Time Warped

by Claudia Hammond

  It was a psychologist called William Friedman who spotted the potential of the earthquake in Mentor, Ohio, as a way of studying time perception. As I’ve already mentioned, the problem with testing people on the timing of news events is that – like the Ethiopian plane hijacking – not everyone has heard of every event and even when they do it can be hours, days or months afterwards. But all the people in the earthquake were instantly aware of it.

  Nine months after the earthquake, Friedman sent a questionnaire to every employee of the nearby Oberlin College, to ask them to guess the time, date, day, month and year it happened. Most people could guess the time to within an hour, but they found it very hard to name the day of the week.70 Once again this gives us some insight into how we reconstruct time in the past using fragments of information, clues which are absent on weekdays. Friedman found that even four-year-olds can tell him the time of day of an event, but it’s not before they are about six that abstract concepts like months start to make sense to them. On occasions, we use indirect elements of a situation to attempt to come up with a date – what was the weather like, was it dark? Or we link it to something that has a firm date in our minds already – did it happen near Christmas? You might work out the year of the Falklands War by remembering that Margaret Thatcher was in power or that you were at school or college. Researchers Alex Fradera and Jamie Ward (the same Jamie Ward who works on synaesthesia) found that when people were encouraged to map out timelines of their own life events on paper and then add the news events to the same timeline, they did better than when they guessed the dates without reference to their personal lives, regardless of whether they considered the news story to be striking. This is a strategy you can adopt deliberately when you need to work out the date of a news event – think of as many links as possible to the details of your personal life at the time.

  There are other techniques for dating events and reducing the impact of telescoping that I’ll come back to in Chapter Six, but here’s just one more for now. When the psychologist John Groeger asked people to recall any car accidents they might have had, they remembered more when told to work from the past to present than vice versa. The famous psychologist and false-memory expert Elisabeth Loftus found that you can improve accuracy even more if you ask people to think of occurrences within a longer time period first and then to narrow it down to a smaller one. So if you really want to know how many times you’ve been to the doctor in the past six months, think of a personal landmark from roughly a year ago, think your way from back then through to now and then answer the question again, just concentrating on the last six months.

  A THOUSAND DAYS

  To work out the timing of an incident in your personal life, two months is the cut-off date you need to remember. It shows up in studies again and again. If an event happened more than two months ago, the chances are it happened a bit longer ago than you think. So if you guess that it happened six months ago, add a month on and you’ll probably be closer. If it you guess it was eight years ago, it was probably nine.

  We find public events harder to date, and it’s possible they are processed and stored differently by the brain. There is a tipping point that crops up time and again in research – 1,000 days, or roughly three years. Three years seems to be the time-frame we assess best. When Chuck Berry told me the story of his glider crash, he guessed that it had happened three years before, but wasn’t certain. I looked for a report of his accident to check the date. It was two weeks short of three years. He had got it right. Now of course these are average results, so it won’t happen with every single event, but if you look back again at that list of news events, you might find that the ones that happened three years ago are the ones where you were correct. If you think a news event happened more than three years ago, then add some time on, adding more the longer ago you think it took place. But if you suspect it was less than three years ago, but more than three months ago, then you are likely to have underestimated how long ago it was, reverse telescoping the time. A strange fact that I will come back to in more detail in Chapter Six.

  So all of this tells us something about how we place events in time and how to get better at guessing dates, but what about the bigger question we’re trying to answer – why time speeds up as you get older. Is the phenomenon of telescoping robust enough to explain this sensation that time is distorted? First, there’s a mathematical issue. In many studies of telescoping the participants are told that the dates they are going to be asked to recall all fall within a certain time-frame, such as the previous six years. Mathematically it is inevitable that the errors people make will skew towards the middle of this time period. They know they can’t give a date longer ago than six years, which encourages them to give more recent dates. This could account for some of the apparent telescoping.

  Age also makes a difference. In Susan Crawley and Linda Pring’s classic study, ‘When Did Mrs Thatcher Resign?’, which opens this chapter, the list of events was given to people in three different age groups. The 18- to 21-year-olds were let off the most distant events, but it was the 35–50 age group who did best; they did better than the over-sixties. When they did make mistakes, the middle-aged group forward telescoped in the way we might expect if time speeds up as you get older. But the over-sixties did something very different. They made more mistakes, but not through forward telescoping. They had a tendency to date events as happening longer ago than they did, something psychologists had thought only occurred with events from recent weeks, not distant events like Margaret Thatcher’s resignation or John Lennon’s death.71 While the older people were very good (and in fact better than the other age groups) at dating some news stories, such as the storming of the Iranian embassy in London by the SAS and the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, they thought that the massacre in the English town of Hungerford had happened six and a half years earlier than it did. Were the middle-aged people particularly interested in the news? Or had the over-sixties become so accustomed to time flying and getting dates wrong that they had deliberately over-compensated by dating them too far in the past?

