Time Warped

by Claudia Hammond

  The feeling that time speeds up as you get older is very common in adults, and one that makes no sense to children. I can remember the irritation I felt as a little girl when adults would marvel at how I’d grown. It seemed like a stupidly obvious remark. Now, although I try very hard not to say it out loud when children can hear me, I can see what a startling marker of time their growth provides. What intrigues me about the sensation of time speeding up is that it’s something we often discuss, but to which we never seem to become accustomed.

  The first explanation most people give involves straightforward mathematics. A year feels faster at the age of 40 because it’s only one fortieth of your life, whereas at the age of eight a year forms a far more significant proportion. This is known as proportionality theory and has been supported by many over the years, including the writer Vladimir Nabokov. It tends to be credited to the nineteenth-century French philosopher Paul Janet, who wrote, ‘Let anyone remember his last eight or ten school years; it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.’57

  The workings of autobiographical memory surely do come into the explanation for time speeding up as we get older, but not necessarily by way of the proportionality theory proposed by Janet. In fact even back in 1884, the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote that this theory of proportionality gives more of a description of the phenomenon than an explanation, and I have to agree. ‘The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older – that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to all appearance remain about the same.’ The problem with the proportionality theory is that it fails to account for the way we experience time at any one moment. We don’t judge one day in the context of our whole lives. If we did, then for a 40-year-old every single day should flash by because it is less than one fourteen-thousandth of the life they’ve had so far. It should be fleeting and inconsequential, yet if you have nothing to do or an enforced wait at an airport for example, a day at 40 can still feel long and boring and surely longer than a fun day at the seaside packed with adventure for a child. If this doesn’t convince you, and the proportionality theory is one that many insist feels intuitively correct, then think back over the past week. If you are an adult then in lifetime terms this single week is completely insignificant, yet at this moment it feels alive in the mind and relevant. The events which took place might not matter at all in 10 years’ time, but they will have an impact on this week and even next month perhaps. Janet’s theory is neat as a description, but it won’t suffice as an explanation because we simply don’t consider the context of our whole lives when judging how fast recent months or even the past year has passed. It ignores attention and emotion, which as we’ve already seen can have a considerable impact on time perception. The theory fails to explain all the different situations where time can warp. I’ve already mentioned enforced waiting, and there is the strange impact that a holiday can have on the experience of time. When people return home they often comment that they feel as though they’ve been away ages, yet if the proportionality theory held, and we considered that fortnight as a proportion of a lifetime, then it should feel tiny, almost unmemorable.

  We should be relieved at the lack of evidence supporting proportionality theory, because the consequences could be depressing. If the proportionality theory is correct then a 20-year-old who eventually lives to the age of 80 would already have lived half of their subjective life. These figures come from a formula devised by Robert Lemlich in 1975.58 When he asked people of different ages how fast they felt time was moving, he found their answer was predicted by his formula, according to the theory of proportionality. However, later research has found that it doesn’t quite work. According to Lemlich’s theory, a 60-year-old should feel as though time is going twice as fast as it did when they were 15, but if you ask the 60-year-olds how fast they feel time is moving now compared with when they were 15, the average answer they give is that it is only moving 1.58 times faster.59

  You’ll have noticed already the problem with all this: it is all based on a person’s subjective experience of time, and the subjective is never easy to measure. Although it’s common to say that time feels as though it’s speeding up as you get older, it is surprisingly difficult to demonstrate. If you ask people to look back on their lives, they will invariably tell you that time feels as though it’s going faster than when they were young, but this relies on their memory of how time felt all those years ago. When today’s 75-year-olds were 25, no one asked them how fast the years were passing, which means that we have to rely on comparing today’s young people with today’s older people. This opens up the possibility that it’s the tempo of life in general that’s changed, rather than their personal perception of time as they age. Today, both younger and older adults claim that time passes quickly. In a Dutch study more than 1,500 people were asked how fast they felt the previous, week, month and year had gone. More than three-quarters answered ‘fast’ or ‘very fast’, regardless of age.60 Perhaps it is the case that life goes slowly as a child, when you have little control over what you do, and once you reach adulthood it goes fast for almost everyone. But there is one question you can ask that does highlight a change with age and which concerns the speed of the previous decade. The greater a person’s age, the more rapidly they will say the previous decade elapsed. So perhaps days, months and years don’t speed up, but there’s something special about the decades.

  If the proportionality theory is considered more of a description than an explanation, how can we make sense of the decades speeding up? The answer is up for debate, but the main theories involve the workings of autobiographical memory. Which brings us back to the list of events at the start of this chapter.

