is to scare people out their wits and then give them a test during that terror. One man knew just how to do it, and – in what appears to be something of a theme in research on time perception – was prepared, along with his brave volunteers, to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve it.
On the day of the study it was particularly windy. This was perfect. For the 23 volunteers standing on top of a Texas skyscraper, the wind injected a little extra anxiety into an already fraught situation. If this experiment was to work, real fear was essential. The neuroscientist David Eagleman, from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston (the same neuroscientist who wrote the best-selling imagined stories of the afterlife, Sum), warned his volunteers to stay well back from the edge until it was their turn to climb up inside a 33-foot-high metal cage mounted on the roof. He radioed down to the team on the ground 150 feet below to check that everything was ready, then turned to a line of digital wristwatches with giant faces. These perceptual chronometers were set to alternate very quickly between two screens showing random numbers. They flicked so fast that to the naked eye they looked like a blur. Eagleman wanted to know whether terror would speed up a volunteer’s sensory processing enough for them to read the numbers which the calm human brain fails to register. Perhaps it’s not that time slows down when we’re afraid, but that our minds speed up.
Eagleman had previously experimented with taking the volunteers on a rollercoaster, but they just weren’t scared enough; and in fact many seemed to enjoy the experience. It was time for something more drastic – freefall. Eagleman knew that no one would agree to take part in this experiment unless he had shown that he was willing to do it himself. Strapped into a harness, he was dangled over the side of the tower block and dropped, backwards. (Forwards wasn’t sufficiently frightening.)Then he did it again. And then again. Before the third attempt he was convinced that he would be less terrified; experience would surely tell his brain that he would be fine. But no, he told me, ‘It was still beyond scary.’ Then it was the turn of a young man called Jesse Kallus. Just as Eagleman had been before him, Jesse was thrown off the building and by the time he had been caught safely at the bottom he had reached a top speed of 70 miles an hour.
Everyone who took part in the experiment reported that time felt as though it decelerated. The fall stretched every one of those unbearably petrifying seconds. So the first element of the study had worked; the desired effect of subjective time dilation had been achieved. Yet still the figures on the watch face flickered too fast for their brains to perceive them. David Eagleman had demonstrated that time itself doesn’t actually slow down when we’re afraid, and nor does the brain’s sensory processing speed up. What changes is our perception of time – our mind time.
So how does this happen? It is true that fright does etch strong memories into the brain, and – as will emerge in this book – memory is one of the key factors in making time warp. When people are shown a video of a bank robbery lasting exactly 30 seconds, two days later they tend to guess that it lasted five times longer than it did. The more disturbing a version of the video they are shown, the greater their overestimation of its duration.8 After a stressful event we often recall every single detail of what we saw, heard or even smelt. The richness and freshness of these memories contributes to our sense of how long it lasted. We become accustomed to a certain quantity of memories fitting into a certain time-frame. Usually this serves us well, but during a life-threatening incident the intensity of the experience results in the creation of more memories. Every second feels brand new, which causes us to judge the event to have taken longer than it really did, to have happened in slow-motion. This sensation is amplified by the fact that in a car accident, for example, the mind focuses on the elements of a situation necessary for survival and filters out anything inessential such as the scenery, the songs changing on the radio or the number of cars that pass. These are the cues which would normally help to assess time passing. Without them, once again time warps.
The big question is whether the combination of the plethora of memories and the absence of cues to time passing is enough to make time decelerate this drastically? There is a more radical explanation – is it possible that the way the brain actually measures time could make it feel as though it slows down? If the brain counts time by monitoring its own processes, when it moves extra fast in an emergency this could cause it to count more beats and to believe that more time has passed. So while the brain is racing to save itself, so is its clock. I’ll come back to this in the next chapter. Before that there are other curious factors that distort time. The life-threatening, mind-racing moments of intense concentration are not the only occasions when time decelerates. The opposite – having nothing on which to fix your mind – in other words sheer boredom – has
a similar, though less extreme effect, as do a series of other experiences.
