Time Warped

by Claudia Hammond

  I realise I have covered a lot of different theories here. My best guess, based on the available evidence, is this: that pulses which are already being used for other purposes are measuring time in our brains. They might be ripples, they might be energy packets, but, whichever they are, when we turn our attention to time itself, they speed up. This acceleration, which you might recall from the discussion of the sheep going through the gate, gives the impression that time is dilating. Extreme anxiety also speeds up the pulses, so while Chuck Berry desperately tries to save his own life the pulses get faster and time gets slower. To estimate a length of time, we use the dopamine system along with combinations of those four crucial areas of the brain – the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, the frontal lobe and the anterior insular cortex – depending on the time-frames involved.

  Once again this illustrates the central theme of this book – that we are creating our own perception of time, based on the neuronal activity in our brains with input from the physiological symptoms of our bodies. This could seem like a reductionist explanation, that time is simply chemical, something created by neuronal activity in concert with the dopamine system, but these neuroscientific explanations should not reduce the importance of our subjective experience of time. For Chuck Berry or Alan Johnston or even Michel Siffre lying in his cold sleeping bag in his ice cave, the pulsing of neurons meant nothing. It was the experience that mattered and this is the part we can change. We have multiple skills when it comes to considering time. We can mentally throw ourselves forward into the future or back into the past. We can imagine situations in the future that we have never witnessed, we can put events into chronological order, detect rhythm in music, speak, catch a ball, run for a train, cross the road and all without needing any awareness of what’s happening in the brain.

  Yet this reality we create for ourselves can easily get disturbed. Eleanor finds it hard to judge time without a clock. How much harder would it be with no daylight and no one else to ask?

  OPERATION TIME

  For two months, or 1,500 hours, Michel Siffre had lived in total isolation underground in the French Alps with no idea whether it was night or day. He allowed his body to tell him when to rest and went to bed whenever he felt tired, describing this body-dictated sleep as more perfect than he could ever have above ground. He ate when he was hungry. But he soon lost his appetite. The one advantage of the low temperatures was that his food stayed fresher for longer than he had expected, but he was no cook and his attempts to make rice pudding went so wrong that he had to open a tin of pineapple chunks to take the taste away. In the end he found he only really enjoyed bread and cheese. Each day he read, kept a diary and noted down physiological measurements from the electrodes fixed to his head and chest. The experiment he had dreamed of conducting for so long was going well, but he was becoming increasingly miserable. His mattress was made from a thick piece of sponge, but because it lay on a floor of ice in below-freezing temperatures, the bed was often damp. His feet were permanently wet and the air permanently dank. His clothes never dried out overnight, so he would put them back on next day and shudder at the bitter wetness against his skin. After spending so many hours sitting down each day he developed back pain, but was determined not to take painkillers in case they interfered with his physiological experiments.

  Michel found himself passing the hours by contemplating another time entirely – the future. He tried to find ways to entertain himself; his version of quoits involved attempting to throw sugar lumps into a pan of boiling water. A record player had been lowered down the shaft for company, but Beethoven and Mario Lanza weren’t a success. ‘The symphonies that had once charmed me became merely chaotic noise. And the popular songs sung by the best café singers seemed only to increase my feeling of loneliness.’ He was so lonely that the only thing he describes with any real pleasure in his diary is a spider he captured and kept in a box as a pet. He talks of often looking at her and feeding her tiny amounts of food and liquid.

  However, despite the wet conditions and his increasing hatred for the yellow lining of his tent, he became so fond of his makeshift home that he began to spend more and more time in bed, leaving the tent as infrequently as possible. When he did venture out into the cave to take measurements he loved to look back and see his cosy, freezing home glowing in the dark. He soon lost interest in keeping the cave tidy and allowed the rubbish to pile up outside the front of his tent. The low temperatures meant that the food was slow to rot, but he did notice mildew growing on an apple core and, ever on the look-out for an opportunity to experiment, he left a line of apple cores so that someone could check on the mildew’s progress the following year.

  With no daylight Michel developed a squint and found it increasingly hard to distinguish green from blue. He didn’t feel claustrophobic, but towards the end of his underground stay he was experiencing dizzy spells and afterwards doctors confirmed that his body had entered a state they called ‘incipient hibernation’.

  Throughout his stay two members of the team remained above ground at the cave’s entrance, sitting in baking sun during the day and lying in freezing temperatures at night. They were forbidden from contacting him lest this give him a clue as to the time of day. Instead, a telephone line had been rigged up which linked him with the surface and he called them whenever he woke, ate or was planning to sleep. They were under instruction to keep a record of the precise hour at which he phoned, but not to reveal it to him. By the second morning Michel was already two hours off-kilter. Within a week he was two days behind reality. Within 10 days he thought night was day and even noted in his diary that with their cheery ‘Hellos’ the team sounded as though they’d been up for hours. In fact he had woken them yet again in the middle of night.

