Time Warped (29 page)

This illustrates once again how the mind constructs its own sense of time in the future just as it does in the past and the present. Our concept of the future is tied up closely with our perception of the past. By now it should be clear that future thinking has a powerful effect on our actions. It gives us foresight and imagination, and allows us to formulate plans, but it can also warp our thinking, causing us to make decisions we might regret, from the marshmallow-like trivial to the fatally serious. But we can use future thinking to our advantage, along with the other time-frames, and it is the harnessing of all this research on time perception which I shall discuss in the final chapter.

WE HAVE TRAVELLED
mentally backwards in time and forwards in time. We have seen how our minds actively construct our experience of time via memory, attention and emotion. Although no dedicated organ to measure time has been found in the brain, we are able to assess its passing. For the most part time feels as though it moves smoothly, yet we are repeatedly surprised by the tricks it seems to play on us. Our relationship with time is not straightforward, which is what makes it so fascinating.

In this book I’ve scoured the literature for what I believe are the most informative studies on time, conducted by researchers from all over the world. The question now is how to put this knowledge about time perception and mental time-travel into practice. This is not a self-help book, but a sweep across the research in this field does indicate certain ways in which we can, if we choose to, both harness and mould the way our minds perceive time. Every recommendation I’ll make in this chapter is evidence-based; none of this is advice I’ve simply made up. That would be a waste
of your time. In many ways research in this area is just beginning, and I have no doubt that as the field of the psychology of time begins to expand there will be new insights for us in the future. But taking the best evidence we have to date, there is plenty we can already put into practice.

If life feels as though it is racing by, with each year passing faster than the last, then this is the chapter where you can discover how to slow time down, although I will question whether this is something you really want to do. You will learn to date past events more accurately and to use your time wisely. But remember that we don’t all have the same problems with time. Some feel as though it’s accelerating; for others the hours seem long. Some find their minds wandering to the future and worrying obsessively; others forget what they were intending to do. In this chapter I will deal with eight different problems.

Reading this book you will probably have already begun to think about how you personally view time. Do you see it laid out in front of you in imaginary space? Would you put the future on the left or the right? When you considered Thomas Cottle’s studies with US Navy personnel perhaps you drew your own circles of time on a piece of paper. If so then you might have sensed already that one time-frame is more salient for you. Or perhaps you went online to fill in Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory.

Do you move along a time-line towards the future or do you sit still while the future comes towards you? Think back to the question about moving Wednesday’s meeting forward two days. If you think it’s now on Friday then you see
yourself as actively moving along through time. If you think it’s on Monday then you stay still and it’s time that moves towards you. Each of these tests begins to explain how you have personally created your own perception of time. This is the impression of time you have constructed for your mental world, but because you actively create mind time, you can also influence it. Now take your pick from time’s challenges.

PROBLEM
1:
TIME IS SPEEDING UP

While I’ve been writing this book, the question that the greatest number of people have asked me is how they can slow time down. As I’ve discussed, it is very common to have the sensation as you get older that time is speeding up, that the years are flashing by. It has been found that if you ask people to guess when three minutes have passed and let them count the seconds off in their heads in one-crocodile, two-crocodile, three-crocodile-fashion, young people do very well, over-estimating by an average of only three seconds. Middle-aged people over-estimate by 16 seconds. But 60- to 70-year-olds overestimate by 40 seconds, which is a lot on a three-minute duration. It is as though their internal clock has slowed down so more time passes than they expect, which gives them the sensation of time speeding up.
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The perception feels very real. The question remains, what to do about it? But before we approach that I would like to pose one more question: do you really want to slow time down?

If you think back to the research on estimation of the passage of time, there were various circumstances where time warped to the extent that it felt protracted – Mrs Hoagland in bed with a temperature; Michel Siffre in his ice cave, lying on his damp camp bed, surrounded by rotting food, longing for dry socks while he gradually went colour-blind; people in such despair they are contemplating suicide, where time expands until one hour feels like three; Alan Johnston counting off the hours during each long night in his cell, fearful for his life. For all these people time felt slow (even though Siffre later discovered it had been passing much faster than he thought). Is this really something we want to simulate? Boredom, anxiety and unhappiness will all slow down time, but none of them are very appealing mental states. I would argue that if you live a life where time goes fast, this is a sign of a life that is full and probably fulfilling, not empty. Slow-moving time might be less desirable than you think, unless of course you could find a way to isolate the more pleasurable experiences and make them linger.

There have been deliberate attempts to lengthen the experience of time using hypnosis. Back in the 1940s two American psychiatrists Linn Cooper and Milton Erickson hypnotised some volunteers. While they were in a trance they were instructed to picture themselves going for a 10-minute walk, but were given only 10 seconds in which to imagine the entire thing. Once they were out of the trance they were able to describe in detail a walk that would have taken 10 minutes. The question is whether they had actually learned to distort their perception of time, slowing
a minute down to 10, or whether they simply had particularly good imaginative skills? Decades later the psychologist Philip Zimbardo also attempted to distort time through hypnosis. Knowing himself to have an especially strong orientation to the future and a reluctance to enjoy himself in the present, he arranged for a colleague to put him into a trance and then suggest to him that he allow the present to expand and fill his mind and his body. Zimbardo believes that for him it worked; he began to notice the smells surrounding him and the extraordinary colours in a painting on the wall.

