Time Warped (3 page)

Time dictates the pattern of our lives – when we work, when we eat, even when we choose to celebrate. Just as the Benedictine monks knew when to expect the bells to ring, we each form appropriate temporal schemata for our own lives, which overwrite each other as they go out of date. (As soon as you have a new school timetable, it’s very hard to remember the previous one.) Some of our temporal schemata are controlled by the changing patterns in the seasons, so inevitably winter and summer are particularly salient time-frames. Others are defined by our culture, so if I were to be dropped in my street at a random time and asked to guess the time, the day of the week and the month, then a combination of nature and culture would provide external cues to all three; if there is little traffic, few people
walking by and no sign of life in the barber’s, then it must be a Sunday. The temperature and the presence or absence of leaves on the sycamore trees will give a clue as to the time of year, and if the sun is out, its position in the sky would give a rough indication of the time of day.

The cyclical nature of the calendar helps us to organise time in our minds. When you are at school, the academic timetable punctuates the year, a punctuation that can have a lasting emotional impact (from which some teachers never escape). The American psychiatrist John Sharp has noticed that a number of his clients feel worse at the end of the summer – a hangover from years of back-to-school dread. Surprisingly, in the temperate climates in the northern hemisphere suicide rates are higher in the spring, as though deep despair sets in when the promise of spring fails to deliver respite from a spell of misery.

As you’d expect, the effect of the seasons varies depending on where you live, as do attitudes towards time. To investigate this the social psychologist Robert Levine compared the tempo of life in 31 countries around the world using three indicators. First, he measured the average walking speed of random pedestrians walking alone in the morning rush hour along a flat street with wide pavements. How fast did people choose to walk? Window-shoppers were excluded on the basis that they dawdle, and the streets selected were not so congested that the crowds would slow people down. Second, he wanted to compare the efficiency of an everyday task, so he measured the time taken to request a stamp in the local language, to pay for it and to receive the change. Finally, to establish the value placed on time-keeping in each
culture, the accuracy of 15 clocks on the walls of banks in each city was checked. Combining these measures gave him an overall score for pace of life. It may not surprise you to learn that the USA, northern Europe and South East Asian countries had the fastest tempos, but Levine’s findings weren’t all so predictable. The efficiency of stamp-selling in Costa Rica brought the country up to thirteenth place in the tempo charts (funnily enough that’s the exact opposite of the experience I had buying a stamp there, but then that’s why we have systematic research on these things, rather than relying on anecdote). Even within the same country the variation can be extreme. On comparing 36 cities in the USA, in this instance combining walking speeds and clock accuracy with the time taken to obtain change in a bank, Boston came out fastest, while the home of showbiz, Los Angeles, was slowest, let down by particularly laid-back bank clerks. Everyone expected New York to come out on top, but in a 90-minute observation period during the early 1990s, the researcher witnessed one pedestrian dealing with a mugger and another with a pickpocket, which might have slowed them down.

At the time of the study the countries with the fastest tempos were also the countries with the strongest economies. This raises the question of which comes first – do people in active economies move faster because time is perceived to be more valuable, or did the fast pace of life lead to economic success? There’s no doubt that energy and speed can help some businesses, but in some cases there is a limit to the extent to which the speed of your work can increase the market for your goods. However fast you make umbrellas,
if it never rains where you live, no one will buy them. So the relationship between tempo and gross domestic product is best seen as a two-way interaction. Speed leads to some economic success, but economic success also requires people to move faster and makes a society more reliant on the clock.

TIME
’
S SURPRISES

So our minds create for us an experience of time which not only feels smooth on the whole, but which we can share with others, allowing us to co-ordinate our activities. Despite this, time never stops surprising us. The reason time is so fascinating is that we never appear to become accustomed to the way it seems to play tricks on us. Throughout life, we find it warps. We comment on weeks that seem to rush by, while others drag. We fly into a time zone that is behind us and create the illusion of cheating time, of living a few hours of life twice. Fly the other way, and we wonder what happened to the time we missed. Despite the longer evenings we get when the clocks go forward in spring, there is still a nagging feeling that an hour has been stolen from us. And when the clocks go back in the autumn we feel a sense of satisfaction at gaining an extra hour which marginally lengthens the weekend. The White Night festival in Brighton on the south coast of England, and its sister event Nuit Blanche in Amiens in France, were established to explore the theme of how you might use that extra hour in the middle of the night. You can do everything from listening to music in an aquarium to learning to knit in a bar. Although our rational side is well aware that this extra hour is just a trick of the clock, we still
feel we are losing or gaining time, and this begins to illustrate how much of our relationship with time is based on illusions we create in our own minds.

In 1917 the wonderfully named researchers Boring and Boring conducted an experiment in which they woke up sleeping people and asked them to estimate the time, something the participants (including Mr and Mrs Boring themselves) were usually able to do successfully to within 15 minutes. But not everyone can do this. Although most of us find time slightly mystifying, for some of us it is utterly inscrutable. Eleanor is 17 and tells me she has never quite ‘got time’. She is aware that she cannot judge its passing in the same way that everyone else seems to. When she wakes up in the morning, unlike the people in Boring and Boring’s study, she has no idea what time it is and this continues all morning. She does not seem to sense time moving on. ‘I don’t know the time until lunchtime, when I start feeling hungry. I deliberately look for clues like that to work out how much time is passing.’ At school she finds that while other people are able to make a rough guess, she can get the time wrong by several hours. Without checking the clock she has no idea whether a lesson is near the beginning or about to end. She inadvertently leaves her mother waiting where she has come to collect her because time doesn’t feel as though it’s passing, so she forgets to check her watch. So far the inconvenience has been mainly for her patient parents, but now that she’s taking exams, she’s beginning to notice the problems this lack of time perception can cause. While other students plan how much time to spend on each
question, unless Eleanor constantly monitors the clock she doesn’t notice that it might be time to move on. Her case illustrates that we don’t all share the exactly the same concept of time. Eleanor also has dyslexia and this could hold the key to her difficulties with time perception. There is an intriguing link between the two, one which I’ll return to when I discuss how the brain measures time.

