Time Warped (34 page)

Our experience of time has been revealed to rely on another dimension entirely – space. We don’t all picture costumed monarchs or decades in the shape of slinkys when we consider the past, but curiously we do all seem to have a sense of where the past and future lie in relation to the location of our own bodies, a sense that is reflected in the metaphors we use in everyday language. It is this ability to locate time in space that helps us to time-travel mentally backwards and forwards at will, with imagery so strong that it can both provide us with an advantage and put our lives in danger.

We curse the fallibility of memory, but it is precisely this flexibility – as I’d charitably like to call it – that allows us to imagine the future, to imagine anything we choose. It is a time-frame so important for us to contemplate that this could even be the default position of the wandering mind. It brings us opportunities to plan and hypothesise that are unique to human beings. I find it wonderful that we can mentally time-travel in this way, indulging in nostalgia one moment, making plans to change the world the next. But future thinking is a problematic time-frame due to our cognitive tendency to focus on the earliest and the most extreme features of a future event, and to neglect the typical when we try to learn from past experience. The result is that we can make decisions about the future which are very wrong.

When it comes to the brain, the clocks of the mind remain elusive, but despite this we are surprisingly good at estimating the seconds, the minutes and even the hours. No one yet knows exactly how we do it, but it is possible that the brain keeps time by counting its own pulses, pulses that occur when our bodies are carrying out other processes.

The experience of time roots us in our mental reality. Some of us see the future coming towards us. Others feel we are sailing on a river of time that is forever moving on, dragging us with it. But when time warps, we are left feeling confused or worse.

So a greater understanding of how human beings experience and use time can help us to live better lives in more productive societies. These might seem like audacious
claims, but there is plenty of time – if we know how to use it to our advantage.

We will never have total control over this extraordinary dimension. Time will warp and confuse and baffle and entertain however much we learn about its capacities. But the more we learn, the more we can shape it to our will and destiny. We can slow it down or speed it up. We can hold on to the past more securely and predict the future more accurately. Mental time-travel is one of the greatest gifts of the mind. It makes us human, and it makes us special.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE IDEA FOR
this book came out of discussions with my excellent editor at Canongate, Nick Davies, about a slightly different book I’d proposed on the way we hold ideas of the future in the mind. It was Nick who encouraged me to tackle the topic of the perception of time as a whole. With the wealth of research out there, it was always going to be ambitious, but I’m glad Nick had faith in me to be able to pull it together.

Without the academics that have spent years conducting this research, this book wouldn’t exist. I’d like to thank the following people whose work has particularly shaped my ideas: Marc Wittmann, Endel Tulving, Dean Buonomano, David Eagleman, Lera Boroditsky, Eleanor Maguire, Jamie Ward, Ad Kerkhof, Katya Rubia, Suzanne Corkin, William Friedman, Daniel Gilbert, Demis Hassabis, Emily Holmes, Daniel Schacter, Donna Rose Addis, Thomas Suddendorf, Karl Szpunar, Philip Zimbardo, Bud Craig, Ernst Pöppel and Virginie van Wassenhove. Writing a book on this topic means you can’t fail to notice what a precious commodity
time is, and so I’m especially grateful to some of those above who have spent time over the years explaining their work to me personally.

My thanks to Mark Williams and Patrizia Collard for their lessons in mindfulness, to Emmy Goodby for her research for Chapters Two and Four, to Marie McCallum for the index and to Matthew Broome and Dean Buonomano for checking particular sections of the book for me.

Then there are the people who were generous enough to share their own experiences with me – Chuck Berry, Robert B. Sothern, Eleanor and Angela. And I want to make special mention of BBC colleague Alan Johnston, who was not only was prepared to go over his traumatic story once more with me, but had clearly thought very hard about the topic of time before the interview. He could easily have written his own book on his experiences, so it was very generous of him to discuss them with me.

Many listeners to the programme I present on BBC Radio 4,
All in the Mind
, took the time to send in their detailed descriptions of the way they visualise time, and in particular I’d like to thank the following people, who even allowed me to include their descriptions in this book: Clifford Pope, Simon Thomas, David Brock, Katherine Herepath and Chella Quint, as well as others who chose to remain anonymous. And special thanks to Roger Rowland and Lisa Bingley, who took the time to draw pictures of how they see time and gave me permission to publish versions of them.

I’ve been really impressed with everyone at Canongate, who have efficiency and enthusiasm that writers dream of.
This is a much better book thanks to them. Jenny Lord and Octavia Reeve made tactful yet incisive improvements and have been excellent at spotting mistakes. Thank you to my agents: David Miller for getting the book published, and Will Francis for his detailed suggestions on the text.

Finally, I’m grateful to those family and friends who have put up with my constant complaining that I don’t have enough time to write this book, and to my partner Tim who patiently read the lot, improved it a great deal and has endured endless conversations about time.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1
McTaggart (1908)

2
Zhong & DeVoe (2010)

3
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5104778.stm

1. THE TIME ILLUSION

4
Described in James (1890)

5
Husserl (1893)

6
Zerubavel (2003)

7
Bargh et al. (1996)

8
Loftus et al. (1987)

9
Twenge et al. (2003)

10
Shneidman (1973)

11
Broome (2005)

12
Wyllie (2005)

13
Wittman (2009)

14
Cotard (1882)

15
Leafhead & Kopelman (1999)

16
Baddeley (1966)

17
Hoagland (1933)

18
Halberg et al. (2008)

19
Hunt (2008)

2. MIND CLOCKS

20
Henderson et al. (2006)

21
Koch (2002)

22
Vicario et al. (2010)

23
Craig (2009)

24
Sevinc (2007)

25
Pöppel (2009)

26
Schleidt & Eibesfeldt (1987)

27
See James (1890) again

28
Lewis & Miall (2009)

29
Zakay & Block (1997)

30
Bar-Haim et al. (2010)

31
Langer et al. (1961)

32
Noulhiane et al. (2007)

33
van Wassenhove (2009)