So what if you don’t want to resort to either hypnosis or suffering to make time slow down, but instead just want to lose that unsettling feeling that every week is slightly more fleeting than the one that’s just gone before, or that it’s nearly Christmas yet again. There is a way of stopping the years rushing by and for this you need to harness the Holiday Paradox (the feeling you get that your holiday passes in an enjoyable flash, but as soon as you get back it feels as though you were away ages). To recreate the holiday feeling, some people go to the trouble of moving their entire lives to a holiday resort. In her ethnography of the British expatriate community in Spain, the sociologist Karen O’Reilly found that part of the appeal of a new life abroad was the desire to live more in the present.
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The British people she interviewed on the Costa del Sol liked the fact that their new friends knew very little about their past and that it was rare for anyone to discuss the future. People told her they had deliberately only planned one element of their futures – that they never wanted to return
to live in the UK. Other than that, she found that few people had any plans beyond the next day. They had been so successful in ceasing to live by the clock that it made her research rather challenging. She would arrive on time, only to find her interviewees walking down the drive with towels under their arms, off out for a swim – and surprised that she couldn’t go with them. When she got lost one day, arriving over an hour and a half after her appointment time to interview another couple, they hadn’t even noticed she was late and found her apologies amusing. What’s striking about the British community on the Costa del Sol is their active decision to emigrate in search of a life that both has a slower pace and is spent more in the present. They are attempting to harness the Holiday Paradox, to create long, lingering days on which to look back. The problem is that the retrospective impression of these days as long relies on novelty, and although life abroad might have fewer routines than at home, the new memories which make time seem lengthy in retrospect will inevitably get rarer as people become accustomed to their new lives abroad. O’Reilly even suggests that they were attempting to challenge the idea that time flows in one direction, trying to somehow stall its onward march.

To slow down the passing years at home we need to recreate the Holiday Paradox by studying the features that make a holiday unusual. First, they involve few routines. But routines are hard to avoid in everyday life; repetitive chores such as cleaning are always going to be there, and if you have young children who need routine, you can’t abolish it altogether. What you can do is to try to add variety
wherever possible. If you can create a life which feels both novel and entertaining in the present, the weeks and years will feel long in retrospect. If you have any choice about your route to work then keep varying it, even if the alternative takes a few minutes longer. This can prevent the auto-pilot effect where everything is so familiar that you arrive at work and can’t even remember some parts of the journey. As soon as you vary the routine, you are forced to be mindful. You notice more things around you and this novelty tricks you into experiencing that time as slightly longer in retrospect. Now you might not want to do this every day. One of the reasons for always taking the same route to work is not to think about it, to feel you’re giving your brain a rest. So you might not want a daily adventure, but you can decide to look for something different each day. What colour are most people wearing on the bus? Which building has the nicest roof?

On holiday you constantly have new experiences that create brand new memories, and – looking back – this is what gives you the sense that you have been away for ages. So the more memories you can create for yourself in everyday life, the less the weeks will rush by. If governments are serious about increasing well-being they could even encourage employers to create more variety at work with a lunchtime talk, a job swap for a day or allowing people to carry out their tasks in a different order, or from a different location. If you fill your weekend with activities and go out for the day on both Saturday and Sunday to do something new, the minutes and hours will pass fast because you are so absorbed, but at the end of the weekend
you will feel as though you have had more than two days off work. If you did something different every weekend, you would make so many new memories in a month that the weeks would cease to rush by. Modern research bears out the advice from the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau back in 1885. He said to lengthen time, ‘Fill it, if you have the chance, with a thousand new things.’

Now, you do need to have a lot of energy to pack your weekends with different activities, and if you’ve had a hard week at work you may well not yearn for a host of new adventures, but rather for an empty weekend. A weekend spent at home, reading the papers, tidying up, watching TV and phoning a couple of people will relax you, but it gives rise to few new memories and soon that weekend will not stand out from any other, making time appear to have gone faster. So there is a trade-off here: do you want to slow time down or spend your spare time restfully?

Disappointingly, watching TV isn’t the answer. When you are tired and want to do nothing it may seem like the perfect activity; you don’t have to move, you don’t have to concentrate too hard and yet it simultaneously distracts you from your own worries while entertaining you. No wonder TV is so popular. But the problem with television, and the same applies to computer games and time spent online, is that it doesn’t lead to the formation of as many memories as non-screen activities. There will of course be exceptions, in programmes so powerful you never forget them. I’m convinced I have created plenty of memories from watching the drama
The Wire
, but I’d still have to admit that the memories from all five series probably don’t add up to 45
hours’ worth of another, more energetic, activity. Matt, who plays computer games early in the morning and late at night, tells me that he doesn’t remember whole games. While he waits in the virtual lobby for 12 people around the world to get ready to play shoot-em-up games, time drags, but once he is playing his absorption is so intense that time appears to shrink. This is exactly what researchers found when they studied gamers in a video gaming centre in Quebec City.
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Afterwards, people underestimate the duration of the game. Yet in terms of memories Matt says he only remembers the highs (the killstreaks where lots of people die), the lows (where he dies) and any new techniques he has learned (if your gun is large enough you can apparently shoot through walls).