For Eleanor time is constantly surprising, but in some circumstances it can be just as unnerving for the rest of us. We marvel, somewhat anxiously, at where the weekend went and how fast other people’s children seem to grow up, or despair at how time drags in an airport queue. Imagine you are watching the final five minutes of a football match, and how differently that time passes depending on whether your team is winning or losing. If they’re 1–0 down five minutes simply isn’t long enough. If they’re 1–0 up, time appears to stretch, giving the other team far more chances to level the score than they deserve. Think of a journey and how the way back always seems shorter. With fewer new memories to fill the time, everything seems familiar and it feels as though the distance is much shorter, unless, as the nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist William James observed, you are retracing your steps because you have lost something. Then it seems endless. Time plays tricks on our minds.

As young children grow up, these mysteries of time are something they begin to observe for themselves. I asked two brothers what they had noticed about time passing. ‘When you have to brush your teeth for two minutes that seems like a long time, but when you’re watching TV two minutes
goes really fast,’ said eight-year-old Ethan. His 10-year-old brother Jake observed, ‘If you’re waiting for someone in the car while they go shopping it seems longer than if you do the shopping yourself.’ These children have already noticed that time is deeply subjective. Our sense of time passing can even depend on the way we feel about our physical well-being. The psychologist John Bargh gave people anagrams to solve, then noted the time it took them to walk to the lift to go home after the experiment. Half the people were given anagrams of everyday words, but half were given words that might be associated with older people, such as ‘grey’ and ‘bingo’. When these people walked to the lift, these subtle hints about old age had primed them to such a degree that it changed their sense of timing and they walked more slowly.
⁷

So what are the major factors that cause time to warp? The first is emotion. An hour at the dentist feels very different from an hour working up to a deadline. If we look at pictures of serene faces we are quite good at guessing how long we watched them for, but show us a series of frightened faces and we overestimate the time that passed. However, the best illustration of the power of emotion to skew our perception of time is more dramatic – the slowing down of time when you are fighting for survival; when, like Chuck Berry falling through the sky, you are genuinely in fear for your life, one minute becomes elastic and can feel like fifteen.

TIME SLOWS DOWN WHEN YOU
’
RE AFRAID

Alan Johnston had long known that kidnapping was a risk that came with the job of a foreign journalist in
Gaza. It was an eventuality he had rehearsed in his mind before it happened in real life. When that fated day came around, and he saw a man get out of a car holding a pistol, his initial thought was, ‘So this is how being kidnapped feels and this time I’m not just imagining it.’ Then for a while everything went into slow motion. ‘You can almost stand back and watch yourself going through it,’ he told me.

Several weeks after he was captured, his captors gave him a radio. One night he heard a story on a BBC World Service news bulletin that made time slow down once more. ‘They said that I’d been killed.’ He began to think that perhaps the kidnappers’ public relations department had got ahead of itself and released the news too early. Was this what they were planning to do tonight? ‘It seemed more likely that they would want to keep me alive because that would be more useful to them, but when you’re lying in the dark hearing that message going out to the world and they say they’ve killed you, there’s a part of you that wonders if they’re going to do it. Maybe tonight’s the night.’ For Alan, this felt like the longest night of his four months in captivity. Time definitely slowed down.

When people are afraid they might die, whether in a situation like Alan’s, in a plummeting glider like Chuck Berry’s, or in a car accident, they often report that the event lasted far longer than was possible. Somehow in just a few seconds they find the time to consider a great number of topics in detail. They think through their past, they speculate on the future and all the while they scan their
memories for any piece of knowledge from anywhere which might help them to survive. This experience of time deceleration through fear is well-established, and – provided you feel frightened – time can distort even in a non-life-threatening situation. When people with spider phobias were instructed to look at spiders for 45 seconds (I am amazed they ever agreed to take part in this experiment), they overestimated the time that had passed. The same happened with novice skydivers. If they were watching other people, they gauged the duration of the fall to be short, but once it was their turn, time seemed to move more slowly and they overestimated the minutes they spent in the sky.

THROWING PEOPLE OFF BUILDINGS

Is this deceleration of time simply an illusion, or does the way we process time actually slow down when we are in fear for our lives? If the brain does process time differently when we are terrified, then it should also be able to process sights that are usually too rapid to see with the naked eye. To discover whether this is true, all you need to do is to scare people out their wits and then give them a test during that terror. One man knew just how to do it, and – in what appears to be something of a theme in research on time perception – was prepared, along with his brave volunteers, to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve it.

On the day of the study it was particularly windy. This was perfect. For the 23 volunteers standing on top of a Texas skyscraper, the wind injected a little extra anxiety into
an already fraught situation. If this experiment was to work, real fear was essential. The neuroscientist David Eagleman, from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston (the same neuroscientist who wrote the best-selling imagined stories of the afterlife,
Sum
), warned his volunteers to stay well back from the edge until it was their turn to climb up inside a 33-foot-high metal cage mounted on the roof. He radioed down to the team on the ground 150 feet below to check that everything was ready, then turned to a line of digital wristwatches with giant faces. These perceptual chronometers were set to alternate very quickly between two screens showing random numbers. They flicked so fast that to the naked eye they looked like a blur. Eagleman wanted to know whether terror would speed up a volunteer’s sensory processing enough for them to read the numbers which the calm human brain fails to register. Perhaps it’s not that time slows down when we’re afraid, but that our minds speed up.