My Plastic Brain

by Caroline Williams

  I contact Giuseppe Iaria at the University of Calgary, because in addition to looking at how the hippocampus varies with navigation ability he is also developing training to improve navigation skills in people with developmental topographical disorientation (DTD). This is an inherited inability to form cognitive maps that can be so severe that people get lost even in their own home. His team at Calgary has online navigational tests and training programs that anyone can try but which were offline being upgraded while I was working on my own skills.13 Giuseppe and I arrange a Skype meeting to discuss my results in relation to his work.

  He agrees that it is a good idea to concentrate on building cognitive maps, because an egocentric strategy, while it kind of works, runs up against the problem of limited brain-processing power, sooner or later. “You can’t remember an infinite number of turns,” he says. On the other hand, he adds, “If you build cognitive maps you don’t need to remember sequences, you don’t need to remember specific landmarks, you don’t need to pay attention all of the time. Focusing on creating a mental map is probably the best training that anyone can offer to anyone.”

  In his research, this involves online training to try to get people with DTD to a level where they can build on their skills in reality. For the rest of us, it seems that my hunch that the best training was to practice in the real world was right. “If you are in a safe place, so you know nothing is going to happen, you can say, ‘Okay, I will go and play for one hour every day.’ It's a physical activity, and physical activity is very important for the hippocampus. If you are able to do that for an hour a day and try to orient yourself before you use any tools to help you get home, that is about the best thing that you can do for yourself.”

  Whether or not it will change anything, brain-wise, Giuseppe agrees with Russell that this is very much still an open question. “We have so much knowledge about which parts of the brain are important for doing something. We have so much information about which cells are important in rats as they move around the environment. It's all great; it's fantastic. But we don’t have a clear idea of how the brain is integrating all of this information in order to give you a sense of direction and navigation in large-scale environments.” That, Giuseppe says, is what his research is hoping to answer over the next few years.

  More generally, what this tells us about the brain is that, while it does tend to get stuck on a certain way of doing something, such as navigating by landmarks rather than mental maps, it can change to a new strategy with a little bit of training. You just have to know that it's there. “The majority of people who mention having problems with navigation and orientation, they are not problems with navigation and orientation; they are just set on a specific bias; they are not necessarily considering other methods. But as soon as you get that knowledge that you can achieve a goal by using a different approach, and obviously you need to practice because you are not used to using that approach, you will get better and better,” says Giuseppe.

  That much is definitely true for me. When I started this project, my aim was to change my brain and prove what had happened using before-and-after brain scans to track my progress. Now my focus is a little bit different: I want to change my abilities, whether that means adding new skills or using what I’ve got more efficiently. And given my newfound ability to think about my space in a different way, I think it's definitely possible.

  More intriguingly, though, it seems as if I have stumbled upon another truth about the human brain: it is flexible enough to integrate a totally new sense. That is where the feelSpace project came from in the first place—the researchers wanted to know if people could integrate information that they have no sense organ for and incorporate it into their understanding of the world. It was only when volunteers started finding that it changed their perception of space that they thought of using it for that purpose.

  I’ve got to be careful here, because I don’t want to make it sound as if I have sprouted a brand-new bit of brain called the “magnetic detection cortex.” Instead, what my brain has done is take a new and previously irrelevant bit of sensory information—a buzzing sensation on my waist—and linked that in memory to the position of north. Once that information was in memory, I could learn to tie it to landmarks. Now, it doesn’t matter if I never wear the belt again—this information is there, intrinsically linked to my knowledge of my hometown. So whether or not I might have made any major changes to my brain's inbuilt circuitry, I have found that it is absolutely possible to bolt on a new skill that no human has evolved with naturally. And that, to me, is the most exciting way that I have “changed” my brain so far.

  NAVIGATION TIPS FOR THE HABITUALLY LOST

  Get to know which part of the navigation puzzle may be lacking. Researchers at the University of Calgary have online tests you can try at www.gettinglost.ca.

  Practice navigating in unfamiliar territory: get a map and compass, and switch off your phone and go exploring—you can always switch your phone back on again if you get really stuck. From experience, take snacks.

  Learn to use the position of the sun as a makeshift compass and pay attention to it when possible—a map might just form of its own accord.

  Wait for haptic sensor belts to hit the market; the next generation of feelSpace, for example, will allow you to set the position of your goal, and it will buzz continuously in that direction to guide you in. Easy.

  Consider fostering a gaming habit—it might just help.

  Don’t feel guilty about using Google Maps. Recent research suggests that having an aerial map with a regularly updated picture of north on it actually makes us better navigators.

  INTERVIEWS/CONVERSATIONS:

  Susan Wache, conversations and interview in Berlin, September 14, 2015.

  Klaus Gramann, interview in Berlin, September 15, 2015.

  Klaus Gramann, email conversation, March 14, 2016.

  Jessilyn Yoo and Neil Calderwood, conversations in Berlin, September 14–15, 2015.

