It is through experiments like this that you can begin to see how our feelings about a situation affect our perception of time and the way we visualise it. In one experiment people were asked to imagine an event they were either dreading, like an operation, or anticipating happily, like a wedding.52 If they were looking forward to it, they were more likely to see themselves as moving towards it, but if they were dreading it, it moved towards them. Emotions and time are undoubtedly connected as we’ve already seen, and space is one of the factors that enables this connection. This last experiment makes me wonder whether the time-versus ego-moving metaphor might be a reflection of a person’s general optimism or pessimism about life. Are those who see themselves marching ever onward into the future more optimistic? This is another piece of research I’d like to add to my wish list of future experiments.
MELLOW MONDAY AND FURIOUS FRIDAY
This next study might seem rather peculiar, but bear with it. We’ve already established that it’s not uncommon to ground time in physical metaphors associated with space or distance, and that your emotional thoughts about an event can make a difference, but this study takes things a step further. The rather lovely title ‘Mellow Monday and Furious Friday’ might give you some idea of where this is going.53 The experimenters took the familiar Wednesday meeting question, but this time they specifically asked people about the emotions they were feeling. They found that if people felt angry they were more likely to see themselves moving through time (the Friday answer and the one associated with looking forward to an event) than to see time moving towards them (the Monday answer, more associated with dread). Then something really extraordinary happened. If the days were arranged on the computer screen in such a way that people were induced to give Friday as the answer, this then changed the way they felt. They then rated themselves as feeling angrier, for no apparent reason.
We know that negative emotions such as disgust, fear and dread are pull-away emotions that encourage you to withdraw. But anger is different; instead of feeling the urge to run away, you want to attack. When you’re furious you might slam the door as you march out of the room, but this is usually to avoid saying or doing something you might regret later. It takes an effort of will to leave the source of your anger rather than confront it. Anger draws you towards your target. The authors of the ‘Mellow Monday’ study believe that when we think about ourselves moving towards the future, we associate this with moving towards something, which we link with feeling angry. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure enough evidence is there yet to back up this chain of thoughts and events. They even suggest that if this association between emotions and the way you see time is as powerful as it appears, then one method of deliberately calming yourself when you feel angry is to think of time moving towards you, rather than you to it. Not easy to do in practice of course, but it might be easier the other way round. If you are dreading the exams that are soon approaching you, you could try imagining yourself in control striding purposefully towards them – if you can bear to.
In this chapter we’ve seen how our perception of time is influenced by the language we speak, the direction in which we read words on a page, our moods and even our position on a journey. Our sense of time in space is profound, and it enables us to time-travel mentally. On a whim we can decide to imagine life when we’ve retired or to think back to our first day at primary school. This ability is called chronesthesia and it’s something that I’ll be discussing in more detail in the subsequent chapters. Incredibly, mental time-travel can even be expressed in our bodies. If people are asked to envisage a typical day four years ago while standing blindfolded, they begin to lean back a few millimetres without even realising it. When they imagine a typical day four years into the future they lean forwards.54 No one in this study guessed what it was about, suggesting that their swaying bodies were not influenced by the experimenters. What this tells us is that time and space are embodied.
Even if we don’t visualise centuries of kings and queens laid out on decorating tables, to an extent we do all experience time within space, whether it’s through the way our bodies move when conceptualising time, the location of the past and the future in relation to our bodies, or our sense that time is like a river. Language provides an insight into the way we perceive time, but also seems to shape that thinking, illustrating that once again we create our own perception of time in our minds. Time constantly surprises us and confuses us. We can’t write it down. We can’t see it. We can’t capture it. So the ability to picture time even to a limited extent helps us to manipulate it in our minds and paves the way for mental time-travel. Next, we’re going back in time – to the past.
HAVE A LOOK at this list of events. Without looking them up, can you name the year and the month in which they took place?
John Lennon is shot dead
Margaret Thatcher becomes British Prime Minister
Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes
Michael Jackson dies
The film Jurassic Park is released in the USA
Argentina invades the Falkland Islands
Morgan Tsvangirai is sworn in as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe
Hurricane Katrina strikes New Orleans
Indira Gandhi is assassinated
A car bomb explodes next to Harrods in London
The first cases of swine flu hit Mexico
The Berlin Wall comes down
Prince William marries Kate Middleton
An IRA bomb explodes at the Grand Hotel in Brighton
Barack Obama is inaugurated as President of the USA
Princess Diana dies
Bombs explode on the London Underground
Saddam Hussein is executed
33 miners become trapped in a mine in Chile
The first Harry Potter book is published
The answers are at the end of this chapter. The years are easier to guess than the months; nonetheless the chances are that you will only get some of them correct. This is normal, but the nature of any mistakes you make illustrates something extraordinary about the way the mind organises the past. I’ll be referring back to this list many times during this chapter. Most of us think we’re bad at remembering names, but in fact Japanese research has found that we’re more likely to remember the names involved in a news story than the date.55 Luckily we don’t get tested on dates very often, so it’s something we don’t tend to realise. You probably thought that some of the events happened more recently than they did and that they feel so familiar that you’re surprised that they took place so many years ago. Perhaps this even stirs in you uneasy feelings that time has somehow slipped by without you noticing. Does this seem to be happening more often? As you get older is time speeding up? You think you saw someone a few months ago, only to realise that it was in fact last year. You expect your friend’s child to be a toddler, only to discover they’ve been at school for years now. Their growing up is a repeating reminder that time moves on.
