Time Warped (11 page)

For his mind it was a very different matter. His perception of time had warped to the extent that every hour felt three times shorter, despite his loneliness and boredom. He would stay awake for an entire day and evening and believe he had only been conscious for a few hours. He was taking to extremes the disruption in time experience by Mrs Hoagland in her fever. In one sense time had gone quickly; he was at the end of the experiment before he knew it. But in another he had slowed the pace of time in his own mind; time had expanded for him.

After his 1962 expedition, Michel spent another 40 years
researching time perception, continuing to use caves rather than laboratory isolation chambers for the simple reason that some people are so fanatical about caves that they are prepared to volunteer to spend a month entombed. Sealed laboratories don’t seem to inspire the same passion. The French department of defence funded Michel’s research in the hope of finding a way for submariners to sleep just once every 48 hours. But after the end of the Cold War he found it harder to secure funding, and now Michel believes it is only mathematicians and physiologists who will be able to take the subject further. Now in his seventies his love of caves continues. Naturally he celebrated the millennium underground and like any good Frenchman took champagne and
foie gras
with him. But having been there for some time beforehand, on the big day his sense of timing went askew and he toasted the new millennium three and a half days late.

‘
BASICALLY I SEE
time as if I’m sitting facing a wallpaper pasting table. I sit near to the right-hand edge, turned slightly sideways so that I look across and also back down the table. The paper starts close to my right hand (the present) and stretches back to the left at the extremity of the table. Ancient time is not actually on the table – like wallpaper, it is in a roll that has tumbled off the far end. I view historical time from an English perspective, in terms of reigns of monarchs. From the far left of the paper to about halfway along the table it is an actual genealogical table, showing Normans, Tudors, Stuarts etc. This stops at about 1800, with a long line running across the paper at an angle of about 15 degrees, to the far side, at 1900. There are two big, rectangular sleepers placed across the track, marking the First and Second World Wars. The far edge of the paper is the English Channel and everything beyond that is “abroad”. The map continues across the world, curving away as if on a giant globe.
I notice that Burma has a sleeper marking the expulsion of King Thibaw in about 1885, in the spot otherwise reserved for Queen Victoria’s family or the declaration of the German empire.

‘Days of the week are like a simple set of five straight dominoes, with two doubles turned sideways at each end for the weekends. Again I jump back when nearing the end of the week. In this map, time moves from right to left. In all others it goes from left to right.’

These are the words of a radio listener called Clifford Pope. I wonder whether they make any sense to you. Or how about this written by another listener – 73-year-old David Williams?

‘I see the year laid out in a roughly elliptical shape viewed from above. It’s March now, so I’m looking down on early March, with the scene curving away to the left towards April and May. Way over to the far left-hand side of the ellipse I can see August and September. Distant history begins at some point almost out of sight, far away to the right, but approachable by turning away from the year-ellipse just about where April is. That more or less coincides with the earliest nineteenth century.’

Although you’ll visualise it in different ways, research suggests that for around 20 per cent of the readers of this book, the idea that you can see time in the mind’s eye will make complete sense. And for the other 80 per cent, strange
as it might sound, you may ‘see’ time to a greater extent than you think you do. In the meantime, bear with me.

As I said in the last chapter, we still don’t have a comprehensive theory of how people track time. And there is no organ solely for sensing time. But as I’ll be demonstrating in this chapter, the ability to picture time in space is particularly important in helping us to create our own perception of time. Not only that, but it can affect the language we use and it paves the way for something that no other creature can experience – mental time-travel.

Through my own research it is clear that some ways of visualising time are more common than others, something backed up by other studies in this field.
³⁹
With the help of listeners to
All in the Mind
on BBC Radio 4, I have analysed the ways in which 86 people visualise time in space. Some sent me long descriptions, including diagrams, and while many commented that they had always assumed that everyone saw time in space, others, like Simon Thomas, thought it was an idiosyncrasy peculiar to them:

‘Until I listened to your programme I thought it was just me! I’ve done it all my life and as a child I assumed that everyone else did it too, until I tried discussing it with a few friends and ended up feeling a little stupid. Since then, and because I find it quite difficult to explain anyway, I’ve largely kept it to myself.’

Whether or not people feel able to discuss the pictures they have in their head, most seemed almost fond of these mental images. They even commented on how much they
had enjoyed the challenge of trying to draw or describe them.

The ability to see time laid out in space is considered by many to be a type of synaesthesia, the condition where different senses appear to blend in the brain. The most common form of this condition involves associating colours with letters, numbers, names or days of the week. In my small survey, I charted the colours people gave for the days – everything from white marbled with orange for Tuesday to a beigey mustard for Friday. There’s an intriguing specificity about the precise tones and shades people ascribe to the different days, but I wanted to look for patterns. Is it possible that these colours are based on nothing more than cultural associations? To me Monday is clearly red. Is that because it’s the start of the week in Britain and so it’s a busy day that stands out? Perhaps most people who see colours for days in predominantly Christian countries see Monday as red. Not the case. It seems my fellow Britons are just as likely to see Monday as pale pink or light blue. To anyone who doesn’t see the day in colour this might all sound very strange, and people often assume that we’re inventing it, but countless studies have demonstrated that these associations are stable over time and too detailed for people to memorise; test me now and test me in five years and I’ll still insist that Mondays are red.

