Time Warped (22 page)

We constantly use both prospective and retrospective estimation to gauge time’s passing. Usually they are in equilibrium, but notable experiences disturb that equilibrium, sometimes dramatically. This is also the reason we never get used to it, and never will. We will continue to perceive time in two ways and continue to be struck by its strangeness every time we go on holiday.

You can apply prospective and retrospective time estimation to other curious mysteries of time too. Why is it when you’re ill the days drag, but when you look back it feels as though the time went fast, almost as if you were never ill at all? Here we see the Holiday Paradox in reverse. Think back to the last time you were unwell – not with something so serious or agonising that you had to go to hospital or feared for your life, but with an everyday illness like a bad cold. The minutes and the hours feel interminable. You long for the day to finish, in the hope that you might feel better next morning. You imagine how fantastic it would be to feel well, and how you will appreciate every moment when you do. You are experiencing time prospectively, wondering when your suffering will end. Your sense of prospective time tells you that every minute is long. All the factors which decelerate time are present. There is no fun. There is no novelty. There is nothing to distract you from paying attention to the clock, the ultimate marker of time. And there is plenty of repetition, mainly of the experience of feeling awful. But once you’ve recovered, yet again something strange happens – it is the opposite of the Holiday
Paradox, but the cause is the same, the dual perspective on time. Retrospective time estimation kicks in and – looking back – the week you spent in bed feels inconsequential. You can remember feeling ill, but there is such a lack of variation in your memories for that time that the days merge and the period of time barely seems to have featured in your life.

Thomas Mann’s descriptions of life at the Swiss sanatorium are a perfect example of the holiday paradox in reverse. He writes that vacuity and monotony ‘are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units to the point of reducing them to nothing at all’. Tedium, he describes as an abnormal shortening of time. He got it exactly right when he said, ‘When one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short.’
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The other situation where the holiday paradox pertains in reverse is for the parents of small children. The nineteenth-century psychologist and philosopher William James observed that although the years accelerate as we get older, the individual hours and days don’t necessarily feel as though they pass any more quickly. Parenthood is a perfect example of this. There is no enforced idleness and definitely no time to sit resting wrapped in blankets, but the result is similar. With early starts, prolonged tiredness and the necessity to repeat tasks and stick to routines, prospectively the days can feel very long. But when you look back on the week, many of the memories are repeats of earlier experiences – you have washed the children, fed them, changed them and read the same book to them hundreds of times
before – so the months flash by, underlined this time by the very visible marker of a growing child.

Parenting has the compensation of a new and exciting relationship and the fascination of watching a child grow up. Real boredom is different. One summer holiday as a teenager I worked in a ceramics factory. I had naively assumed my job might be to paint patterns on ceramic bowls. Instead I sat all day at a wooden table which had a metal clamp attached to it and a thin slot in the front of the clamp. My job was to post two-inch-long flat, cream, ceramic oblongs through the slot. Most of them fitted, but a couple of times an hour came the only interesting moment, the moment when I had found an oblong which didn’t go through the slot – a dud. It was impossible even to know whether this was a useful job, since no one knew what the rectangles were for. I asked the supervisor and the question went up the line of command until a man came over to ask, in an alarmingly Dickensian way, who was the girl who wanted to know what these pieces were for. Had this been a film, he would have decided this was the sort of enquiring mind he wanted running his company and would then have changed his will in my favour because he had no heir and was looking for a successor to head the family firm. It wasn’t a film, and so he didn’t. But he did tell me that these ceramic oblongs were to become insulators in washing machines. Sadly this piece of information didn’t actually make the job more interesting or time go any faster, which is probably why no one else had bothered to ask. My colleagues had accepted that this job was boring and that all you could do was wish away the
hours until it was time to go home. We clocked in and out with punch-cards. You were fined 15 minutes’ pay if you arrived more than one minute late and half an hour’s pay if you were two minutes late. I soon learnt from the others to make the most of the location of the factory at the bottom of a steep hill. If you cycled down the hill as fast as possible, braked sharply outside the door and threw your bike down, you could clock in just in time and then return to lock your bike up, spending a good 10 minutes chatting while you did so. On the first day all the other women stood up and joined a queue by the door 45 minutes before the shift was due to end. I assumed they were working different hours from me, but they were in fact queuing to clock out. Everyone in the queue watched the second hand moving towards the 12 on the vast clock high up on the wall of the factory. The first person was poised with her card in the air, ready to dunk into the machine with satisfaction on the dot of 6.30 p.m. The company’s rigidity over time-keeping had back-fired, leading them to lose almost an hour’s work from every member of staff every single day.

In terms of time perception, the Holiday Paradox in reverse was definitely at work here. The hours passed very, very slowly. The marker of time, the big clock, hung over us psychologically as well as physically. We could talk all day and listen to our Walkmans while we worked, but time crawled by at such a snail’s pace that we often wondered whether the clock had stopped. Now that I’m lucky enough to work in a job that’s never boring, I only ever look at the clock in dread of an approaching deadline and never in the
hope of finding more time has passed. Although we wished away the hours in the factory, when we finally reached the weekend and looked back, with so few new memories to fill it, the week occupied little space in the memory and it felt as though it had been short.

