Time Warped (2 page)

I will be revealing the results of my study into the way people visualise time in their minds. You may be surprised to learn that one in five of us imagine the days, the months, the years and even the centuries laid out in precise patterns in the mind’s eye. The variety in the way people visualise time is intriguing too – with centuries standing like dominoes or decades shaped like a slinky. Why do some people see time like this and what effect does it have on their experience of time? And I’ll be addressing a question that has no right or wrong answer but still divides us – is the future coming towards us or are we endlessly moving along a timeline towards the future?

Today we can calculate the time more precisely, more minutely, than ever before. The caesium clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States is so accurate that in the next 60 million years it will neither gain, nor lose, a second. A few years ago it could only do that for a mere 20 million years. The clock of the mind is more elusive. It seems to govern our experience of time, yet appears not to exist. For decades scientists have searched for evidence of an internal clock. Over a 24-hour period, circadian rhythms regulate our body clock, keeping us in synch with day and night through exposure to daylight, but there is no single organ dedicated to sensing the seconds, minutes or hours passing. Nevertheless our minds can measure time. We can estimate a minute fairly accurately. We constantly deal with different time-frames – a moment ago, middle age, the past decade, the first week of term, every Christmas, two hours’ time – which we juggle effortlessly in our minds. Meanwhile we are building up a long-term sense of the decades passing, and of our own life history and where we fit into the earth’s history.

The latest findings from neuroscience are beginning to give us clues as to how our brains can sense time without any single organ devoted to the purpose and in Chapter Two I will examine these competing neuroscientific theories. But it may be that what fascinates you more is how your conception of time affects the way you think and the way you behave. Although according to the calendar time only goes in one direction, in our minds we constantly leap about from the past to the future and back again. If you wish, you can read this book in the same way. While I
think I’ve set it out in the right order, you don’t have to follow me. If you have ever wondered how good you are at making decisions based on how you might feel in the future, Chapter Five beckons. If you’ve ever been in an accident and experienced time standing still, in Chapter One you can find out why. If you want to know why time feels as though it’s speeding up or why world news events always feel as if they happened a year or two longer ago than you thought, then Chapter Three may be for you.

To conclude, I will explore how all this research might be useful in our everyday lives. We construct the experience of time in our minds, so it follows that we are able to change the elements we find troubling – whether it’s trying to stop the years racing past, or speeding up time when we’re stuck in a queue, trying to live more in the present, or working out how long ago we last saw our old friends. Time can be a friend, but it can also be an enemy. The trick is to harness it, whether at home, at work, or even in social policy, and to work in line with our conception of time. Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organise life, but the way we experience it.

Finally, a word about the word ‘time’. Naturally a book about time will use the word a lot. Were I from the Amondawa tribe in the Amazon that would be a problem. They have no word for time, no word for month and no word for year. There is no agreed calendar and there are no clocks. They do refer to sequences of events, but time does not exist as a separate concept. By contrast, the word ‘time’ is used more often than any other noun in the English
language.
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This reflects our fascination with time – and is one reason why I’ve written this book. But the ubiquity of the word presents some difficulties – as it is all too easy to use time all the time. You see the problem? To avoid confusion, I may sometimes seem pedantic about terms or utilise jargon from psychology. There are also phrases, such as future thinking, which, for the sake of precision, at times, I will use repeatedly. I hope you will bear with me.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering what happened to Chuck Berry, our base-jumping glider pilot who was left suspended in the air, his body falling and time dilating. I’m afraid you won’t find out right away, as there are many other issues to explore. But at the end of the next chapter, we will use our ability to travel back in time in our minds and we’ll learn how it all worked out for Chuck.

WHEN THE BBC
reporter Alan Johnston was held captive in Palestinian-controlled Gaza, he had plenty of time to fill but no accurate method of measuring it. With no wristwatch, no books, or pen and paper, his only means of guessing how much time had passed was by studying the lines of light visible through the shutters and the shadow that moved slowly across the walls as he willed each day away. The five Islamic calls to prayer also allowed him to work out the rough time of day, but he soon lost track of the date. ‘I made a mark on the door in the traditional clichéd prisoner way, but for a while I was worried about what the guard might do if he saw these marks on the door of his flat. He was going through quite bad moods at the time, so I started making etching lines on the edge of my toothbrush instead, but it was still quite easy to become uncertain about the date and soon I was adrift from time.’

In fact Alan Johnston spent almost four months in that flat, but at the time he had no idea how long he would be detained, or whether he would live or die. ‘Suddenly time
becomes like a living thing, a crushing weight that you have to endure. It’s endless, since you don’t know when you’re going to be freed, if ever. There’s this great sea of time ahead of you that you have to keep ploughing through.’ To pass the hours, Alan invented mind games, setting himself tasks such as developing the best possible intellectual attack on the idea of apartheid, or trying to write poetry and stories in his head. But with no pen and paper to record his thoughts, it became an exercise in memory, ‘If you write seven crap lines of poetry, you’ve got to remember them before you can move on to the eighth and then when you’ve written the ninth line you’ve got to ask yourself whether you still remember line five.’ Eventually Alan developed his own mental strategy for coping with the hours, a strategy that used the concept of time itself – one I’ll return to later in the book.

There were two elements holding sway over Alan’s life as a hostage: his captors and time. In this chapter I’ll examine the conditions under which time can become so warped that it slows down to the unbearably protracted pace experienced by Alan Johnston. It is not surprising that time dragged for him, locked in one room and deprived of all stimulation, but I’ll also be covering other, more peculiar, circumstances where time expands. It is the mysterious flexibility of time that makes it so fascinating, but before we get to that, let’s consider why our ability to sense the passage of time is so important, both to us as individuals and as part of society.

