Time Warped

by Claudia Hammond

  With the exception of the language spoken by the Amondawa tribe in the Amazon where no word for time exists, most other languages constantly make reference to it using words relating to space or physical distance. We talk of long holidays or short meetings, but rarely do we do this the other way round, borrowing the language of time to describe distance. We talk of time speeding up as though it were a physical object in space, like a car, but wouldn’t describe a street as four minutes long. But how much does this really tell us about the way we think of time? Do we use time-related phrases because they fit conveniently into our sentence structures or does this tell us something about the way we perceive time? Our experience of time is quirky and unsettling – and we come up with expressions that try to capture that feeling.

  Is the way we think about time also influenced by the words we use? Psychologist David Casasanto compared the use of metaphors for ‘time as distance’ and ‘time as amount’ in four languages. In English we talk about something taking a long time (implying distance), whereas the Greeks use a phrase meaning physically large to refer to time and Spanish speakers refer to ‘mucho tiempo’ meaning much time. Using that handy research method of comparing numbers of hits on Google, Casasanto investigated whether the phrase ‘much time’ or ‘long time’ appeared most frequently. It was clear that French and English speakers preferred the use of ‘long’, the distance metaphor, while Greek and Spanish speakers used ‘much’, the amount metaphor. But the intriguing part of the study comes next.46 A group of English and Greek speakers were given a series of tasks presented on a computer screen to investigate whether the way they spoke about time also affected the way they thought about it. Some tasks involved having to estimate how long it took a line to spread gradually across a screen. Others involved guessing the time taken for a container to fill up with water. Some involved both. The results were clear: the English speakers were distracted by distance and allowed it to affect their estimation of time, while the Greek speakers were distracted by amount. However, Casasanto found that people’s loyalty to their language metaphors could be weakened; he was able to train English speakers to think of time in terms of amount instead of distance.

  This experiment might seem obscure, but if it really is the case that the language you speak affects the way you conceptualise the relationship between time and space to the extent that it can change the judgements you make about speed, distance, volume and duration, then this is remarkable. This is a fairly new area of study, but you have to wonder what the implications might be. Could the words we use affect our whole attitude towards time?

  TIME AND SPACE MIXED UP

  Our use of language is not the only evidence demonstrating our association of time with space. In fact there’s more than an association. We get time and space mixed up. The father of developmental psychology, Jean Piaget, studied the way children’s minds work at different stages of their development. He conducted a study where two trains on parallel tracks move for exactly the same amount of time, but because one is going faster it stops several inches further away than the other. Young children insist that this train must have been moving for longer. Piaget concluded that young children find it hard to distinguish between size as it relates to time and size as it relates to space. Children’s brains are of course still developing, but experiments conducted by Lera Boroditsky suggest that as adults we don’t find it much easier.47 We are good at judging distances, but these judgements can skew our estimations of time. So if a series of dots are bunched together as they cross a screen we are likely to think they are moving faster than if they are more spread out, even though they are moving at precisely the same speed. We find it hard to judge time without allowing spatial considerations to come into play.

  We are lucky enough to have complex brains that not only compute in many dimensions, but are conscious that they are doing so too. Our brains are very clever, but this cleverness can trip itself up. In this case, our brains are fooled by their very awareness that time and space are related. Bigger sometimes means faster, but not always. Lions are quicker than mice, but bullets are even faster. In everyday life we constantly make mental calculations involving speed, time and distance – think of catching a ball or crossing a road. So perhaps it’s not surprising if they are associated and sometimes confused in the mind. Show children two lights and ask them which was on for longest and they will choose the brighter one. Show them two trains racing and they’ll say the biggest one is the fastest. They get the idea of largest, but often apply it to the wrong property, which takes us back to the theory I discussed in the previous chapter: that we might have a neural structure which judges magnitude rather than time in particular. As adults we make fewer of these mistakes, but the relics of this space/time crossover are still there.

  There is one rather mysterious element to all this: the way we think about time and space is not symmetrical. If you show people a line of three light bulbs, switch them on one at a time and ask people to guess the time between each light coming on, the more spread out the lights are physically, the longer people will say the duration between lights was. This is known as the ‘kappa effect’. It’s similar to the study with the series of dots moving across the screen, and also works the other way round. If you switch the lights on in turn and ask people to estimate the distance between them, the faster you turn on the lights, the closer they will say they are. This is called the ‘tau effect’. Just as we know a lion is big so it probably runs fast, we find it hard to ignore what we know about speed and distance and assume that faster probably means nearer. But Boroditsky and Casasanto have shown that the relationship between space and time is imbalanced. We think about time in terms of space more than we think about space in terms of time. This brings us back round to the language and the lack of phrases such as ‘a four-minute-long street’.48

