Time Warped (17 page)

When the Reverend Robert Shields died in 2007 he left behind 91 cardboard boxes containing a type-written diary spanning 25 years which chronicled his life, minute by minute. It’s 30 times longer than Pepys’ diary. It makes Robert B. Sothern’s decades of daily bodily measurements seem as brief as a simple medical note. The reverend’s commitment was such that he woke up every two hours
during the night, every night, in order to write down his dreams. During the day he would sit in his thermal underwear in his office in the back porch of his home in Dayton, Washington, surrounded by six electric typewriters arranged in a horseshoe. Every page of typing consists of a list of times accompanied by a description of exactly what he was doing, from shaving to opening junk mail. His father had won the title of world speed-typing champion for his ability to type the Gettysburg Address repeatedly at 222 words a minute. We don’t know whether Robert inherited his father’s gift for typing, but even if he did it still took him four hours a day to write his diary. He bequeathed it to Washington State University on condition that no one read it until 2057. At approximately 37.5 million words, it
might
be the longest diary in the world, but until it’s unveiled in 2057 no one will know because not even an exact word count is permitted. In the few extracts which have been made public, the events are mundane. He changes light bulbs. He watches
Murder, She Wrote
starring Angela Lansbury (he notes that ‘The action in
Murder
is quick, fast and condensed.’). He eats macaroni cheese. He trips up in the street while carrying home some leftovers after supper with friends. He records the precise number of sheets of papers he uses every time he goes to the loo. He finds copious different ways of describing urination: ‘I let out my water tank,’ and ‘I hosed down the ceramic facility until it surged with foam.’
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Mundane, but curiously gripping. Believing that the historians of the future will want to study both his diary and his DNA, he has taped samples of his nose hair to one of the pages.

This is the ultimate autobiographical record, one with which a human memory could never compete. He and Gordon Bell are both determined not to let the fallibility of memory destroy the record of their lives. This seems to be a trend, with numerous life-bloggers noting down every detail online. Gordon insists his e-memory is different and more comprehensive than the life blogs, but his motivation is still curious. He works for Microsoft and travels the world giving talks on the project and the technology he employs, yet is hesitant to discuss practical applications. You can see ways in which this kind of electronic memory could be extremely valuable – for someone with memory problems as a result of brain damage, for example. Yet his aim, he says, is only to demonstrate that it is possible to record a life. He shows us films he’s made by editing together the photos taken at 20-second intervals. They remind me of those flicker books we made as children where you get a notebook and draw a man diving off a diving board, leaning over slightly more on each page, until he’s submerged and all you’re left with is a splash and then a ripple. In Gordon Bell’s film streets jump by and food disappears bit by bit. It’s stilted, yet super-fast. But these films are just for illustration. He stores his whole life, he says, but rarely plays it back. His colleague asked him whether this could be described as a memory that is WORN – standing for
Written Once, Read Never
. He doubts that. He thinks someone will watch it all.

The beauty of these attempts by the reverend and Gordon Bell is that they remove the big limitation of autobiographical memory: its selectivity. But that might also be the
problem. Perhaps one day we’ll each have a digital library of our own lives and the ability to pick any day and watch it again. I’d choose one date at random and look at the pictures for that same date every year, hoping to get some sense of how the world had changed or how I’d changed. You could relive the best parties, experience a day in your first job or pretend it’s Christmas every day. But would you get round to actually doing it when it comes at the expense of creating new memories, or at least watching films where you don’t know the ending? How many couples have watched their wedding video more than once or twice? If this kind of technology meant you remembered everything, it could have a profound effect on your perception of time because, as we shall see, it is through the lens of autobiographical memory that we gain a sense of time gone by. We rely on these memories of the past, to a greater extent than we might realise, to judge the speed of time as it passes in the present.

