Time Warped

by Claudia Hammond

  WE HAVE TRAVELLED mentally backwards in time and forwards in time. We have seen how our minds actively construct our experience of time via memory, attention and emotion. Although no dedicated organ to measure time has been found in the brain, we are able to assess its passing. For the most part time feels as though it moves smoothly, yet we are repeatedly surprised by the tricks it seems to play on us. Our relationship with time is not straightforward, which is what makes it so fascinating.

  In this book I’ve scoured the literature for what I believe are the most informative studies on time, conducted by researchers from all over the world. The question now is how to put this knowledge about time perception and mental time-travel into practice. This is not a self-help book, but a sweep across the research in this field does indicate certain ways in which we can, if we choose to, both harness and mould the way our minds perceive time. Every recommendation I’ll make in this chapter is evidence-based; none of this is advice I’ve simply made up. That would be a waste of your time. In many ways research in this area is just beginning, and I have no doubt that as the field of the psychology of time begins to expand there will be new insights for us in the future. But taking the best evidence we have to date, there is plenty we can already put into practice.

  If life feels as though it is racing by, with each year passing faster than the last, then this is the chapter where you can discover how to slow time down, although I will question whether this is something you really want to do. You will learn to date past events more accurately and to use your time wisely. But remember that we don’t all have the same problems with time. Some feel as though it’s accelerating; for others the hours seem long. Some find their minds wandering to the future and worrying obsessively; others forget what they were intending to do. In this chapter I will deal with eight different problems.

  Reading this book you will probably have already begun to think about how you personally view time. Do you see it laid out in front of you in imaginary space? Would you put the future on the left or the right? When you considered Thomas Cottle’s studies with US Navy personnel perhaps you drew your own circles of time on a piece of paper. If so then you might have sensed already that one time-frame is more salient for you. Or perhaps you went online to fill in Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory.

  Do you move along a time-line towards the future or do you sit still while the future comes towards you? Think back to the question about moving Wednesday’s meeting forward two days. If you think it’s now on Friday then you see yourself as actively moving along through time. If you think it’s on Monday then you stay still and it’s time that moves towards you. Each of these tests begins to explain how you have personally created your own perception of time. This is the impression of time you have constructed for your mental world, but because you actively create mind time, you can also influence it. Now take your pick from time’s challenges.

  PROBLEM 1: TIME IS SPEEDING UP

  While I’ve been writing this book, the question that the greatest number of people have asked me is how they can slow time down. As I’ve discussed, it is very common to have the sensation as you get older that time is speeding up, that the years are flashing by. It has been found that if you ask people to guess when three minutes have passed and let them count the seconds off in their heads in one-crocodile, two-crocodile, three-crocodile-fashion, young people do very well, over-estimating by an average of only three seconds. Middle-aged people over-estimate by 16 seconds. But 60- to 70-year-olds overestimate by 40 seconds, which is a lot on a three-minute duration. It is as though their internal clock has slowed down so more time passes than they expect, which gives them the sensation of time speeding up.121

  The perception feels very real. The question remains, what to do about it? But before we approach that I would like to pose one more question: do you really want to slow time down?

  If you think back to the research on estimation of the passage of time, there were various circumstances where time warped to the extent that it felt protracted – Mrs Hoagland in bed with a temperature; Michel Siffre in his ice cave, lying on his damp camp bed, surrounded by rotting food, longing for dry socks while he gradually went colour-blind; people in such despair they are contemplating suicide, where time expands until one hour feels like three; Alan Johnston counting off the hours during each long night in his cell, fearful for his life. For all these people time felt slow (even though Siffre later discovered it had been passing much faster than he thought). Is this really something we want to simulate? Boredom, anxiety and unhappiness will all slow down time, but none of them are very appealing mental states. I would argue that if you live a life where time goes fast, this is a sign of a life that is full and probably fulfilling, not empty. Slow-moving time might be less desirable than you think, unless of course you could find a way to isolate the more pleasurable experiences and make them linger.

  There have been deliberate attempts to lengthen the experience of time using hypnosis. Back in the 1940s two American psychiatrists Linn Cooper and Milton Erickson hypnotised some volunteers. While they were in a trance they were instructed to picture themselves going for a 10-minute walk, but were given only 10 seconds in which to imagine the entire thing. Once they were out of the trance they were able to describe in detail a walk that would have taken 10 minutes. The question is whether they had actually learned to distort their perception of time, slowing a minute down to 10, or whether they simply had particularly good imaginative skills? Decades later the psychologist Philip Zimbardo also attempted to distort time through hypnosis. Knowing himself to have an especially strong orientation to the future and a reluctance to enjoy himself in the present, he arranged for a colleague to put him into a trance and then suggest to him that he allow the present to expand and fill his mind and his body. Zimbardo believes that for him it worked; he began to notice the smells surrounding him and the extraordinary colours in a painting on the wall.