NOT THE KINDEST OF EXPERIMENTS
You arrive to take part in a study. You know it is to take place in the psychology department, but not what it involves. There are five other participants, all wearing name-tags. Everyone seems friendly, if a little unsure of what might be about to happen. The woman in charge says that first you should get to know each other and she gives you a list of topics to discuss, among them the place you would most like to visit in the world, your most embarrassing experience and what you would choose if you could have one magic wish. Soon you’re happily exchanging tales of humiliating incidents, like the time you got an electric hot-brush stuck in your hair on the way to a wedding and had to walk along the street with the flex hanging down from your head (this happened to me). The psychologist says you will be working in pairs and, to make things go smoothly, you should write down the names of the two people from the group with whom you would prefer to work. That’s easy. You hand in your form and wait to see who you’ll be paired with. But when they call you in for your turn they look rather embarrassed and say that no one has put you down as someone they’d like to work with. They say that in all the studies they’ve been running, this is so unusual that they think it best for you to work on the tasks alone. You’re a bit surprised, and – if you’re honest – hurt, but you try to tell yourself that it doesn’t really matter what a group of strangers thinks of you and that you didn’t particularly like them anyway. You’re determined not to show anyone that you’re upset and to do the tasks as well as you can. For the first task, they start a stopwatch, then stop it and ask you to guess how much time has passed.
While you sit alone wondering why no one likes you, what you don’t realise is that every other member of the group has also been taken aside to separate rooms to work alone, but while half were given the same explanation they gave you, others were told they must work on they own because they had been chosen by everyone, making it difficult to allocate partners fairly. A harsh experiment you might think, although not as bad as a study later in the same series where they tell you that the results of your personality questionnaire indicate that although you might marry several times, none of your relationships will last and you are likely to spend your old age alone. I should add at this point that after all experiments like this participants are debriefed and told it’s all a fiction.
The intriguing result of this rejection study is that the belief that a few strangers dislike you can alter your time perception. The people who were told they were popular estimated the 40 second test as lasting an average of 42.5 seconds, while the rejected group came out with an average of 63.6 seconds.9 Although 20 seconds might not sound like much, the fact that there was a difference is quite extraordinary. The rejection had made them painfully aware of everything happening in the present. Their misery had stretched time.
This research on rejection and time perception stemmed from the work of psychologist Roy Baumeister, who studied people who were contemplating suicide. Those in this situation tend to experience what is known as a deconstructed state, where they have such a strong sense of an inner numbness that they have little or no concept of a future and find it hard to imagine that life might ever improve if they remain alive or that choosing death would have serious ramifications. People planning suicide are in a very particular mental state where the perception of time can become skewed. As an aside, it is a state which can also explain why suicide notes often reveal so little. The American sociologist Edwin Shneidman spent more than a quarter of a century studying the meaning of suicide notes after finding a collection of them in the vaults of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office in 1959. He decided to devote his career to their study, determined to gain an insight into the suicidal mind. His analysis showed, probably not surprisingly, that suicide notes contain a greater percentage of first-person singular pronouns than other sorts of documents. But it seems in terms of insight their content is disappointing. After spending more than 25 years obtaining and analysing notes, Shneidman concluded that most tell the same story, and despite being ‘written at perhaps the most dramatic moment of a person’s life, are surprisingly commonplace, banal, even sometimes poignantly pedestrian and dull’.10 Later in life he decided that odd phrases could sometimes be telling, but that most notes still bring little by way of explanation to those left behind. Only a third of people who kill themselves even leave a note. Somewhat harshly Shneidman believes that those who do are the kind of people who like stating the obvious. He doesn’t disguise his bitterness at his disappointment with the style of the notes: ‘To a “Quarantine – Measles” sign such a person might add the words “Illness inside – please stay out”.’ He believes that because people who are about to kill themselves are in this altered state, a state of such fixed purpose where time is warped, they are unable to explain much about their state of mind. The tragedy here is that an explanation is exactly what those left behind are searching for. And Shneidman believes we optimistically look for even more than that; we hope that someone on the brink of death might have some ‘special message for the rest of us’. But lest we think that Shneidman was lacking in sympathy for those driven to suicide, he did a great deal to pioneer the field of suicide prevention and co-founded the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center in 1958, a centre that was to become famous in 1962 after it concluded that Marilyn Monroe’s death was caused by ‘probable suicide’.