WHEN TIME SPEEDS UP

Misdating the year of the Princess Diana’s death, or the fall of the Berlin wall, is just one feature of life speeding up as you get older. While a week with nothing planned stretches ahead of you if you’re 11 and it’s the summer holidays, take a week off work as an adult in the hope of redecorating your house and before you are even halfway through the painting, the week will have rushed past. Anyone over the age of 30 will tell you time is accelerating and that any markers of time, whether it’s Sunday nights or
Christmas, appear to come round sooner every week or year. It came as a shock to many when the news was released in 2001 that the two 10-year-old boys infamous for murdering the British two-year-old Jamie Bulger were now grown up and that plans were being made for their adult lives. It wasn’t so much the surprise that they would be free so soon, but that they could possibly be adults. With Jamie Bulger forever frozen in time at the age of two, the age gap makes it all the more unsettling. Part of this is our revulsion at the crime, but it is also a reminder that whether we like it or not time has moved on.

The feeling that time speeds up as you get older is very common in adults, and one that makes no sense to children. I can remember the irritation I felt as a little girl when adults would marvel at how I’d grown. It seemed like a stupidly obvious remark. Now, although I try very hard not to say it out loud when children can hear me, I can see what a startling marker of time their growth provides. What intrigues me about the sensation of time speeding up is that it’s something we often discuss, but to which we never seem to become accustomed.

The first explanation most people give involves straightforward mathematics. A year feels faster at the age of 40 because it’s only one fortieth of your life, whereas at the age of eight a year forms a far more significant proportion. This is known as proportionality theory and has been supported by many over the years, including the writer Vladimir Nabokov. It tends to be credited to the nineteenth-century French philosopher Paul Janet, who wrote, ‘Let anyone remember his last eight or ten school years; it is
the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.’
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The workings of autobiographical memory surely do come into the explanation for time speeding up as we get older, but not necessarily by way of the proportionality theory proposed by Janet. In fact even back in 1884, the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote that this theory of proportionality gives more of a description of the phenomenon than an explanation, and I have to agree. ‘The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older – that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to all appearance remain about the same.’ The problem with the proportionality theory is that it fails to account for the way we experience time at any one moment. We don’t judge one day in the context of our whole lives. If we did, then for a 40-year-old every single day should flash by because it is less than one fourteen-thousandth of the life they’ve had so far. It should be fleeting and inconsequential, yet if you have nothing to do or an enforced wait at an airport for example, a day at 40 can still feel long and boring and surely longer than a fun day at the seaside packed with adventure for a child. If this doesn’t convince you, and the proportionality theory is one that many insist feels intuitively correct, then think back over the past week. If you are an adult then in lifetime terms this single week is completely insignificant, yet at this moment it feels alive in the mind and relevant. The events which took place might not matter at all in 10 years’ time, but they will have an impact on this week and even next month perhaps. Janet’s theory is neat
as a description, but it won’t suffice as an explanation because we simply don’t consider the context of our whole lives when judging how fast recent months or even the past year has passed. It ignores attention and emotion, which as we’ve already seen can have a considerable impact on time perception. The theory fails to explain all the different situations where time can warp. I’ve already mentioned enforced waiting, and there is the strange impact that a holiday can have on the experience of time. When people return home they often comment that they feel as though they’ve been away ages, yet if the proportionality theory held, and we considered that fortnight as a proportion of a lifetime, then it should feel tiny, almost unmemorable.

We should be relieved at the lack of evidence supporting proportionality theory, because the consequences could be depressing. If the proportionality theory is correct then a 20-year-old who eventually lives to the age of 80 would already have lived half of their subjective life. These figures come from a formula devised by Robert Lemlich in 1975.
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When he asked people of different ages how fast they felt time was moving, he found their answer was predicted by his formula, according to the theory of proportionality. However, later research has found that it doesn’t quite work. According to Lemlich’s theory, a 60-year-old should feel as though time is going twice as fast as it did when they were 15, but if you ask the 60-year-olds how fast they feel time is moving now compared with when they were 15, the average answer they give is that it is only moving 1.58 times faster.
⁵⁹