  So what if you don’t want to resort to either hypnosis or suffering to make time slow down, but instead just want to lose that unsettling feeling that every week is slightly more fleeting than the one that’s just gone before, or that it’s nearly Christmas yet again. There is a way of stopping the years rushing by and for this you need to harness the Holiday Paradox (the feeling you get that your holiday passes in an enjoyable flash, but as soon as you get back it feels as though you were away ages). To recreate the holiday feeling, some people go to the trouble of moving their entire lives to a holiday resort. In her ethnography of the British expatriate community in Spain, the sociologist Karen O’Reilly found that part of the appeal of a new life abroad was the desire to live more in the present.122 The British people she interviewed on the Costa del Sol liked the fact that their new friends knew very little about their past and that it was rare for anyone to discuss the future. People told her they had deliberately only planned one element of their futures – that they never wanted to return to live in the UK. Other than that, she found that few people had any plans beyond the next day. They had been so successful in ceasing to live by the clock that it made her research rather challenging. She would arrive on time, only to find her interviewees walking down the drive with towels under their arms, off out for a swim – and surprised that she couldn’t go with them. When she got lost one day, arriving over an hour and a half after her appointment time to interview another couple, they hadn’t even noticed she was late and found her apologies amusing. What’s striking about the British community on the Costa del Sol is their active decision to emigrate in search of a life that both has a slower pace and is spent more in the present. They are attempting to harness the Holiday Paradox, to create long, lingering days on which to look back. The problem is that the retrospective impression of these days as long relies on novelty, and although life abroad might have fewer routines than at home, the new memories which make time seem lengthy in retrospect will inevitably get rarer as people become accustomed to their new lives abroad. O’Reilly ev
en suggests that they were attempting to challenge the idea that time flows in one direction, trying to somehow stall its onward march.

  To slow down the passing years at home we need to recreate the Holiday Paradox by studying the features that make a holiday unusual. First, they involve few routines. But routines are hard to avoid in everyday life; repetitive chores such as cleaning are always going to be there, and if you have young children who need routine, you can’t abolish it altogether. What you can do is to try to add variety wherever possible. If you can create a life which feels both novel and entertaining in the present, the weeks and years will feel long in retrospect. If you have any choice about your route to work then keep varying it, even if the alternative takes a few minutes longer. This can prevent the auto-pilot effect where everything is so familiar that you arrive at work and can’t even remember some parts of the journey. As soon as you vary the routine, you are forced to be mindful. You notice more things around you and this novelty tricks you into experiencing that time as slightly longer in retrospect. Now you might not want to do this every day. One of the reasons for always taking the same route to work is not to think about it, to feel you’re giving your brain a rest. So you might not want a daily adventure, but you can decide to look for something different each day. What colour are most people wearing on the bus? Which building has the nicest roof?

  On holiday you constantly have new experiences that create brand new memories, and – looking back – this is what gives you the sense that you have been away for ages. So the more memories you can create for yourself in everyday life, the less the weeks will rush by. If governments are serious about increasing well-being they could even encourage employers to create more variety at work with a lunchtime talk, a job swap for a day or allowing people to carry out their tasks in a different order, or from a different location. If you fill your weekend with activities and go out for the day on both Saturday and Sunday to do something new, the minutes and hours will pass fast because you are so absorbed, but at the end of the weekend you will feel as though you have had more than two days off work. If you did something different every weekend, you would make so many new memories in a month that the weeks would cease to rush by. Modern research bears out the advice from the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau back in 1885. He said to lengthen time, ‘Fill it, if you have the chance, with a thousand new things.’

  Now, you do need to have a lot of energy to pack your weekends with different activities, and if you’ve had a hard week at work you may well not yearn for a host of new adventures, but rather for an empty weekend. A weekend spent at home, reading the papers, tidying up, watching TV and phoning a couple of people will relax you, but it gives rise to few new memories and soon that weekend will not stand out from any other, making time appear to have gone faster. So there is a trade-off here: do you want to slow time down or spend your spare time restfully?

  Disappointingly, watching TV isn’t the answer. When you are tired and want to do nothing it may seem like the perfect activity; you don’t have to move, you don’t have to concentrate too hard and yet it simultaneously distracts you from your own worries while entertaining you. No wonder TV is so popular. But the problem with television, and the same applies to computer games and time spent online, is that it doesn’t lead to the formation of as many memories as non-screen activities. There will of course be exceptions, in programmes so powerful you never forget them. I’m convinced I have created plenty of memories from watching the drama The Wire, but I’d still have to admit that the memories from all five series probably don’t add up to 45 hours’ worth of another, more energetic, activity. Matt, who plays computer games early in the morning and late at night, tells me that he doesn’t remember whole games. While he waits in the virtual lobby for 12 people around the world to get ready to play shoot-em-up games, time drags, but once he is playing his absorption is so intense that time appears to shrink. This is exactly what researchers found when they studied gamers in a video gaming centre in Quebec City.123 Afterwards, people underestimate the duration of the game. Yet in terms of memories Matt says he only remembers the highs (the killstreaks where lots of people die), the lows (where he dies) and any new techniques he has learned (if your gun is large enough you can apparently shoot through walls).