  Perhaps it’s lucky that we’re more often required to remember names than dates because researchers in this area often comment that people dislike taking part in these studies. The task sounds straightforward, but some go as far as to say they find it painful to learn that they don’t know when a famous event took place. Why should we find this so troubling? Skowronski believes that the pain is caused by the close relationship between our judgements of time and our self-image. When there has been a big change in self-image the passage of time is easier to judge; any new parent would find it very easy to divide events into pre- and post-baby. And it’s this close intertwining of identity and time perception that causes us discomfort when we cannot work out timings. We feel that we own the news events that have happened during our lifetimes; that they are almost a part of us. With personal memories the feeling is even stronger, and so when we don’t know when something happened we lose the sense that we are in control. Willem Wagenaar, the Dutch psychologist who kept a diary for six years, described the experience of putting his own autobiographical memory to the test as not just boring, but downright unpleasant.

  Marigold Linton did not enjoy her self-experimentation either. After choosing herself as the ultimate reliable participant, she soon became disappointed with her efforts. As the years went by and there were more memories to include, the testing on the first day of each month began to take many hours; she would test herself on as many as 215 different events. She wrote that she had ‘looked forward to working with a completely tractable subject, one who would come on time and would be motivated and consistent. This impression is simply not true. I am frequently intractable, resentful, and distractible, especially as a long test day drags on.’ Sometimes she forgot to take part in the experiment at all.

  Dull though these sorts of studies might be for the participant, they are crucial to our understanding of the experience of the years passing us by.
However, telescoping does not provide us with the ultimate explanation for why life feels as though it speeds up as you get older. The studies of both personal and public events show that telescoping does not occur as consistently as we might expect. If the theory held, then the older you are, the more you should forward telescope time, but in fact it is the middle-aged who forward telescope time the most. Telescoping undoubtedly occurs some of the time and research on this topic can tell us plenty about how to date events more accurately in our own lives, but – along with the theory of proportionality – it still fails to provide a full explanation for why time speeds up as you get older.

  THE REMINISCENCE BUMP

  Think back on your life and try to recall a couple of experiences that made you especially happy and a couple which made you sad or afraid. How old were you when these events took place? There is a good chance that some if not all of them took place when you were between the ages of 15 and 25. Psychologists have found that people have a preponderance of memories stemming from this period of our lives. This is known as the ‘reminiscence bump’. And this bump could be the key to life speeding up as you get older.

  The reminiscence bump involves not only the recall of incidents; we even remember more scenes from the films we saw and the books we read in our late teens and early twenties. If you look back at the list of news events, many of those you dated correctly are likely to have occurred during your own bump. The bump can be broken down even further – the big news events that we remember best tend to have happened earlier in the bump, while our most memorable personal experiences are in the second half. It’s such a robust finding that it can even help you guess a person’s age. Ask them to name someone famous called ‘John’ from the past and the chances are that they’ll choose a John who was well-known when they themselves were in their late teens. From this you can work out their rough age today. In a study which did just this in 1999, people in their fifties were most likely to name John F. Kennedy (US President, 1961–63), while those in their thirties selected John Major (British Prime Minister, 1990–97). For the name ‘Richard’ the thirty-somethings picked the British TV presenter Richard Madeley, the 40-year-olds chose the pop singer Cliff Richard and older people either stuck with Cliff Richard or chose the rock-and-roll legend Little Richard. Some chose Richard III. He wasn’t, of course, alive during their teens, but maybe they saw or studied the Shakespeare play while they were at school.72

  The key to the reminiscence bump is novelty. The reason we remember our youth so well is that it is a period where we have more new experiences than in our thirties or forties. It’s a time for firsts – first sexual relationships, first jobs, first travel without parents, first experience of living away from home, the first time we get much real choice over the way we spend our days. Novelty has such a strong impact on memory that even within the bump we remember more from the start of each new experience. In a study of adults’ memories from their first year at college, 41 per cent of memories were from the very first week, the week with the greatest number of new events. That said, novelty does not tell the whole story – childhood is packed with fresh experiences and yet we don’t remember that period with as much clarity. We know that the brain goes through a special period of development in late adolescence and early adulthood so one theory, not yet proven, is that the brain might be so efficient at this time of life that it lays down the strongest memories.