The sensation that time speeds up as you get older is one of the biggest mysteries of the experience of time. In this chapter I’ll show why the key to time speeding up lies in our perception of the past. And memory is to provide the explanation for some of time’s other curiosities too. I’ll begin by examining how autobiographical memory works and along the way I’ll be telling the tales of some people who have gone to extreme lengths both to record and test their own memories of the most everyday events. I’ll be covering the different theories about why time speeds up, concluding with my own, which I call the ‘Holiday Paradox’. This can also explain why it is that a good holiday appears to whizz by and yet afterwards you feel as though you’ve been away for a long time, and why the days go slowly, yet the years so fast, if you’re bringing up small children.
We know that time has an impact on memory, but it is also memory that creates and shapes our experience of time. Our perception of the past moulds our experience of time in the present to a greater degree than we might realise. It i
s memory that creates the peculiar, elastic properties of time. It not only gives us the ability to conjure up a past experience at will, but to reflect on those thoughts through autonoetic consciousness – the sense that we have of ourselves as existing across time – allowing us to re-experience a situation mentally and to step outside those memories to consider their accuracy.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
In July 1969 the British tennis player Ann Jones took part in what should have been the most memorable match of her life. She was playing in the Wimbledon Ladies’ Final against Billie Jean King, who’d already won the title three times, meaning Ann wasn’t the favourite. Nevertheless the match went to three sets, and after Billie Jean King served a double fault on match point, Ann Jones became the champion. After competing in 13 Wimbledon tournaments she had finally achieved her dream. Princess Anne presented her with the trophy, she held it up for everyone to see, the crowded applauded and the photographers captured the moment. You would assume this would be the one tennis match planted firmly in her memory forever; yet speaking on Ladies’ Final day 40 years later, she confessed that she barely remembers it. ‘People expect me to remember everything about the final, and always ask me about it, but over time it all blurs. I remember the semi-final better.’ She says she does recall the feeling of winning and that it was everything she’d hoped it would be, but ask her the score and she has no idea. The BBC sent her a video of the match and although her children and grandchildren love it, she’s never watched it herself. Her experience shows that even memories of unique, personally momentous events can fade. Most of what we do is forgotten. When we talk about the study of memory, really it should be the study of forgetting. Every day we experience hundreds of moments that we simply forget.
The study of memory has been a major area of research within the field of psychology, yet compared with the number of studies conducted on topics such as short-term memory or semantic memory, the ability to recollect personal experiences has been relatively neglected. Autobiographical memory can be divided into two types: episodic memory, which consists of specific personal experiences, for example arriving on your first day at a new school; and semantic memory, which consists of the knowledge we have about our lives and the world, and would include the facts about the school you went to – the town it was in and how many pupils attended.
To make sense of our own memories we rely on our understanding of time. Whenever we tell the narrative of our own lives it is natural to link events, to put them on a timeline and to explain how one led to another. Back in 1885 the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau said that just as cities build on top of earlier civilisations – ‘the living city is built on top of sleeping cities’ – so the present covers up the past in our minds, constantly building on top of it. But just as archaeologists can uncover Roman mosaic floors under modern buildings, if you look carefully many of the ruins of memory remain. At the time we tend to see the choices we make in our lives as relatively independent of the times we live in, but looking back we can explain retrospectively how our story fits into its place in social history. If you ask someone why they are choosing to embark on parenthood in their mid-thirties, at least 10 years later than their parents might have done, their explanation will tend to relate to their personal circumstances rather than the trends of the time. So they might say they hadn’t met a partner in their twenties, or wanted to finish their education, travel or get their career under way, not that social or political factors have pushed them in a certain direction. But ask the generation above and they will say that they had children in their early twenties because that was what you did then. These patterns are hard to see in our own lives, partly because we want to believe our personal choices are just that, personal, and not swayed by the cohort to which we belong by an accident of history.
TOTAL RECALL
Having a conversation with Gordon Bell is slightly unnerving. While you stand opposite him you know that the small, black device on his chest is photographing you every 20 seconds, creating pictures that he intends to preserve forever in his extensive slideshow of his every waking moment since 1988. He calls it ‘Total Recall’. It’s not just photos. He saves everything – every bank statement, every email, every text, every webpage he visits, every answerphone message (including all the times his wife has told him to turn off the recording), every TV programme he watches and every page of a book he reads (he has even employed a patient assistant whose job it is to scan these pages). In theory you could choose any date from the past 24 years and relive his life on that day, seeing everything he saw and reading everything he read. He describes his methods with enthusiasm, clearly fascinated by the technology that has allowed him to do it and the complex systems he uses to file everything digitally. But you can’t help but feel slightly sad, wondering whether anyone will care. He is creating an extraordinary record of one man’s life, but a life where a lot of energy is devoted to finding methods of keeping an extraordinary record of a life. Will anyone look at all this information after his death? Maybe they will. Maybe in a few centuries’ time he will be the Samuel Pepys of his day, although I get the feeling he includes less gossip in his diary. Also, he’s not alone. He has a competitor.
