Hammond to propose that studying time perception could lead to mental health advances, as when she suggests, hopefully, that understanding the involuntary flash-forwards that can precede suicide might lead to better prevention. It may be some of this optimism that inspires Ms.
We are also unusually optimistic when planning - we overestimate our own ability to complete a distant task. Hammond relies on the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who has found that when predicting how we’ll feel in the years to come, we tend to dwell on extreme cases from the past, not typical ones. If you think the past is strange, try the future. Hammond believes this “holiday paradox,” caused by our tendency to gauge passing time by the number of new memories formed, may be at the heart of a more perplexing problem: that time appears to speed up as we get older. A vacation filled with activities may pass quickly, but once you get home, all those new memories can give the illusion that you’ve been away longer. After losing himself in endless hours listening to Beethoven and feeding a pet spider, he was astonished to learn that the eight-week experiment was over in what felt like little more than a month.
The philosopher and psychologist William James observed in 1890 that “a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.”Ī French explorer learned this the hard way in 1962 when, after shutting himself in a cavern to study the effects of isolation, he experienced a strange distortion of time. When memory comes into play, our sense of time can become even more erratic. Sadness can lead to a deceleration of time, and so can fear, as the neuroscientist David Eagleman confirmed when he dropped his subjects from a tower at an amusement park in Houston, each participant instructed to stare at a stopwatch in free fall until being caught by a net. But you might not have expected a role for body temperature: cold can make the seconds tick faster, while heat can slow them down, as one scientist found when he asked his wife to repeatedly count the seconds as her fever rose. At each duration she finds distortions and paradoxes, revealing the persistent “capriciousness, strangeness and mutability” of time as we sense it.Īnyone who has waited for a red light knows that not all minutes are created equal. In “Time Warped,” Claudia Hammond, a British radio journalist and psychology lecturer, delves into scores of experiments on how we track the seconds, hours, months and decades.
For a sky-diver whose parachute won’t open, a few seconds can seem to last forever, but safe on the ground an hour can pass in a flash.
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