You’ll have noticed already the problem with all this: it is
all based on a person’s subjective experience of time, and the subjective is never easy to measure. Although it’s common to say that time feels as though it’s speeding up as you get older, it is surprisingly difficult to demonstrate. If you ask people to look back on their lives, they will invariably tell you that time feels as though it’s going faster than when they were young, but this relies on their memory of how time felt all those years ago. When today’s 75-year-olds were 25, no one asked them how fast the years were passing, which means that we have to rely on comparing today’s young people with today’s older people. This opens up the possibility that it’s the tempo of life in general that’s changed, rather than their personal perception of time as they age. Today, both younger and older adults claim that time passes quickly. In a Dutch study more than 1,500 people were asked how fast they felt the previous, week, month and year had gone. More than three-quarters answered ‘fast’ or ‘very fast’, regardless of age.
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Perhaps it is the case that life goes slowly as a child, when you have little control over what you do, and once you reach adulthood it goes fast for almost everyone. But there is one question you can ask that does highlight a change with age and which concerns the speed of the previous decade. The greater a person’s age, the more rapidly they will say the previous decade elapsed. So perhaps days, months and years don’t speed up, but there’s something special about the decades.

If the proportionality theory is considered more of a description than an explanation, how can we make sense of the decades speeding up? The answer is up for debate, but the main theories involve the workings of
autobiographical memory. Which brings us back to the list of events at the start of this chapter.

LIFE THROUGH A TELESCOPE

Most people say they feel daunted by the task of trying to date public events from recent history but then go on to get many of them right. Have a look at any events you misdated. This is where it gets interesting, as mistakes can tell us a lot about the workings of the mind. Did you tend to think that events happened more recently or longer ago than they actually did? There are revealing patterns in these dating errors that give us a window onto the problem of time speeding up. The chances are that for events that happened at least 10 years ago, such as the explosion at Chernobyl nuclear power plant or Princess Diana’s death, you thought some of them happened more recently than they did. This common mistake is known as forward telescoping. It is as though time has been compressed and – as if looking through a telescope – things seem closer than they really are. The opposite is called backward or reverse telescoping, also known as time expansion. This is when you guess that events happened
longer ago
than they really did. This is rare for distant events, but not uncommon for recent weeks. You might think you saw a friend three weeks ago, but in fact it was only a fortnight ago.

Forward telescoping is one of the factors that can contribute to the sensation of life speeding up, and I’ll come back to why it might do that later in this chapter. First I want to look in more detail at the phenomenon of
telescoping. The most straightforward explanation for it is called the clarity of memory hypothesis, proposed by the psychologist Norman Bradburn in 1987. This is the simple idea that because we know that memories fade over time, we use the clarity of a memory as a guide to its recency. So if a memory seems unclear we assume it happened longer ago.

When it comes to dating news stories, we might assume that the more we know about an event, the more able we will be to name the date it happened. It seems not. When Susan Crawley and Linda Pring from Goldsmiths College, University of London, gave people of different ages a list of events very similar to the one I’ve given you, but longer, the following events were those this British sample found it easiest to date, giving both the correct month and year: Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher resigning, the shooting of John Lennon, the invasion of the Falklands, the Grand Hotel Brighton bomb, the Chernobyl disaster, the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, the Dunblane Massacre, the Baltic Ferry disaster, the Lockerbie plane crash and the hurricane that hit southern England. Surprisingly the amount a person knew about an event
only
made a difference to the accuracy of dating it if it happened before they were born. For events that happened within our lifetime we don’t appear to use knowledge to date them.
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Instead we rely on memory. The exception, of course, is when we know so little about an event that we’ve not even heard of it. Then we tend to assume that it must have happened long, long ago because otherwise we would remember it. The events used in these
studies vary depending on where they are conducted. In the list of a dozen news story events used in research in New Zealand, only two rang any bells for me, although I wish I had known about the story of Shrek, the extra-woolly sheep who had not been shorn for many years and apparently became a media star after he was discovered during a muster in Central Otago.