I’ve illustrated how the Holiday Paradox and its opposite can account for some of the contradictions in the sensation of time passing when you are ill, bored, caring for small children or on holiday, but the same principle of our dual perspective on time can also expand on the explanations I have covered so far for that other big mystery we have been considering – why time speeds up as we get older.

Let’s take a child of seven who is living a life filled with new experiences. We know that time feels slower for that child than it does for an adult. To understand the reason, once again we need to look at their prospective and retrospective estimations of time passing. Here there’s less of a paradox than there is for adults because even prospectively some hours can drag. Children have far less control over their lives and spend more hours doing things they don’t want to. Think back to those endless car journeys or the doodles you did while aching for a dull lesson to end. Conversely, when they’re doing something they enjoy children become very absorbed, with an apparent ability to live more in the moment than adults do. They can entertain themselves in a paddling pool for hours longer than any adult could, constantly innovating and experimenting. For them this time passes quickly, too quickly. They are shocked when they’re called away to have their lunch. The watching parent has probably found time dragging, but for the rapt
child time has sped by. As bedtime approaches, the minutes rush by even faster as they beg for just one more game/go/story. What the child is experiencing is a variation on the Holiday Paradox, an effect that is complicated by their relatively poor skills at prospective time estimation. The days are full of new experiences and while their parents rush them to school they want to take every opportunity to explore the world. They will stop and stare at workers digging up the road; they will pause to pat a dog; they will notice anything that’s different; they will try new things. Why walk along the pavement when you can hopscotch along avoiding the cracks in the paving stones or pick your way up and down the crenellations on a wall? This means that overall, despite a few slow hours where they’re forced to do something boring, on the whole days for children, just like ours on holiday, are all-absorbing, and packed with new memories which, looking back retrospectively, makes the months and years seem to stretch out.

By the time a child reaches the mid-teens, the reminiscence effect begins to come into play. The demands of school and exams mean that the hours can still sometimes drag, but gradually there is less routine, more freedom, and novelty in spades – first sex, first drinks, first love, first time away from home, first chance to have some real choice about what they do and who they are. The formation of identity makes these events stand out as we’ve discussed, giving rise to the reminiscence effect. It’s already been suggested that these memories might be extra-strong in order to help reinforce that new identity, but I propose that this time of entering adulthood also becomes the benchmark
for our judgements of retrospective time. This plethora of new events continues until at least our mid-twenties, by which time we’ve become accustomed to a certain number of memories representing a certain amount of time passing.

In middle age prospective estimation of time tells us that the
hours
are passing at an average speed and so are the days. It is the elapsing of the months and years that people say they find shocking, never the hours. Markers of time constantly remind us that the years are moving on. We are shocked when we hear that it is already the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down. We see items
we own
in vintage shops. Most shocking of all, we have work colleagues born in the 1990s – surely they should still be at school! These markers in time conflict sharply with our retrospective judgements, through which we gauge time passing via the number of new memories we have made. With fewer new experiences, and thus fewer new memories, we repeatedly experience a disconnection between the information we are getting from prospective and retrospective time estimation.

This dual process of prospective and retrospective time estimation is key to many of time’s mysteries. Once again this is not something to which we become accustomed or ever will; it is simply a consequence of the dissonance between the two methods we have for estimating time. We can’t stop judging time in this way, but we can make use of the features of time estimation to make time feel as though it’s passing slower or faster, depending on how we would like it to be. This is something I’ll be exploring in the final chapter of this book. Before that, we’re going to
move forward into the future. We have seen the way our memories of the past affect our view of time. Next we will see how our ability to time-travel mentally into the future has a bigger impact on the present than we have ever realised.

In case you have resisted looking until now, here are the correct dates for the list of events:

John Lennon is shot dead – December 1980

Margaret Thatcher becomes British Prime Minister – May 1979

Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes – April 1986

Michael Jackson dies – June 2009

The film
Jurassic Park
is released in the USA – June 1993

Argentina invades the Falkland Islands – April 1982

Morgan Tsvangirai is sworn in as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe – February 2009

Hurricane Katrina strikes New Orleans – August 2005

Indira Gandhi is assassinated – October 1984

A car bomb explodes next to Harrods in London – December 1983

The first cases of swine flu hit Mexico – March 2009

The Berlin Wall comes down – November 1989

Prince William marries Kate Middleton – April 2011

An IRA bomb explodes at the Grand Hotel in Brighton – October 1984

Barack Obama is inaugurated as President of the USA – January 2009

Princess Diana dies – August 1997

Bombs explode on the London Underground – July 2005

Saddam Hussein is executed – December 2006

33 miners become trapped in a mine in Chile – August 2010

The first Harry Potter book is published – June 1997

AN ELDERLY MAN
, apparently very ordinary, died late one December afternoon in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, in 2008. He was 82. In normal circumstances, the passing of such a man would have provoked little interest beyond his family and friends. But in this instance, a team of internationally eminent research scientists from across the USA immediately sprang into action. The care home where the man lived – and died – phoned Suzanne Corkin, a neuroscientist at MIT in Boston, who – for once – was not away at a conference. She alerted one of her colleagues, based in California, who was also in the country – and he too picked up the call. So keen were the scientists to get hold of the man’s body as soon as he died that they had even taken the precaution, years in advance, of contacting every funeral home in the area. If his mortal remains were delivered to them, they must on no account proceed with cremation.