  Rhesus monkeys do things differently, displaying a symmetrical interference of time with space and space with time that shows they are just as likely to think about space in terms of time as they are time in terms of space.49 Is this because they don’t have language or because their senses differ? We know rhesus monkeys can’t learn to throw a ball like a human being. Does this mean they haven’t learned about the way that force, time and distance interact; that the harder you throw a ball, the further it goes, but the longer it takes to land? Time and distance (or space) seem to have a unique kind of association in the human mind. Perhaps those fanciful mental images of decades and days of the week that I discussed at the start of the chapter mean much more than we think. They could even allow us to do something extraordinary – to represent mental time in space so that we can time-travel mentally in a way that no other animal can. At will, we can imagine next week or think about when we were seven and then jump back again. This remarkable ability is something I’ll discuss in more detail in Chapter Five. In my view it’s the fact that we can picture time at all that allows us to think about future events, and also to imagine impossible events. At will, I can picture – and any moment now so will you – a small mouse flying up to the moon on a toothbrush on New Year’s Eve next year, dodging fireworks as it flies. No one knows what a monkey might be able to conjure up in its mind, but is its imagination stunted by an inability to spatialise time?

  WHEN IS WEDNESDAY’S MEETING?

  The way we associate time and space is not just a theoretical matter; it affects us on a daily basis in the real world too. We all use space to think about time, some of us, as we’ve seen, more elaborately than others. There’s one simple question that highlights the differences in the way individuals view time in space, one which separates us into two groups.

  Next Wednesday’s meeting has had to be moved forward by two days. What day is the meeting happening now?

  There are two possible, equally correct answers to this question, yet I’ve been surprised at the number of people who before answering insist that they know this is something they always get wrong. You can see them struggling not to give their
first, intuitive answer. What they really mean is that they have encountered situations where another person feels differently and have then blamed themselves for somehow misunderstanding time. Although there’s no right or wrong answer, whether you answered Monday or Friday tells you far more about the way you personally see time passing than you would ever guess. If your first instinct, regardless of how you think others might answer the question, is that the meeting is on Monday, then it is time that is moving, like a constant conveyor belt where the future comes towards you. You are using the time-moving metaphor.

  Time-moving metaphor

  If you believe the meeting to be on Friday, then you have a sense that you are actively moving along a time-line towards the future – the ego-moving metaphor.

  So either you stay still while the future comes towards you or you move along towards the future. It’s the difference between thinking that we’re fast approaching Christmas or that Christmas is coming up fast. Did you pass the deadline or did the deadline pass you?

  Ego-moving metaphor

  THE RIVER OF TIME

  In captivity in Gaza, the BBC journalist Alan Johnston had a strong image of time as a flowing river or a sea. He even visualised the water deliberately to help him deal with the hours he was forced to spend with nothing to do but think. Mental imagery is a strategy psychologists sometimes teach people to help them to cope with difficult situations such as living with chronic pain, but Alan developed this coping mechanism of his own accord. With no one to talk to and no idea when he would be released, it’s not surprising that he had what he modestly refers to as ‘bleak moments’. But Alan had the same determination shared by the psychiatrist Victor Frankl during his time in Nazi concentration camps – that his captors could control everything else, but not his thoughts. He resolved to take charge of his own mental state.

  Alan took comfort in the notion of a river, because while the repetitious, empty days and nights suggested endless circularity, the flow of a river meant that he was always moving forwards, and that one day things would be different:

  ‘I used to imagine myself as a boatman on this river of time. I knew the river would eventually get somewhere. Either I’d die of old age in that place or some moment of freedom would come. But regardless, something would happen; I would not always be living like that. Even if I reached old age there, somehow the river of time would reach a point where this thing would stop. As a boatman on the river of time I needed to keep my eyes on the horizon and not to endlessly watch the bank passing by because that would feel slower. I used to think that I needed to keep steering the boat into the calmer waters, by which I mean a calmer state of mind. When I was miserable and unhappy and dwelling on dark things, the river had choppier waters and flowed less swiftly, so the thing was to steer yourself into the calmer, faster-flowing water of the river of time which would eventually, inexorably bear you to an end of that situation.’

  As a free man, Alan had read about Ernest Shackleton’s journey in a tiny open lifeboat after his ship the Endurance had become trapped near Elephant Island in the ice floe that eventually wrecked it. If Shackleton could take that little boat across a dangerous ocean and even survive a hurricane, then Alan could survive his own journey locked in this room in Gaza. ‘I had to make a mental journey across the endless wastes of sea and time. Just as Shackleton was aiming for a tiny speck of land far, far beyond his horizon, I was aiming for a moment in time far, far beyond the time horizon – the moment when I’d be free.’

  He imagined that his vessel on this ‘sea of time’ was a raft of mental planks. Each plank represented something positive about his situation – his health seemed to be okay, Gaza was a place where deals were often made and he hadn’t been tortured.