34
http://www.neurobio.ucla.edu/~dbuono/InterThr.htm

35
Buonomano et al. (2009)

36
Eagleman & Pariyadath (2009)

37
Siffre (1965)

38
Foster & Kreitzman (2003)

3. MONDAY IS RED

39
Ward (2008)

40
Mann et al. (2009)

41
See Ward (2008) again

42
Gevers et al. (2003)

43
Cottle (1976)

44
See Cottle (1976) again

45
Boroditsky (2008)

46
Casasanto (2010)

47
Boroditsky (2000)

48
Casasanto & Boroditsky (2008)

49
Merritt et al. (2010)

50
Casasanto & Bottini (2010)

51
Boroditsky & Ramscar (2002)

52
Margulies & Crawford (2008)

53
Hauser et al. (2009)

54
Miles et al. (2010)

4. WHY TIME SPEEDS UP AS YOU GET OLDER

55
Kogure (2001)

56
Shield (1994)

57
Janet (1877) in James (1890)

58
Lemlich (1975)

59
Friedman et al. (2010)

60
See Friedman et al. (2010) again

61
Fradera & Ward (2006)

62
Linton (1975)

63
Walker (2003)

64
Ross & Wilson (2002)

65
Skowronski et al. (2003)

66
Wagenaar (1986)

67
Maycock et al. (1991)

68
Prohaska et al. (1998)

69
Frederickson et al. (2003)

70
Friedman (1987)

71
Crawley & Pring (2000)

72
Holmes & Conway (1999)

73
Conway & Haque (1999)

74
Linton (1988)

75
Frankl (1946)

76
Mann (1924). Quotes from p. 104.

5. REMEMBERING THE FUTURE

77
D’Argembeau et al. (2011)

78
Rosenbaum et al. (2005)

79
Schacter & Addis (2007)

80
Hassabis & Maguire (2009)

81
Addis et al. (2008)

82
Kennett & Matthews (2009)

83
Eichenbaum & Fortin (2009)

84
Szpunar et al. (2007)

85
Hassabis et al. (2007)

86
Logan, C.J. et al. (2011)

87
Suddendorf & Corballis (2007)

88
Busby & Suddendorf (2005)

89
Atance (2008)

90
Buckner (2010)

91
Szpunar & McDermott (2008)

92
Berntsen & Bohn (2010)

93
Newby-Clark & Ross (2003)

94
Lachman et al. (2008)

95
Van Boven & Ashworth (2007)

96
Taylor et al. (1998)

97
Hawton (2005)

98
Crane et al. (2011)

99
Holmes et al. (2007)

100
Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010)

101
Bar (2009)

102
Azy et al. (2008)

103
See Hassabis & Maguire (2009) again

104
Gilbert & Wilson (2009)

105
Gilbert (2006)

106
Loewenstein & Frederick (1997)

107
Gilbert et al. (1998)

108
Wilson et al. (2000)

109
Dunn et al. (2003)

110
Liberman & Trope (1998)

111
Nussbaum et al. (2006)

112
See Liberman & Trope (1998) again

113
Wakslak et al. (2008)

114
Shu & Gneezy (2010)

115
Marshall (undated)

116
Buehler et al. (1994)

117
Mischel et al. (1989)

118
Steinberg et al. (2009)

119
El Sawy (1983)

120
Weick (1995)

6. CHANGING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH TIME

121
Mangan et al. (1996)

122
O’Reilly (2000)

123
Tobin et al. (2010)

124
Schwartz (1975)

125
Hoffman (2009)

126
See Friedman et al. (2010) again

127
Ofcom (2010)

128
Bluedorn (2002)

129
Leroy (2009)

130
Jiga-Boy et al. (2010)

131
Putnam (1995)

132
See Frankl (1946) again

133
Kerkhof (2010)

134
James (1890)

135
Csikszentmihalyi (1996)

136
Zimbardo & Boyd (2008)

137
Williams & Penman (2011)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This list is not exhaustive, but these are the main research papers to which I refer in
Time Warped
, and the books in this field that I found to be the most useful to my own research.

Apologies to the authors, but, to save space and trees, where there are multiple authors I’ve included only the first.

Addis, D.R. et al. (2008) Age-related changes in the episodic simulation of future events.
Psychological Science
, 19, 33–41.

Atance, C.M. (2008) Future thinking in young children.
Current Directions in Psychological Science
, 17, 2008, 295–298.

Azy, S. et al. (2008) Self in Time: Imagined self-location influences neural activity related to mental time travel.
Journal of Neuroscience
, 28(25), 6502–6507.

Baddeley, A.D. (1966) Time estimation at reduced body-temperature.
The American Journal of Psychology
, 79 (3), 475–479.

Baddeley, A.D et al. (2009)
Memory.
Hove: Psychology Press.

Bar, M. (2009) The proactive brain: memory for predictions.
Theme issue. Predictions in the brain: Using our past to generate a future.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, B, 364, 1235–1243.

Bargh, J.A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. et al. (1996) Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action.
Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology
, 71, 230–244.

Bar-Haim, Y. et al. (2010) When time slows down: The influence of threat on time perception in anxiety.
Cognition & Emotion
, 24(2), 255–263.

Berntsen, D. & Bohn, A. (2010) Remembering and forecasting. The relation between autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking.
Memory and Cognition
, 38(3), 265–278.

Bluedorn, A.C. (2002)
The Human Organization of Time: Temporal
realities and experience.
USA: Stanford University Press.