  LIFE THROUGH A TELESCOPE

  Most people say they feel daunted by the task of trying to date public events from recent history but then go on to get many of them right. Have a look at any events you misdated. This is where it gets interesting, as mistakes can tell us a lot about the workings of the mind. Did you tend to think that events happened more recently or longer ago than they actually did? There are revealing patterns in these dating errors that give us a window onto the problem of time speeding up. The chances are that for events that happened at least 10 years ago, such as the explosion at Chernobyl nuclear power plant or Princess Diana’s death, you thought some of them happened more recently than they did. This common mistake is known as forward telescoping. It is as though time has been compressed and – as if looking through a telescope – things seem closer than they really are. The opposite is called backward or reverse telescoping, also known as time expansion. This is when you guess that events happened longer ago than they really did. This is rare for distant events, but not uncommon for recent weeks. You might think you saw a friend three weeks ago, but in fact it was only a fortnight ago.

  Forward telescoping is one of the factors that can contribute to the sensation of life speeding up, and I’ll come back to why it might do that later in this chapter. First I want to look in more detail at the phenomenon of telescoping. The most straightforward explanation for it is called the clarity of memory hypothesis, proposed by the psychologist Norman Bradburn in 1987. This is the simple idea that because we know that memories fade over time, we use the clarity of a memory as a guide to its recency. So if a memory seems unclear we assume it happened longer ago.

  When it comes to dating news stories, we might assume that the more we know about an event, the more able we will be to name the date it happened. It seems not. When Susan Crawley and Linda Pring from Goldsmiths College, University of London, gave people of different ages a list of events very similar to the one I’ve given you, but longer, the following events were those this British sample found it easiest to date, giving both the correct month and year: Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher resigning, the shooting of John Lennon, the invasion of the F
alklands, the Grand Hotel Brighton bomb, the Chernobyl disaster, the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, the Dunblane Massacre, the Baltic Ferry disaster, the Lockerbie plane crash and the hurricane that hit southern England. Surprisingly the amount a person knew about an event only made a difference to the accuracy of dating it if it happened before they were born. For events that happened within our lifetime we don’t appear to use knowledge to date them.61 Instead we rely on memory. The exception, of course, is when we know so little about an event that we’ve not even heard of it. Then we tend to assume that it must have happened long, long ago because otherwise we would remember it. The events used in these studies vary depending on where they are conducted. In the list of a dozen news story events used in research in New Zealand, only two rang any bells for me, although I wish I had known about the story of Shrek, the extra-woolly sheep who had not been shorn for many years and apparently became a media star after he was discovered during a muster in Central Otago.

  The incident people in the British study found hardest to date was the hijacking of an Ethiopian Airlines plane, which crashed in the Indian Ocean in 1996. In every age group most people had no idea when it happened and assumed it must have been a very long time ago. Compared with the other events on the list that took place that year, such as the opening of the Channel Tunnel and the Baltic Ferry disaster, I can’t say I remember it myself. But when I looked it up I discovered the most extraordinary story, one that wouldn’t be easy to forget. On a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, three young men charged the cockpit, shouting into the intercom that they had just been released from prison in Ethiopia and wanted political asylum because their anti-government views left them in danger in their own country. They claimed to have a bomb, which later turned out to be a bottle of drink, and had chosen this particular aeroplane on the basis of an article they’d read in the in-flight magazine, which said it could fly all the way to Australia without refuelling. This, they thought, would suit them perfectly. What they didn’t realise was that because the plane was only on a six-hour stopover flight, the fuel-tank wasn’t full. The pilots pleaded with them, but the hijackers were convinced they were lying and insisted they steer the plane in the direction of Australia. Knowing they couldn’t make it that far, the pilots continued along the coast in the hope of making an emergency landing at the airport in the Comoros Islands just as the fuel ran out. This hijacking was unusual because for four hours the hijackers allowed life in the cabin to proceed as though little had happened. The passengers were aware of the hijackers and even made plans to overpower them once they’d landed, but they had no idea of the arguments occurring in the cockpit. They continued to eat, read and, rather surprisingly considering the circumstances, to sleep.

  As they approached the Comoros Islands, just as the pilot predicted, the fuel started to run low. He knew this was his one and only opportunity to land the plane safely, so he began dropping altitude. As soon as they noticed what was happening, the hijackers wrestled for the controls and the disruption caused the pilot to miss the runway and ditch the plane in shallow water just off the island he was aiming for. This is one of the few occasions in airline history that a plane this large has landed on water. Despite the diagrams in the safety instructions where planes float on the surface of the water while passengers calmly remove their high heels and slide down the emergency chutes ready to blow their whistles to attract attention, large planes rarely float. They sink. And even landing in shallow water, this crash was to prove fatal for many of the passengers. One side of the plane hit a coral reef, causing it to break up. Scuba divers on holiday rushed to the rescue alongside locals, but still 123 of the 175 passengers and crew died in the crash. Today the incident is told as a cautionary tale in safety training for airline crews as many of the passengers who survived the impact and managed to get their life jackets on made the fatal error of inflating them before escaping from the cabin – the life-jackets pushed them up towards the roof of the plane, which was by now full of water and the people drowned.