Accurate timing is essential for communication, co-operation and human relations in more ways than you might
expect. It’s obvious that any activity involving two or more people requires the co-ordination of timetables, but even something as apparently simple as a conversation demands split-second timing. To produce and understand speech, we rely on critical timings of less than a tenth of a second. The difference between the sound of a ‘pa’ and a ‘ba’ is all in the timing of the delay before the subsequent vowel, so if the delay is longer you hear a ‘p’, if it’s short you hear a ‘b’. If you put your hand on your vocal cords you can even feel that with the ‘ba’ your lips open at the same time as you feel your cords start to vibrate. With the ‘pa’ the vibration starts a moment later. This relies on timing accurate to the millisecond. Even the timing between syllables can be crucial to a phrase’s meaning. With Jimi Hendrix’s lyric, ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky,’ just a fraction of a second difference in timing is what gives you the famous mondegreen, ‘Excuse me while I kiss this guy.’ In order to co-ordinate limb and muscle movements we need to estimate milliseconds, while the appraisal of seconds allows us to do everything from detecting rhythm in music or kicking a ball to deciding whether it’s faster to walk along the travelator at the airport or on the floor around the side. (Answer: it depends. Researchers at Princeton University found that taking the travelator usually slows you down because you tend to reduce your pace, or – more irritatingly – get stuck behind people who stop walking as soon as they get on. An empty travelator will get you across the airport faster than walking on the floor alongside it, but only if you don’t decide to stand still yourself.)

Our sense of timing isn’t perfect, yet on the whole our
brains are able to conceal this, presenting us with a world where time usually feels smooth and consistent. A badly-dubbed film has to be quite bad for us to notice the discrepancy; studies have shown that if the mismatch is anything below 70 milliseconds our brain goes along with our expectation that if we can see a person’s mouth moving and we can hear a sound that matches it, then they must be occurring simultaneously. Yet once people are
told
that they don’t match, they can then work out whether the pictures are ahead of or behind the sound. So it’s not that we
can’t
detect these discrepancies, it’s that unless we are alerted to a problem the brain assumes that sound and sight fit together because that’s what we’re used to. Some of our senses are better at timing than others; it’s much easier to remember an auditory rhythm tapped out in Morse code than the same series of dots and dashes written down.

The rabbit illusion in the box below is one you can try on someone else.

Find a volunteer, take their forearm and get them to look away. Using the end of a pen, tap very fast several times in the same spot near their wrist and – without breaking the rhythm – tap several times nearer the inside of their elbow. Then ask them what you did.

The chances are they will say that you made a series of taps at regular intervals along their arm from wrist to elbow. Even though you didn’t touch the middle of their forearm the brain makes certain assumptions about the distance and
the timing of the taps. Likewise if you turn a light on and off very fast it appears to flicker, but if you do it even faster there’s a point at which it appears to be perpetually switched on; our brains try to make sense of the flicker by perceiving it as a constant light. We are tagging events in time in order to make sense of them.

Computers with accurate timing in the millisecond range have made it a great deal easier for scientists to investigate the time intervals that the brain can and cannot detect. In the 1880s the Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner was determined to calculate the shortest time a human could differentiate between two sounds. To do this he used a Savart wheel, a metal disc with teeth all the way round that produce a loud click as the wheel turns. If the wheel goes fast enough then, like the flickering light bulb, the sound appears continuous. Exner wanted to establish the minimum time interval at which humans could still hear separate clicks. He tried the same with electrical sparks and found our senses varied dramatically – when watching sparks, people found it hard to differentiate, but when it came to listening to clicks people could differentiate between two clicks with only a five-hundredth of a second between them.
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These are impressive millisecond judgements, but our abilities at time perception go way beyond this. The subjective experience of time relies on the ability to put that millisecond moment into context. As the philosopher Edmund Husserl said in his study of the phenomenology of time, we hear a song one note at a time, but it is our sense of the future and the past – our memory and our anticipation – that
makes it a song.
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The experience of time feels personal, a part of our consciousness that we find hard to put into words. St Augustine wrote ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, then I know. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know it not.’ Yet we constantly refer to abstract ideas involving time – six months, last week or next year – and everyone knows what we mean. The notion of time is both personal and shared.

YOUR TIME IS MY TIME

Each society forms rules about time that its people share and understand. In many parts of the world, including Europe and the US, if a ticket for a play says 7.30 p.m. it is customary to arrive earlier than the specified time, but if a party invitation says 7.30 p.m. you are expected to arrive later. The sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel believes that these social rules provide us with a means of judging time.
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We learn to expect a play or show to last about two hours and anything longer starts to feel as though it is dragging, whereas the same period of time would feel too short to count as a morning’s work. If we unexpectedly see someone at the wrong time we might not even recognise them. Cultures develop shared ideas of appropriate timings; how long you should stay when invited into someone’s home, even how long you should know a partner before you consider marrying them. Exceptions surprise us. I remember sitting at a lunch in Ghana on a table with six men, two of whom (one local and one from Scotland) surprised the rest of us with their tales of marriage proposals on first dates. (In case you are
wondering, both the women they asked said ‘Yes’, and both marriages are still going strong more than two decades later.)

Routines give us a sense of security. They are so important that the mere act of breaking them can disrupt a person’s concept of time and, in extreme cases, even cause terror. At Guantanamo Bay it was standard practice to make the timing of meals, sleep and interrogation unpredictable, defeating a prisoner’s urge to count time and thereby inducing anxiety. Knowing the exact date was of no practical use to Alan Johnston, yet he knew he needed to try to keep track of the calendar. This desire for predictability and control is nothing new. In the early Middle Ages, Benedictine monks decided that predictability was essential to living a good and godly life and would ring bells at fixed intervals and carry out regular services to create a shared routine.