  My favourite explanation involves identity. We saw how the close intertwining of memory and identity can cause discomfort when our memories let us down. This same connection could shed light on the reminiscence bump. During late adolescence and our early twenties most of us are working out who we are and who we want to be. The Leeds University psychologist Martin Conway, who conducted the study on the famous Johns and Richards, proposes that during this period of identity development we lay down particularly vivid memories, which then remain accessible in order to help us maintain the identity we have created. If this were true, then you might expect people who find themselves going through some kind of major transformation of identity later in life to experience a second reminiscence bump in order to consolidate their new identity. This is exactly what Conway found when he studied the memories of Bangladeshi people who had lived through the struggle for independence from Pakistan and begun new lives in the 1970s.73

  These three theories that account for the reminiscence bump – brain development, identity searching and novel experiences – are a powerful combination. It’s a phenomenon that has been cleverly exploited by TV producers, who worked out some time ago now that we love to wax nostalgic about our teens. Nostalgia is an intriguing emotion. We consider it to be a warm, positive feeling, yet it includes tones of loss and perhaps the longing for a happier past. It has bittersweet elements, so much so that it used to be discouraged, and was even once considered to be a psychiatric disorder. The term nostalgia was coined in 1688 by a doctor called Johannes Hofer to describe the worrying behaviour he observed in Swiss mercenaries who were far from home. They would weep, refuse to eat and in extreme cases even attempt suicide. Over the subsequent two centuries various bizarre physical causes of nostalgia were proposed, including the driving of blood to the brain by changes in atmospheric pressure and the clanging of cowbells in the Alps damaging brain cells and the eardrum. By 1938 nostalgia had been branded an ‘immigrant psychosis’ and four particular populations were thought to be at risk: soldiers, seamen, immigrants and children in their first year at boarding school. Yet by the end of the twentieth century there had been a sea change and nostalgia became the warm, fuzzy feeling in which we now like to revel.

  The ability to time-travel mentally back into the past serves a serious function when it comes to identity. It helps us to cement our individuality and to search for meaning in a life we know to be finite. By examining the past, we can make the future where we cease to exist feel more distant. Nostalgia also performs a social role, reinforcing our connections with other people. When we share so many memories how can we feel alone in the world? It can make the present feel more tolerable by improving our self-esteem. Strangely we even look forward to nostalgia, deliberately becoming part of events in order to be able to look back on them with everyone else in the future. We want to create memories so that we can say we were there, whether it was Live Aid in 1985 or the 2012 London Olympics.

  Nostalgia can even bring comfort in the most hopeless of situations. Victor Frankl admits that when he was in Auschwitz he found consolation in nostalgia. He would deliberately imagine his past life in great detail – taking the bus back to his home, walking up to the front door, getting out his keys, unlocking the door and turning the lights on in his apartment. The memory of these small actions could bring him to tears, but still he felt it occupied his mind and somehow lessened his pain.

  The period about which we are most apt to reminisce and feel nostalgic is that within the reminiscence bump. It has even been suggested that the bump could be the answer to the mystery of time speeding up as we get older. If memories from between the ages of 15 and 25 are somehow extra accessible in order to construct and confirm your identity, then it makes sense that this plethora of vivid memories could make youth seem long and therefore slower, while adult life with fewer stand-out moments appears to go faster. This feeling is compounded by the lack of markers in time during middle age. When you are young, you might move home every year or two. It is easy to remember which years you spent at university, for example, and where you went after that, but as you get older and become more settled you move about and change jobs less frequently, allowing the years to merge into one another.

  This does provide a partial explanation for the sensation that time moves faster as you get older, but still it cannot provide a total explanation for time speeding up because it applies to such a specific time-frame. It can’t explain why time feels faster in your sixties than in your thirties. The reminiscence effect contributes, but to get closer to the heart of the accelera
tion of time we need to go back to the idea of novelty and its antithesis, monotony.

  REMEMBERING MOMENTS, NOT DAYS

  The reason Marigold Linton persevered with her unhappy project studying her memories across several years was that she wanted to discover whether William James was correct when he wrote in 1890, in The Principles of Psychology, that ‘the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory’s content, and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view’. Referring to time, he said ‘Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up.’ James’ view fits in with the much more recent ideas about so-called ‘memory effects’, which are in truth more about forgetting than memory.

  Monotony is the culprit; and judging by the contents of Marigold’s index cards, the highlights of her days did mainly involve endless cups of coffee and games of tennis. She confessed that the monotony of her own life had surprised even her. Cards would read, ‘I had coffee with Jeff’, or ‘At 4.30 we completed the Xeroxing of the final copy of the statistics book.’ To be fair it wasn’t all dull. Events which had seemed unimportant at the time took on more significance as the months went by. One day she meets a ‘shy scholar’. Nothing is made of this, but later she starts seeing more of him and eventually they marry.74 Marigold’s surprise at her apparently boring life is a perfect illustration of memory effects. We forget the events that we repeat often, while new events stand out and give rise to stronger memories. Try the following experiment: