Time Warped (21 page)

This does provide a partial explanation for the sensation that time moves faster as you get older, but still it cannot provide a total explanation for time speeding up because it applies to such a specific time-frame. It can’t explain why time feels faster in your sixties than in your thirties. The reminiscence effect contributes, but to get closer to the heart of the acceleration of time we need to go back to the idea of novelty and its antithesis, monotony.

REMEMBERING MOMENTS
,
NOT DAYS

The reason Marigold Linton persevered with her unhappy project studying her memories across several years was that she wanted to discover whether William James was correct when he wrote in 1890, in
The Principles of Psychology,
that ‘the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory’s content, and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view’. Referring to time, he said ‘Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up.’ James’ view fits in with the much more recent ideas about so-called ‘memory effects’, which are in truth more about forgetting than memory.

Monotony is the culprit; and judging by the contents of Marigold’s index cards, the highlights of her days did mainly involve endless cups of coffee and games of tennis. She confessed that the monotony of her own life had surprised even her. Cards would read, ‘I had coffee with Jeff’, or ‘At 4.30 we completed the Xeroxing of the final copy of the statistics book.’ To be fair it wasn’t all dull. Events which had seemed unimportant at the time took on more
significance as the months went by. One day she meets a ‘shy scholar’. Nothing is made of this, but later she starts seeing more of him and eventually they marry.
⁷⁴
Marigold’s surprise at her apparently boring life is a perfect illustration of memory effects. We forget the events that we repeat often, while new events stand out and give rise to stronger memories. Try the following experiment:

Try to remember everything you have done in the past fortnight and don’t look in any diaries, emails or paperwork for help. How many events can you think of?

In the fortnight before I first wrote this paragraph I remembered interviewing five or maybe six different people for radio programmes, going to a hen night at a Greek restaurant in London, seeing the film
In the Loop,
and a man on rollerblades almost crashing into me on the pavement and then shouting at me because I flinched. The last two weeks feel as though they’ve been very busy, but to be honest this is all that stands out for me. Re-reading this paragraph several months later is like an experiment in itself. I would never have guessed that these events were related in time and although I remember the film and the rollerblader, I’ve no idea what the interviews might have been about. If I was prompted, I’d probably recognise the research findings and remember a few of the details, but it has no anchor in time. As the Italian poet Cesar Pavese said, ‘We don’t remember days; we remember moments.’

The average person can remember between six and nine events when they’re given this task. Yet if you think back
to the last time you went abroad, the chances are you will remember far more than nine incidents, particularly if you stayed in several different places. Several months ago I spent twelve days in the USA for work, travelling to seven different cities in three different time zones. I could easily list 30 different memories, from running round a frozen lake in Madison, Wisconsin, to leaning over a wall in Chicago to look at the river which had been dyed bright green for St Patrick’s Day, to not believing the bossy sat-nav woman when, while trying to get to our hotel, we pulled into an Ikea car park in a bleak industrial estate just off the freeway and she confidently announced, ‘You have reached your destination.’ We thought she was wrong, but unluckily for us the motel was right there. I could write pages about that trip, yet it happened far longer ago than that the other fortnight I described. If memory were to fade uniformly with time it should be less clear. Instead novelty stands out.

I mentioned the temporal schemata we develop as we grow up, which give us a sense of what the months of the year and the passing seasons mean. They also give us ideas about how fast time moves and how many events typically fit into a certain time period. We learn to gauge how long events take and then in turn to judge the passage of time by the number of events that have occurred. When the same events are repeated, for example when we go to work, we tend to think little time has passed, and then get brought up short when presented with a definite marker in time like an anniversary. So if we become accustomed to a large number of memories fitting into that decade of the reminiscence bump, then when there are fewer new memories in our thirties and forties, we
will feel as though less time has passed and be surprised when we find out that another year has flashed by.

I believe monotony and variety are crucial to explaining many of the mysteries of time. Time drags when you are ill, and you yearn for the hours and days to pass so that you can feel better again. Yet, when you look back, the hours and hours of feeling ill barely feature in your memory. You remember that you
were
ill, but with little novelty a week spent ill at home feels like a lost week in terms of memories. The exact opposite happens on a good holiday. It flies by at the time, yet feels long in retrospect. This brings me to the Holiday Paradox, an effect that can finally explain all these tricks of time.

THE HOLIDAY PARADOX

Every day after breakfast Hans Castorp prepared himself for the morning ahead. He lay down on the reclining chair in his private loggia, took two rugs made from camel hair and deftly wrapped them around himself, one from left to right, the other from right to left, turning himself into a perfect parcel where only his head and shoulders were exposed to the cold mountain air. His reclining seat was made from dark red wood. There was a head-roll at the top and flat cushions covered the length of the chair so as to support his body from head to foot. It was always placed at an identical angle, perfectly lined up with the chairs of the other residents, each in their own loggia. It was quite the most comfortable chair he had ever known. As he looked out over the mountains, Hans knew he was now ready to
start the day, a day he would spend resting. Again. This was the moment he loved; the moment when he was able to consider the expanse of time ahead of him – with nothing to do.

Castorp is the young German hero of Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
, a book which pre-dated and seems to have anticipated much of the research on the perception of time. Castorp travels to a Swiss sanatorium to visit his cousin, intending to stay for three weeks, but doesn’t leave for seven years. In his first week there is a lot to take in. He learns the routines and meets the other guests. But he soon notices that his strange, empty life appears to be warping time. The others warn him that a week ‘above’, as they refer to life on the mountain, is not the same as a week back home. Spending so many hours sitting still on his loggia, he wonders whether time passes more slowly when you’re not physically moving – remember those studies I mentioned of people getting on and off trains in California. Even the structure of the novel echoes the quirks of time, with the first five chapters describing his long seven years at the sanatorium in minute detail, and then as soon as he leaves time begins to accelerate with the remaining six years squashed into just two chapters.

Thomas Mann believed that novelty somehow refreshes our sense of time and that as soon as we leave our usual routines to visit somewhere new we change time’s tempo. This might imply that the solution to creating a life that feels long is to travel constantly, but Mann warns that this new pace of life lasts for only six to eight days before the freshness begins to wear off. The one consolation is that
the sense of novelty kicks in again when you first get home and can last a few days or, Mann says, for only 24 hours for those with ‘low vitality’.

There is no doubt that Mann was correct in his observation that vacations do curious things to our perception of time. A good holiday passes disappointingly fast. Compared with the months of anticipation and hard work saving up the money to go, the actual time spent away is short. Take a holiday that is a week long. After the first couple of days settling in, you have just two or three days’ holiday before you find yourself in the run-up to leaving and already you’re calculating when you will need to set off for the airport. It was over in a flash. Conversely, you get home and something strange happens. You look back on your holiday and it feels as though you were away for some time. Could it really have been only a week? You are left with two simultaneous yet contradictory experiences of time. The holiday felt fast while you were there, but afterwards it feels as though you were away for ages. The longer the trip, the stronger the sensation that something is not quite right. This is the Holiday Paradox. Once again William James summed it up for us, ‘In general time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.’ Holidays are the perfect example of the former, while the latter is illustrated by illness, or life on the magic mountain, or in a far more extreme situation like the one in which the psychiatrist Victor Frankl found himself. As well as controlling his own mind, as I mentioned in the last chapter,
Frankl was determined to make use of his time imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps to study the human mind in general. One of the observations he made was that although the days passed slowly, the months rushed by. ‘In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week.’
⁷⁵
Frankl’s experience fits in with what we already know about the impact of new memories on time perception. The days were very similar to one another. Once people had become accustomed to the routines, and even to the extent of the daily horrors they were living and witnessing, in a curious way they were left with few new memories to create. Frankl himself likened this to the elongation of time described by Mann on the Swiss mountain. Life at the sanatorium relied on strict schedules with meals and rest-cures providing strong, regular markers in time.

Memories and markers in time are two key elements of the way we experience time. Holidays provide the perfect conditions for time to pass quickly – disruption to a daily routine and the removal of cues to the hours passing, combined with a host of new sights and sounds to absorb the attention. The days appear to fly by. When you get home the other key element comes into play – memory. The reason you feel as though you’ve been away for ages is that so many new things have happened that you have far more new memories than in a normal week, warping your standard mental measurement of time. It is my contention that the Holiday Paradox is caused by the fact that we
view time in our minds in two very different ways – prospectively and retrospectively. Usually these two perspectives match up, but it is in all the circumstances where we remark on the strangeness of time that they don’t.

If you think back to the studies where people estimated the time passing while listening to a busy piece of music, or after getting cold diving, these two methods of mentally viewing time were evident. In some studies, people were asked to guess how much time was passing as it happened. A stopwatch was started, and they had to estimate when a minute was up. This involves judging time prospectively – as you go. In the other kind of study time is estimated afterwards – retrospectively. People are occupied with another task and then asked to guess how much time has passed. These are two very different skills and I propose that it is the existence of these two types of time estimation that causes the Holiday Paradox – the contradictory feeling that a good holiday whizzes by, yet feels long when you look back. When life is going smoothly these two types of time estimation match up, making it feel as though the days and weeks are passing at normal speed. There are markers in time that help us to pace the day, such as the start and end of the working day, the lunchbreak, a favourite TV programme and bed time. The days are governed by routine and even variety fits into the pattern in certain places and involves a fairly predictable number of new experiences (the six to nine new events we recall from the last fortnight). Prospective and retrospective time estimation are in synch. Time feels steady. Everything is in order.

Then you go holiday and these two types of time
estimation fail to tally, causing time to warp. Every sight and sound is new. You don’t feel bored. Clock-watching is rare and the familiar markers of time are faint, if present at all. On the same day I was up early to bird-watch in Costa Rica, I can remember more than a dozen experiences – arriving back for breakfast before most people were up; walking into town along the beach and jumping across small water courses; hiring bikes which you had to pedal backwards to work the brakes; searching for a beach we’d heard about and never found; watching a couple having their first surf lesson; cycling along bumpy tracks to a sloth sanctuary where baby sloths were brought out to meet us; a young monkey leaping onto a man’s head and leaving a long, greenish-brown deposit on his shoulder; then spaghetti for lunch; a search for tiny, red poison-dart frogs in a botanical garden; followed by a drink in a bar overlooking a surf break known as the cheese-grater because it’s so dangerous that the chances are you and your board will be hauled across the coral. I’ve not even reached mid-afternoon and have come up with more memories than you would expect in a normal fortnight. And this was just one day of the holiday. There were another nine, each with their own new memories. I was so busy that prospective time estimation told me that the day was going past fast. But back home I now use retrospective time estimation when reliving that day, and – because it was packed with new experiences – it seems to have lasted for ages. Employing the memory effects I discussed before, I am using the quantity of new experiences to gauge how much time has passed. I can remember every individual day, unlike in life at home where the
experiences merge. Adding up all these new memories makes the holiday feel long overall.