  Russell Epstein, Steve Marchette, Steve Weisberg, and Josh Julian, interview and conversations during Philadelphia lab visit, January 11–12, 2016.

  Giuseppe Iaria, Skype interview, February 18, 2016.

  We must put aside the idea of a single time; all that counts are the multiple times that make up experience.

  —Henri Bergson, Durée et simultanéité, 1922

  People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually…it is more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff.

  —the Tenth Doctor (Doctor Who)

  I’m no physicist, and indeed no Time Lord, so I am not going to try and explain what time actually is, in the real, physical world; I’m not even sure that it's possible (for what it's worth, my physicist friends confirmed that I’m about right on that). But you don’t need to be a physicist to know that our experience of time passing is anything but constant.

  When I crashed my car, head-on, fifteen years ago, I discovered just how slowly it can go. In the seconds before I hit the car coming the other way, it was like being in a slow-mo movie sequence. I remember turning the steering wheel right and left for what felt like ten seconds in a vain attempt to miss the other car. I had several distinct thoughts while this was happening: Oh God, I’m going to crash. I’m only twenty-six, and I’m going to die. This must have been what it was like for Dad. Then time rushed forward at double speed as I hurtled toward the other car, before snapping back to normal speed: BANG. Ouch. Silence.

  My wedding day was the complete opposite. From getting my hair done in the morning to the last dance at midnight, it went by in a complete blur. It all whooshed by so quickly that I barely remember the details of the day—who I spoke to and what we said. I only remember the details of the vows we made because there is video evidence of what we agreed to.

  This wibbly-wobbliness of time is well known and is understood to be a product of how our brains process what is going on around us at any given moment. What I want to know is this
: is it possible to learn how to manipulate time at will, not as a passive observer but as the driver of your own perception?

  Controlling perception of time is something that is often written about in popular science articles on the subject, and it sounds pretty appealing—particularly to a forty-something like me who would like to know what the hell happened to the last decade. Annoyingly, though, I’m yet to find any useable advice on how to actually do it in real life.

  The standard spiel is to fill your time with new and exciting experiences. The explanation is that, when you are a child and summer holidays last forever, it is because everything is shiny and new and worthy of your full attention, and so you are constantly storing new things in memory. When you look back at that time, you get the mental illusion that it must have taken ages to fit in all that exciting new stuff.

  Once you’re an adult and life slips into a kind of predictable rhythm of work, socializing, and maybe a couple of hobbies to break up the chores, we start to live life more or less in our sleep, hardly bothering to pay attention because we’ve seen it all before. Fewer attention-grabbing experiences means that a smaller number of new memories are being stored—so when you look back on your recent past, it feels like it must have gone quickly. It's all a bit sad when you think about it: if our lives are the sum total of our memories and experiences, and we aren’t bothering to have any, are we really having a life at all?

  But I have a problem with the “get a more exciting life” solution to stopping life from speeding past. It's just not very realistic. It reminds me of the glib advice to “live every day as if it were your last.” There's nothing wrong with the sentiment, but it's not the way the world works. Most of us need to work for a living, usually for most of the hours in the day—which leaves barely enough time for the boring stuff, let alone any swinging from chandeliers.

  More than that, though, adding new and exciting things to your life only allows the illusion of control over how quickly time passed when you look back at the experience afterward. What I’m interested in is making time pass at a different speed as you are actually living in it, and that's not necessarily the same thing.

  As it turns out, this distinction between time judgments in the moment and after the event is a topic of debate in time psychology at the moment, led by veteran time researcher John Wearden, of Keele University, in the United Kingdom. Wearden has been working on time perception since the 1980s, and—along with Sylvie Droit-Volet of Clermont University, in France—has recently published new research showing that, while many researchers take time judgments made after the event to be a good proxy for how time felt in the moment, the two measurements often bear little relation to each other.

  In one of their recent experiments, volunteers were interrupted by a smartphone app that asked what they were doing, how they felt, and how quickly time was passing in the moment. They were also asked to either hold down a button on the phone for a certain duration—five hundred, one thousand, or fifteen thousand milliseconds—or to estimate how long a stimulus on the screen appeared for. These are all different ways of measuring a person's accuracy in estimating time as it is passing and after the event. “What we found, basically, was the duration judgments were completely disconnected from judgments of the passage of time,” Wearden says. “If you reported that time was going quickly, it didn’t affect your judgment of [how long] a second [lasts]. The two seem to be based on completely different things.”1

  This chimes with what he found back in 2005: people watching an exciting movie feel like time is whizzing by in the moment, but if you ask them afterward to guess how long the clip lasted, they guessed that they had been watching it for longer than they really had. The opposite was true for people who watched a relaxation film. Which means that you might feel that time is going quickly in the moment but afterward feel that it took ages. So which is the “real” perception of time? In this case, did the exciting movie take more or less time? Both, it seems, are illusions created by the brain, and making that judgment depends on which illusion you choose to believe at any given moment.