Synaesthesia is now a well-documented phenomenon recognised by the scientific community. Rarer forms can even involve tasting shapes. I’ve never forgotten reading about a man who insisted that the chicken tasted too pointy, or meeting a woman who described seeing elaborate
patterns on hearing certain types of music. When I played her some guitar music she spoke of seeing a quadrant divided into brown, blue, green and navy blue with a river of colour curling down like a plait from the top right-hand corner. As I mentioned above with my red Mondays, the extraordinary thing is that if you play these people the same piece of music or give them the same food six months later they will describe exactly the same associations, and you can test them on multiple stimuli that would be impossible to memorise. Synaesthetes are not making it up. They are experiencing
real
sensations – as evidenced by the areas of the brain that light up in brain-scanning studies. So when the woman mentioned above hears guitar music the areas of her brain relating to colour vision are activated.

No one knows the exact cause of synaesthesia, but one theory points to the richness of connections in the brains of newborn babies. In our first months, the mass of sensations pouring into the brain are not all channelled down specialised pathways. It is as if the brain is a tangled jungle – sight and sound and smell and taste are all mixed up and hard to differentiate. Then at about four months a process of pruning starts, with all the vines and creepers cut back, leaving only separate branches for the senses. Out of confusion, clarity emerges. However, according to this pruning theory, for synaesthetes a few of these jungly connections somehow remain intact, with the result that they continue to experience some crossover of the senses. This idea is supported by the fact that many synaesthetes find that these connections get weaker as they get older. To extend the forest metaphor – while not all the entwining is hacked
away, it withers back gradually as time goes on. I’ve found this happening myself. The colours I associate with people’s first names are so much fainter now.

All of this gives credence to the pruning theory, which remains the most compelling explanation we have so far for synaesthesia. But just one thought. The association of letters and colours is the most common form of the condition – yes, sadly, I’m only a common synaesthete – but it appears to present something of a challenge to the strongest theory. For while newborn babies experience a great deal in their first months, they don’t see a lot of the alphabet.

MONTHS GO ROUND IN A CIRCLE

The specific form of synaesthesia relevant to time perception is the phenomenon of ‘seeing time in space’. As many as one in five of us perceive time in this way. If asked to explain what they mean by ‘seeing time in space’ people often resort to drawing a diagram. I can understand why, as this is a concept that is hard to describe in words. I will do my best, however, with a few diagrams to help out along the way. For the sake of clarity I will use the somewhat jargony term ‘spatial visualisation’. Before I go on, I should say that there has been debate among researchers about whether the spatial visualisation of time, although a genuine phenomenon, really counts as synaesthesia. I believe it does as it exhibits the two key features of the syndrome – the ability to describe perceptions in the same terms both automatically and consistently over many years. It is also the
case, as I will show, that the way people visualise time spatially seems to develop during childhood.

In all the radio programmes I’ve made, I’ve never known a topic elicit such a big response from listeners as time-in-space synaesthesia. People seemed thrilled to learn that other people also visualise time spatially. Thrilled and liberated. One listener, Sara, told me that the discovery that her experiences were part of a recognised phenomenon was like having a switch turned on in her mind. She had tried hard to suppress her sense that she saw time in space, but now she could let go, ‘I suddenly saw the week spread out around me. It was a feeling of relief, of putting things back into place.’ Some people told me they were convinced that it was only through seeing time in space that they had any conception of time at all.

Again, I ask for patience for those of you who find all this talk deeply weird, because although it’s true that it is only a minority of people who visualise time spatially, the phenomenon can shed light on how mental images of time affect everyone’s thinking. Before reading the results of my analysis of the qualitative descriptions below, take a moment to think about how you might visualise time if you were forced to. Obviously time is not a visible concept, but if you had to draw a diagram of time how would you do it? Are the next few weeks laid out ahead of you? If you think about the two world wars do they occupy different places in your mind’s eye? Can you look back down the decades? Where is next Tuesday?

Of the 86 descriptions I analysed, the months of the year were the units of time that people were most likely to see
laid out in front of them. But this ‘laying out’ took different forms. Two-thirds of participants who visualised the months in space described a circle, a loop or an oval, with a smaller minority seeing a wave or a spiral. It’s not surprising perhaps that some sense of circularity was a strong feature, when you consider the repeating nature of the months through the years of life. We all know the feeling – described by Flanders and Swann in one of their comic songs – of getting to the end of another year and thinking it’s ‘bloody January again’. The year has completed a full circle and is back where it started. By way of contrast, time/spacers are likely to see the non-repeating decades as consisting of jagged shapes or even zigzags – but more of that later.

Back with the circle of months: July and August were often seen as elongated in comparison with other months, perhaps reflecting the long school holidays experienced in their youth by this British sample. It is also common to report a gap between December and the following January, as though there is a natural break in the cycle at the turn of the year. The strong influence of traditional ways of organising time is apparent here. Only six people described the layout of the months in shapes involving straight lines, with either squares, ladders, rulers or parallel columns of months. One participant commented that she had feared she might lose her mental picture of time on retirement after a working life where time was ordered, but the image was so strong by then that in fact it remained.