  The pilot, Leul Abate, survived the ordeal and was given an award for his bravery. One of those who lost his life was the cameraman and photojournalist Mohammed Amin, famous for the pictures he took of the Ethiopian famine of 1984. Coincidentally, by the time of the hijacking, he had become the publisher of the Ethiopian Airlines’ in-flight magazine, the same magazine used by the hijackers to decide which plane to seize in their attempt to escape from the country.

  As I said before, this really is an extraordinary story and the chances are that I’ll remember it the next time I hear it mentioned, and probably so will you. But because knowledge doesn’t improve the dating of events which happen in our lifetimes, we still won’t necessarily remember how long ago it took place. The event isn’t tethered to a particular date for us. The fact that so many people don’t remember this hijacking highlights one of the difficulties of studying autobiographical memory and working out the frequency of the telescoping of time. You can’t test somebody on their ability to estimate the date of the Ethiopian hijacking if they’ve never heard of it. Studying short-term memory is easy; you can give a whole group of people the same list of words to memorise, test them under different conditions and score them on their accuracy. But while news events may seem to be universal, they aren’t. If you’ve never heard of an event like the Ethiopian hijacking you will never remember the date, however fantastic your memory. An alternative solution is to test people’s autobiographical memory for personal events instead, but this brings two new problems: not only are everyone’s memories different, but they are hard to verify. I remember going with my grandfather to an air show where a motorcyclist attempted to jump over a line of double-decker buses. It was the climax of the day and hundreds of us stood watching. It looked like an impossible task. Would he manage it? Surely he’d crash. He started far, far away from the buses, roared up the ramp and took off. Then, as he hovered in the air, the crowd gasped as it became clear he wouldn’t make it. He fell onto the buses, glancing off the edge of a roof and landing on the grass. The ambulance staff rushed to rescue him, but it was too late. He was lifted onto a stretcher and an orange blanket was pulled over his head. I remember it well. My grandfather tried to stop us from looking and took us to find the car. Or maybe it didn’t happen like this at all. My sister tells me it wasn’t an air show, but an agricultural show; it was our elderly neighbour who took us, not our grandfather; and the motorcyclist wasn’t killed; he did fall, but he only injured his leg. My sister is four years older than me and she’s probably right, but our differing stories illustrate just how tricky it is to assess autobiographical memory and the part it plays in time perception. If every memory needs verifying, how are we to work out who’s good at it and who’s not?

  TAKE TWO ITEMS A DAY FOR FIVE YEARS

  Psychologists have avoided some of these problems by asking people where they were on a certain date and then verifying the answers via diaries or relatives. But one researcher tried something a little more extreme, a technique of which I suspect Gordon Bell might approve. Back in 1972 Marigold Linton’s idea was to have someone write down everything that happened to them, however insignificant it might seem. Then in years to come the accuracy of each autobiographical memory and its place in time could be tested. Looking around for a suitable guinea pig for such a study, Marigold Linton sought an individual who was easily accessible, reliable and, crucially, prepared to take part in a daily study with a five-year commitment. Following in the footsteps of many a scientist in the past, she decided there was only one subject who would do for the job – herself. Her conscientious nature was never in doubt – as a member of the Cahuilla-Cupeno tribe of Native Americans, she was the first ever person from a Californian reservation to attend college. On opening her first report card at college and seeing she had straight As, she was so surprised that she tried to return it to the office, convinced it must belong to someone else. Nevertheless she found researching her own memory far mo
re challenging than she could ever have predicted.62

  She called the study ‘Take-two-items-a-day-for-five-years’, although really that name only covered the first part of the study. In fact every evening for 10 years she sat down in her home in Salt Lake City, took a fresh white filing card measuring six inches by four and typed three lines describing an event that had happened to her that day. She considered each experience for a moment, then rated its confusability, emotionality, importance, datability, the likelihood that she would discuss it with others and whether it belonged to a sequence (e.g. one lecture in a course of twelve). On the reverse of the card she wrote the date and then shuffled it in among the other cards from that month. The first day of each month was a testing day (in both senses of the word as it transpired) where she would select two of the previous months’ cards at random and guess which occurrence happened first and the date, all the while timing herself with a stopwatch. The idea was to assess her ability at a very particular type of time perception – setting events in their place in time.