  I am not saying that you should never watch TV, play computer games or spend a weekend doing very little. But if you really want to stop time speeding up, the answer is to devise an energetic timetable and only to watch TV when you know it will be memorable. Armed with this knowledge, it’s for you to decide which is more important to you. You might choose to spend less time in front of screens and to fill your time with memorable activities. This will give you copious memories, creating the impression that lots of time must have passed. Time will slow down. But perhaps you don’t want to do lots of new activities. Maybe part of growing older is having the option to spend more hours doing what you know you like best, rather than seeking out new experiences. Why learn to sail if you know you hate every other water sport you have ever tried? Why endlessly seek new restaurants if you live two minutes away from the place that always serves a meal you really like? The choice is yours. Once you know why you have the sensation that time is speeding up, it might matter to you less than you think. Or you might decide that since time rushing by is a sign of a busy, happy life, that it doesn’t matter enough to sacrifice resting or watching programmes you enjoy. As Pliny the Younger wrote in AD 105, ‘the happier the time, the shorter it seems’.

  PROBLEM 2: MAKING TIME GO FASTER

  Time has such a powerful hold over us that we both hate and fear wasting it. On days when I make radio programmes I have no spare time. Yet the fear that I might finish writing the script early and have nothing to do for an hour while I wait to go to the studio is so strong that I constantly email extra work to myself or carry extra reading with me, just in case.

  This is one of the reasons we like to queue, to be certain that we don’t have to wait a moment longer than is fair. Many cultures regard it as democratic that they stand in line regardless of rank (with the exception of the advantages bought with a business-class airline ticket, of course). Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who has studied queuing, believes the reason we hate it if someone else pushes in is that we have resisted our own urge to push in and feel others ought to do the same. We know we all have to be saved from our worse selves.124

  We judge the time we spend waiting to be longer than it actually is because we’re in anticipatory mode. Yet if someone offered you a 10-minute rest doing nothing (which is effectively what queuing offers) in the middle of a busy day at work, you would probably welcome it. When waiting is forced on us in a queue we find it hard to savour the experience as the bonus of some time to do nothing. Expectations, experience and culture all influence our tolerance for queues. Having spent her young adult life in communist Poland, the writer Eva Hoffman says that because there was nothing to hurry for, queues did not present a problem. But after living in the United States and returning to Eastern Europe after the fall of communism in 1989, she found the queues intolerable.125

  Sometimes we need to find a way to make time speed up, whether in a trivial situation like a post office queue or in grave circumstances like Alan Johnston’s. He told me that when he relates his experience to people (which is rare because, extraordinarily, he fears boring them) the hardest thing to communicate is the weight of having to fill all those hours locked in that room in Gaza. This is how he tells people they could understand it. Place one white, plastic chair in the middle of the room. Then sit there for three hours. Then for another six hours. Then for three hours more. Then remember that there are still four hours to go before you can allow yourself to fall asleep to relieve the boredom. If you were really to try this there would still be one major difference between your experience of time and his – you’d know you could give up at any point you choose. Alan didn’t have that option; he knew that tomorrow would be exactly the same. As would the n
ext week. And the week after that. Maybe for years.

  It was clear to Alan that in order to deal with his 18 waking hours each day, it was essential to harness the fact that we construct our own perception of time:

  ‘After about eleven days there was that shock-of-capture period, when you think this is absurd, you can’t go on. This isn’t going to happen. And then there are moments when you think, Christ, I’m the Brian Keenan of Gaza. I remember that eleventh night. I’d just had a wash. I sat on the chair and thought that I’d arrived on firmer psychological ground at that point. I thought, this is the long one. I could be here for three years. I’m generally quite pessimistic. If I can expect the worst scenario in my head then everything will seem easier. So I decided to be ready to take three years in captivity and that anything less than three years would be a huge bonus.’

  Alan cleverly adopted a strategy of considering life through dual time-frames. While assuming he would be captive for three years, on a day-to-day basis he told himself the experience could end at any moment. ‘Every single evening when the call to prayer came I used to say to myself, almost out loud, this wasn’t your day, but maybe tomorrow will be.’

  On 4 July 2007, after almost four months, the Army of Islam group holding Alan Johnston hostage handed him over to officials from Hamas. His ordeal had ended and soon he would be free to return home. It was at the start of his journey back to Scotland that he noticed that something had changed in the way he experienced time.

  ‘On the flight home from Israel somebody got a small dog through security. This woman sat there with a Chihuahua. When the staff realised the dog was there, we had an hour’s delay while they removed it. Everybody was so annoyed that it was slightly surreal. I couldn’t work out why they couldn’t bear waiting for just for one hour. Yet within six weeks of getting back to London I remember waiting at a bus stop and swearing because there weren’t any buses coming along. Already the old impatience had come back. I’d hoped I would avoid that. After everything my parents had gone through, and all that hassle for the BBC, I wanted to take something useful from it. It’s like walking on air when they let you go. Everything seems so fantastically good. If only you could hold on to just one per cent of that appreciation of freedom, but you very quickly see it dwindling away.’