When the Reverend Robert Shields died in 2007 he left behind 91 cardboard boxes containing a type-written diary spanning 25 years which chronicled his life, minute by minute. It’s 30 times longer than Pepys’ diary. It makes Robert B. Sothern’s decades of daily bodily measurements seem as brief as a simple medical note. The reverend’s commitment was such that he woke up every two hours during the night, every night, in order to write down his dreams. During the day he would sit in his thermal underwear in his office in the back porch of his home in Dayton, Washington, surrounded by six electric typewriters arranged in a horseshoe. Every page of typing consists of a list of times accompanied by a description of exactly what he was doing, from shaving to opening junk mail. His father had won the title of world speed-typing champion for his ability to type the Gettysburg Address repeatedly at 222 words a minute. We don’t know whether Robert inherited his father’s gift for typing, but even if he did it still took him four hours a day to write his diary. He bequeathed it to Washington State University on condition that no one read it until 2057. At approximately 37.5 million words, it might be the longest diary in the world, but until it’s unveiled in 2057 no one will know because not even an exact word count is permitted. In the few extracts which have been made public, the events are mundane. He changes light bulbs. He watches Murder, She Wrote starring Angela Lansbury (he notes that ‘The action in Murder is quick, fast and condensed.’). He eats macaroni cheese. He trips up in the street while carrying home some leftovers after supper with friends. He records the precise number of sheets of papers he uses every time he goes to the loo. He finds copious different ways of describing urination: ‘I let out my water tank,’ and ‘I hosed down the ceramic facility until it surged with foam.’56 Mundane, but curiously gripping. Believing that the historians of the future will want to study both his diary and his DNA, he has taped samples of his nose hair to one of the pages.
This is the ultimate autobiographical record, one with which a human memory could never compete. He and Gordon Bell are both determined not to let the fallibility of memory destroy the record of their lives. This seems to be a trend, with numerous life-bloggers noting down every detail online. Gordon insists his e-memory is different and more comprehensive than the life blogs, but his motivation is still curious. He works for Microsoft and travels the world giving talks on the project and the technology he employs, yet is hesitant to discuss practical applications. You can see ways in which this kind of electronic memory could be extremely valuable – for someone with memory problems as a result of brain damage, for example. Yet his aim, he says, is only to demonstrate that it is possible to record a life. He shows us films he’s made by editing together the photos taken at 20-second intervals. They remind me of those flicker books we made as children where y
ou get a notebook and draw a man diving off a diving board, leaning over slightly more on each page, until he’s submerged and all you’re left with is a splash and then a ripple. In Gordon Bell’s film streets jump by and food disappears bit by bit. It’s stilted, yet super-fast. But these films are just for illustration. He stores his whole life, he says, but rarely plays it back. His colleague asked him whether this could be described as a memory that is WORN – standing for Written Once, Read Never. He doubts that. He thinks someone will watch it all.
The beauty of these attempts by the reverend and Gordon Bell is that they remove the big limitation of autobiographical memory: its selectivity. But that might also be the problem. Perhaps one day we’ll each have a digital library of our own lives and the ability to pick any day and watch it again. I’d choose one date at random and look at the pictures for that same date every year, hoping to get some sense of how the world had changed or how I’d changed. You could relive the best parties, experience a day in your first job or pretend it’s Christmas every day. But would you get round to actually doing it when it comes at the expense of creating new memories, or at least watching films where you don’t know the ending? How many couples have watched their wedding video more than once or twice? If this kind of technology meant you remembered everything, it could have a profound effect on your perception of time because, as we shall see, it is through the lens of autobiographical memory that we gain a sense of time gone by. We rely on these memories of the past, to a greater extent than we might realise, to judge the speed of time as it passes in the present.
WHEN TIME SPEEDS UP
Misdating the year of the Princess Diana’s death, or the fall of the Berlin wall, is just one feature of life speeding up as you get older. While a week with nothing planned stretches ahead of you if you’re 11 and it’s the summer holidays, take a week off work as an adult in the hope of redecorating your house and before you are even halfway through the painting, the week will have rushed past. Anyone over the age of 30 will tell you time is accelerating and that any markers of time, whether it’s Sunday nights or Christmas, appear to come round sooner every week or year. It came as a shock to many when the news was released in 2001 that the two 10-year-old boys infamous for murdering the British two-year-old Jamie Bulger were now grown up and that plans were being made for their adult lives. It wasn’t so much the surprise that they would be free so soon, but that they could possibly be adults. With Jamie Bulger forever frozen in time at the age of two, the age gap makes it all the more unsettling. Part of this is our revulsion at the crime, but it is also a reminder that whether we like it or not time has moved on.
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