  During each phone call he took his pulse and counted from 1 to 120 at the rate of one digit per second. But here something extraordinary happened. He thought the count took the two minutes that it should, but his colleagues with the stopwatch knew it was taking five minutes. Life without day or night had skewed his mind time. He had lost any accurate sense of the passage of hours or minutes and found he couldn’t even guess how long his phone call to the surface had lasted. Initially he used his Mario Lanza records to judge short periods of time, but soon, ‘The beginning and the end of a record blend and become integrated in the flood of time . . . Time no longer has any meaning for me. I am detached from it, I live outside time.’ Time had become something he could no longer judge, something he found strange.37 He was undoubtedly bored and lonely, yet found that although each day felt endless, when he looked back he thought it had lasted far fewer hours than it really had. This is a common paradox of time. Yet it was passing even faster than he realised. He eked out his cheese rations to make it last the whole two months, but he was so wrong about time that in fact he needn’t have deprived himself.

  He did have a suspicion that he might not have the right date, that he might be a few days ahead, but insisted he couldn’t possibly be behind. Then the team suddenly announced that the experiment had come to an end and that it was already 14 September. He was astonished. He thought he had 25 days to go. But the discovery that he could now leave the damp cave behind and emerge into the sunlight did not bring him joy. Instead he was confused. He felt he had lost his sense of reality and as a result had lost 25 days. Where had that time gone? He felt cheated of his memories.

  Then time warped once again. Although he was expecting to stay for almost another month, as soon as he discovered that the team were on their way down to fetch him, time felt unbearably slow. Even in the last few minutes before their arrival he wondered how they could be taking so long. He had always known that once the team arrived they would have to spend one more night underground getting everything ready for the ascent, but now he felt too impatient to wait. And he was afraid. He found himself overcome with the fear that having survived this long, he might die right at the last moment. The sound of every tiny rock fall or crack in the ice made him flinch.
Finally his friends reached him and he felt calmer. They were disgusted by his rubbish tip, which was by now waist-high, but relieved to see that he was okay. At the last moment he delayed leaving. He knew the press was camped out on the surface waiting for his glorious arrival, but he continued collecting samples from inside the cave until his colleagues told him he really must stop.

  The journey back to the top was tough. In his weakened state he had to be winched up on a platform, but even so he blacked out and almost gave up when he had to climb using his own strength through what they called the cat hole. They covered his eyes to shield him from the daylight. He blacked out again and was rushed to a helicopter, but not before his friend Anne-Marie had held some fresh violets to his nose for him to smell. This was to become a very strong memory for him; the first nice smell he had experienced in two months.

  Some claimed the whole operation had been nothing more than a publicity stunt and that the phone contact meant he wasn’t truly living in isolation, but most accepted that at the age of 23 Michel had founded the field of chronobiology – the scientific study of the effect of time on biological rhythms. His experiments demonstrated for the first time the existence of a body clock that can function independently of light and dark. Before Michel’s experiment no one knew how the body’s rhythms worked, but analysis of his sleep and wake cycles revealed that regardless of the time of day, if a series of sleep and active periods were added together they always came to 24 hours and 31 minutes. This is the one clock in the body that we can precisely locate. It is in a part of the hypothalamus gland at the base of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. The neurons here oscillate constantly, providing a rhythm of just over 24 hours which is corrected by daylight.38 Because Michel had no daylight he began doing what is known as free-running and each day he became another 31 minutes out of synch. Eventually he became so off-kilter that he was sleeping during the day rather than at night, yet his body was keeping to a surprisingly regular routine.

  For his mind it was a very different matter. His perception of time had warped to the extent that every hour felt three times shorter, despite his loneliness and boredom. He would stay awake for an entire day and evening and believe he had only been conscious for a few hours. He was taking to extremes the disruption in time experience by Mrs Hoagland in her fever. In one sense time had gone quickly; he was at the end of the experiment before he knew it. But in another he had slowed the pace of time in his own mind; time had expanded for him.

  After his 1962 expedition, Michel spent another 40 years researching time perception, continuing to use caves rather than laboratory isolation chambers for the simple reason that some people are so fanatical about caves that they are prepared to volunteer to spend a month entombed. Sealed laboratories don’t seem to inspire the same passion. The French department of defence funded Michel’s research in the hope of finding a way for submariners to sleep just once every 48 hours. But after the end of the Cold War he found it harder to secure funding, and now Michel believes it is only mathematicians and physiologists who will be able to take the subject further. Now in his seventies his love of caves continues. Naturally he celebrated the millennium underground and like any good Frenchman took champagne and foie gras with him. But having been there for some time beforehand, on the big day his sense of timing went askew and he toasted the new millennium three and a half days late.

  ‘BASICALLY I SEE time as if I’m sitting facing a wallpaper pasting table. I sit near to the right-hand edge, turned slightly sideways so that I look across and also back down the table. The paper starts close to my right hand (the present) and stretches back to the left at the extremity of the table. Ancient time is not actually on the table – like wallpaper, it is in a roll that has tumbled off the far end. I view historical time from an English perspective, in terms of reigns of monarchs. From the far left of the paper to about halfway along the table it is an actual genealogical table, showing Normans, Tudors, Stuarts etc. This stops at about 1800, with a long line running across the paper at an angle of about 15 degrees, to the far side, at 1900. There are two big, rectangular sleepers placed across the track, marking the First and Second World Wars. The far edge of the paper is the English Channel and everything beyond that is “abroad”. The map continues across the world, curving away as if on a giant globe. I notice that Burma has a sleeper marking the expulsion of King Thibaw in about 1885, in the spot otherwise reserved for Queen Victoria’s family or the declaration of the German empire.