  ‘I imagined lashing those mental planks together to make my raft on the sea of time. I had a powerful mental picture of me and this vessel. When you’re feeling low, you think how am I going to get myself into the brighter side of my mind again? You argue yourself out and every time you use the argument it gets slightly blunter. You hear yourself saying where’s the freaking deal been for the last three months? Then instead of going through the arguments all over again, you envisage that raft slowly pulling you through. You see yourself on the sea of time and that image is quite calming. It’s symbolic. Sometimes there’s a mental storm and the planks will be scattered in the sea and you have to swim around and pick them up. You’re thinking how good each plank is and you lash them back together again and off you go. That was a process that went on many, many times. I hadn’t thought about it till now but my ways of coping were time-related.’

  Alan’s image of himself as constantly moving on towards the future is one shared by many people. Regardless of what he did, he knew that time would carry on taking him onwards and he would reach the future. This is an example of the ego-moving metaphor (again, ego is not being used in a judgemental way in this phrase). It contrasts with the time-moving metaphor I described, where you remain motionless while the future comes towards you. Does the day of an exam get nearer to you or do you get nearer to the day of the exam? This is why the question I posed earlier about moving Wednesday’s meeting is so revealing. It gives you a clue as to which of these two perspectives you personally ascribe to. I remind you again that there’s no right or wrong answer here, no better or worse way of viewing time.

  MAKING TIME GO BACKWARDS

  The incessant forward movement of time has long fascinated writers, who have attempted to explain it through tales of time-travel or even through the reversal of the direction of time. Lewis Carroll’s rarely discussed novel The Story of Sylvie and Bruno features a brother and sister who sometimes appear as children, sometimes as tiny fairies. When they encounter the Outlandish Watch, which makes time go backwards, people they meet take pieces of lamb out of their mouths and return them to a joint of meat, which rotates slowly over a spit until it becomes raw again and eventually the fire dies down to a single flame and is extinguished. The accompanying now-raw potatoes are handed back to the gardener for burial and of course every conversation becomes nonsensical. In Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow, the Nazi doctor heals his Jewish patients of their terrible wounds rather than inflicting them. In Counter-Clock World, Philip K. Dick takes it a step further, with old people knocking on the insides of their coffins begging the funeral directors to unearth them from the ground in the cemetery. Once rescued, these ‘old-borns’ live their lives backwards, gradually getting younger. If they’ve written a book earlier in life the state ensures that every copy is destroyed at the precise moment it was published. Time continues to rewind until they are children and eventually babies, whom women then volunteer to carry. Their pregnancy bumps get smaller and smaller until the day of conception when the women have an overwhelming desire to find someone to have sex with. This unconceives the old person. They are no more and it is as though they had never existed.

  These are only stories, but new research shows that with the clever use of a mirror, making time appear to go backwards is easier than these writers could have guessed. This experiment even took its creators, the psychologists Daniel Casasanto and Robert Bottini, by surprise.50 They took Dutch speakers and performed the usual test of getting them to press keys on either the left or right of the keyboard when different time words flashed up on the screen. As you’d expect for speakers of a language written from left to right, they were fastest when they had to press the left key for the words in the past. Then they did the same experiment but with the words written on the screen in mirror-image, forcing them to read from right to left, and everything changed. The direction of the flow of time reversed in their minds and suddenly they were faster when the early words were associated with a right-hand key. This may sound simple to you now, but I can assure you that it really was an extraordinary discovery and I can see why the authors were so surprised. This is a young area of study, and at the moment we don’t know what the practical implications of this finding might be, but its s
ignificance lies in the suggestion that the direction in which we read affects not only our thinking, but the way we visualise time itself.

  Your answer to the Wednesday meeting question might seem intuitive, but this too can be manipulated. Your response can even depend on where you’re standing. Lera Boroditsky is particularly imaginative when it comes to devising experiments that illustrate just how easy it is for us to switch our perception of time depending on what we’re doing at a particular moment.51 She asked people the same Wednesday meeting question, but some of them were on the Caltrain from San Francisco to San Jose, others were at the airport and the third set of people, in true psychological research tradition, were in the researcher’s own department at Stanford University queuing for lunch. This is the same psychology department where Philip Zimbardo conducted his famous prison experiment, turning the basement into a makeshift jail (more on that in Chapter Five, but I’ve seen the so-called solitary confinement cells they used in that study, and they really are just cupboards only a filing cabinet deep). I’m pleased to say Boroditsky’s study involved no such cruelty, but nonetheless led to findings which are significant.

  In response to the Wednesday meeting question, people who are waiting – either to board their plane or at the back of the lunch queue – are more likely to give the answer Monday (the time-moving metaphor). They are waiting for time to come to them, to allow them to start their journey or eat their lunch. The people already getting onto the train or about to get off it and those disembarking from a plane were more likely to say Friday (the ego-moving metaphor). They had actively begun their journey and already felt that they were moving forwards, rather than being forced to wait for time to come to them.