People with depression can experience distortions of time even if they are not feeling suicidal. During an episode of depression, the past and the present become central, while the future – especially any kind of hopeful future – is almost impossible to imagine. The British psychiatrist Matthew Broome has frequently seen this in patients. And experiments confirm that people with depression give time estimations that are on average twice as long as those who are not depressed. In other words time is going at half its normal speed. This leads me to wonder whether in some cases depression could be considered a disorder of time perception. Or perhaps the slowing of time is a consequence of depression, which then helps to maintain it and makes it harder to escape from. Matthew Broome points out that we know that sleep deprivation and the use of a light box can both elevate a person’s mood as they confuse the internal clock.11 When a person is depressed the present and the future become ‘bound to one another in suffering’.12 The effect is so distinct that the philosopher of psychiatry Martin Wyllie suggests that as an additional diagnostic tool, mental health professionals could ask their clients to estimate the duration of the consultation. I wonder whether you could simply ask them to estimate the passing of a minute. If 40 seconds feel like a minute to them, then time is stretching. The more slowly time is passing for that person, the more severe their condition might be.
Time also decelerates for the most anxious cancer patients. The psychophysicist Marc Wittman has found that they overestimate time intervals and report that time seems to be slowing down. Contemplation of their mortality has directed their attention to the passage of time with the result that it protracts it.13 In contrast, for patients experiencing conditions involving a break with reality, such as schizophrenia, time can distort in many different ways – appearing to vary in speed, repeat itself or even stop altogether. The Cotard delusion takes this distortion of time perception to extremes. Named after the French neurologist who first described it in 1882, the Cotard delusion is a rare condition of extreme pessimism, beginning with depression and ending in the denial of everything, including possession of the main organs of the body, having a family, a future or even an existence. Back in 1882 Jules Cotard wrote of one of his patients, ‘Stating that she was no longer anything, the patient begged for her veins to be opened up, so that it could be seen that she had no more blood and that her organs no longer existed.’14 In a sense this is the ultimate disorder of time. There is no sense of a past or a future, and three-quarters of the patients in the subsequent case reports of this rar
e condition even believed that they were dead.15 It is very rare, but, as we’ll see, problems with the perception of time could also be a root of a far more common condition.
HYPERACTIVE TIME
He doesn’t sit still. He fidgets. He can’t concentrate. He moves impatiently from one thing to the next, constantly getting distracted. This might sound like the description of any lively child. But there is a big difference. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, do these things far more than other children of the same age and it has been discovered very recently that faulty timing might be the key. Children with ADHD are rooted in the present. They find it hard to consider the consequences of their actions and they find waiting, even for a short time, excruciating. This might be because what feels like five minutes to the rest of us, feels like an hour to them, so when they are told to sit and wait for five minutes this could be a task they find genuinely challenging. In laboratory experiments children with ADHD find timing tasks very difficult. Their experience of time appears to be different from that of other children. If they are asked to say when three seconds have passed they think they’re over in far less than that; in other words if you have ADHD time passes very slowly. This finding is so common in children with ADHD that Katya Rubia, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, has been able to use time estimation tasks to correctly classify 70 per cent of cases, quite a feat considering there are currently no conclusive tests for ADHD; current diagnoses rely on experts watching a child’s behaviour and then making a judgement.
Time Warped Page 3