  I arrange a Skype chat with Wearden to see if he can throw any light on the subject. I have interviewed him before and remember him as the kind of charmingly grumpy guru who is great fun to chat with because he's knowledgeable enough to know every twist and turn in the past thirty years of research in time perception, and forthright enough to tell me when his opinion on a particular theory is that it's “a load of complete bollocks.” (Scientists’ usual code for this is, “It's an interesting idea, but there are a number of problems with it….”)

  Wearden tells me that the trouble with what I am trying to do is that “in the moment” time hasn’t been particularly well studied. There has been, he says, “a lot of speculation about it and a little bit of research.” There has been no shortage of perception-of-time studies, of course, but most of them use duration judgments, given after the event: “how long did that movie clip last?” or “how long have we been talking?” or prospective judgments, made in advance, such as “hold that button down for three seconds.”

  A handful of people are tackling “in the moment” time perception, though, which is good news for me. I’m not bothered about feeling as if a two-week holiday lasted forever after the event—I want to control how I perceive time in the moment. It would be the ultimate use of the mental flexibility I’ve been trying to foster so far. Imagine if you could choose to remember every second of walking down the aisle and saying your vows as if it were in the slow-mo of a car crash, every thought and feeling larger than life and twice as colorful. And wouldn’t it be great, when you can feel yourself getting bored and time dragging to a standstill, to be able to do something specific to speed things along?

  Unfortunately, there are one or two other reasons to think that this isn’t going to be easy. What I’m basically trying to do is get a grip on the nature of human consciousness: that mysterious sense that there is a “me” that is living in the flow of another mysterious thing called time. Far cleverer people than me have been flummoxed by both of these questions over the course of human history.

  Not only that, but I’m not only trying to understand consciousness: I’m attempting to change the very nature of that consciousness as it is happening to me. Essentially, I’m trying to choose one illusion over a different illusion while simultaneously living in an illusion. Maybe the second you stop living in time, and turn your focus onto it, it will change the experiencing altogether. Even more confusingly, time isn’t a solid immovable “thing” that is perceived in the brain at all, at least not in the same way that the brain perceives a table or chair. Each person's perception of time is generated in the same brain that is perceiving the rest of the experience. Which makes me wonder whether it is even possible for people to understand their conscious experience of time from the inside.

  All in all, thinking about time is making me feel dizzy in the same sort of way as when I look at the night sky and try to get my head around our place in the universe. Intellectually, it all kind of makes sense, but if you try and put yourself and your life into that picture, it very quickly blows your mind. It also makes me realize how much we take for granted the passage of time as a framework for making sense of life; it plays a huge part in our lives, and we don’t have to do anything to make it happen.

  Not everyone has this luxury, though, as I discovered by accident while talking to a dog-walking friend one day. I’ve known Jeannie for years—we have very similar naughty sheepdogs, who love to herd each other into tiny circles, while arguing over which one of them is the sheep. Jeannie's a lovely woman, eloquent and softly spoken but with an impish sense of humor that erupts into a loud, explosive laugh when you least expect it. I had noticed that she sometimes seems a little distracted but didn’t think much of it; I’m sure I come across like that too, when I’m having one of my more creative, “hypofrontal,” moments. It turns out, though, that the reason she seems distracted is that since suffering
a stroke six years ago, she is totally lost in time. Without regularly checking her watch, she has no idea whether we have been walking around our local park for ten minutes or an hour, and without consulting her to-do list she wouldn’t know whether the next thing she has to do is go home and cook dinner, or to go to work to start the day. In fact, more often than not, she's not sure what day of the week it is, what season we are in, and sometimes even where she is on the timeline of her own life. It's something, she tells me, called “loss of passage of time syndrome,” and it sounds both terrible and fascinating.

  Over a cup of tea at Jeannie's house a few months later, I get the full story. She first noticed the problem a few weeks after leaving the hospital, as she started to ease back into normal life. “I’d get up in the morning to get my sons off to school, and my husband would come up and say, ‘Come out of the shower!’ I had no idea whether I’d been in there a minute or, as it happened, forty minutes.”

  Six years on, this is the kind of thing that still happens all the time. She tells me about a recent occasion where she nipped over to check the notice board at work, and the next thing she knew a colleague had come to find her because she’d been missing for twenty minutes and was needed elsewhere. “How long did it feel like you’d been there?” I ask. “Five minutes?” “Less,” she replies.

  This is particularly interesting, because it is often assumed that the ultimate state of well-being is to be in the flow, to step out of time and ride the waves of mental freedom. From what Jeannie tells me, though, it's not a state that she would recommend long term.

  “It's just this ghastly feeling of untetheredness,” she says. “We all have that ticking clock that we touch base with—and for me there is something that drags me away, and I don’t know where, but some terrifying place that isn’t to do with time. And there's a certain feeling that comes with that, that isn’t freeing or pleasant, it's sort of a dull dread…. It's like a lostness on a hundred different levels.”