  ‘Days of the week are like a simple set of five straight dominoes, with two doubles turned sideways at each end for the weekends. Again I jump back when nearing the end of the week. In this map, time moves from right to left. In all others it goes from left to right.’

  These are the words of a radio listener called Clifford Pope. I wonder whether they make any sense to you. Or how about this written by another listener – 73-year-old David Williams?

  ‘I see the year laid out in a roughly elliptical shape viewed from above. It’s March now, so I’m looking down on early March, with the scene curving away to the left towards April and May. Way over to the far left-hand side of the ellipse I can see August and September. Distant history begins at some point almost out of sight, far away to the right, but approachable by turning away from the year-ellipse just about where April is. That more or less coincides with the earliest nineteenth century.’

  Although you’ll visualise it in different ways, research suggests that for around 20 per cent of the readers of this book, the idea that you can see time in the mind’s eye will make complete sense. And for the other 80 per cent, strange as it might sound, you may ‘see’ time to a greater extent than you think you do. In the meantime, bear with me.

  As I said in the last chapter, we still don’t have a comprehensive theory of how people track time. And there is no organ solely for sensing time. But as I’ll be demonstrating in this chapter, the ability to picture time in space is particularly important in helping us to create our own perception of time. Not only that, but it can affect the language we use and it paves the way for something that no other creature can experience – mental time-travel.

  Through my own research it is clear that some ways of visualising time are more common than others, something backed up by other studies in this field.39 With the help of listeners to All in the Mind on BBC Radio 4, I have analysed the ways in which 86 people visualise time in space. Some sent me long descriptions, including diagrams, and while many commented that they had always assumed that everyone saw time in space, others, like Simon Thomas, thought it was an idiosyncrasy peculiar to them:

  ‘Until I listened to your programme I thought it was just me! I’ve done it all my life and as a child I assumed that everyone else did it too, until I tried discussing it with a few friends and ended up feeling a little stupid. Since then, and because I find it quite difficult to explain anyway, I’ve largely kept it to myself.’

  Whether or not people feel able to discuss the pictures they have in their head, most seemed almost fond of these mental images. They even commented on how much they had enjoyed the challenge of trying to draw or describe them.

  The ability to see time laid out in space is considered by many to be a type of synaesthesia, the condition where different senses appear to blend in the brain. The most common form of this condition involves associating colours with letters, numbers, names or days of the week. In my small survey, I charted the colours people gave for the days – everything from white marbled with orange for Tuesday to a beigey mustard for Friday. There’s an intriguing specificity about the precise tones and shades people ascribe to the different days, but I wanted to look for patterns. Is it possible that these colours are based on nothing more than cultural associations? To me Monday is clearly red. Is that because it’s the start of the week in Britain and so it’s a busy day that stands out? Perhaps most people who see colours for days in predominantly Christian countries see Monday as red. Not the case. It seems m
y fellow Britons are just as likely to see Monday as pale pink or light blue. To anyone who doesn’t see the day in colour this might all sound very strange, and people often assume that we’re inventing it, but countless studies have demonstrated that these associations are stable over time and too detailed for people to memorise; test me now and test me in five years and I’ll still insist that Mondays are red.

  Synaesthesia is now a well-documented phenomenon recognised by the scientific community. Rarer forms can even involve tasting shapes. I’ve never forgotten reading about a man who insisted that the chicken tasted too pointy, or meeting a woman who described seeing elaborate patterns on hearing certain types of music. When I played her some guitar music she spoke of seeing a quadrant divided into brown, blue, green and navy blue with a river of colour curling down like a plait from the top right-hand corner. As I mentioned above with my red Mondays, the extraordinary thing is that if you play these people the same piece of music or give them the same food six months later they will describe exactly the same associations, and you can test them on multiple stimuli that would be impossible to memorise. Synaesthetes are not making it up. They are experiencing real sensations – as evidenced by the areas of the brain that light up in brain-scanning studies. So when the woman mentioned above hears guitar music the areas of her brain relating to colour vision are activated.

  No one knows the exact cause of synaesthesia, but one theory points to the richness of connections in the brains of newborn babies. In our first months, the mass of sensations pouring into the brain are not all channelled down specialised pathways. It is as if the brain is a tangled jungle – sight and sound and smell and taste are all mixed up and hard to differentiate. Then at about four months a process of pruning starts, with all the vines and creepers cut back, leaving only separate branches for the senses. Out of confusion, clarity emerges. However, according to this pruning theory, for synaesthetes a few of these jungly connections somehow remain intact, with the result that they continue to experience some crossover of the senses. This idea is supported by the fact that many synaesthetes find that these connections get weaker as they get older. To extend the forest metaphor – while not all the entwining is hacked away, it withers back gradually as time goes on. I’ve found this happening myself. The colours I associate with people’s first names are so much fainter now.