My Plastic Brain

by Caroline Williams

  Listening to Jeannie talk about the unbearable lack of time, it is obvious that being able to check in with some kind of ticking clock is crucial for our emotional and cognitive well-being. Most psychologists agree that there probably is such a thing ticking away somewhere in the brain. They know this because experiments in animals have shown that if you feed them by the clock, all kinds of creatures, from fish to rats to turtles and dogs, are able to count time well enough to know when to expect dinner to appear, and to look a bit disgruntled when it doesn’t. Only humans, psychologists presume, experience time flowing in the moment. Unless, of course, any other species are truly conscious—which they might be, but that is a whole other story.

  The leading model that explains the internal clock of this is called the pacemaker-accumulator model. In this view, the “in the moment” bit of this is guided by attention, which acts as a kind of switch that turns on the ticks of the internal clock. These ticks are temporarily stored in an “accumulator,” a kind of holding pen where they are temporarily stored to be counted if need be.

  When we want to work out how long something has lasted, we use memory to access the accumulator and count the ticks. When we access the accumulator, it uses memory, not attention, to compare the most recent batch of time with our memory of past time spans. Wherever the internal clock is located in the body, more than one cognitive process is driving it. Which makes me think that you can probably only choose to tinker with one part of the machine at a time.

  Psychologists know that this is a psychological clock, inside our heads, rather than any physical measurement of time, because changing what is going on in the body and mind tampers with the speed of the ticks. Heating the body or head (believe it or not some experiments used heated helmets to specifically warm the head), and taking drugs like amphetamines or anything that increases dopamine levels in the brain, make the clock tick faster—so that estimates of how long a stimulus lasted start to get out of kilter with clock time. Strong emotions, like fear and anger, do something similar, which is thought to account for the kind of experience I had when I crashed the car. When strong drugs and strong emotions affect the workings of the brain, our perception of time starts to go all over the place.

  This is where it gets a bit difficult to visualize, because a faster ticking clock doesn’t only mean that you think that time has passed faster in the moment. Instead, it makes you feel like more time has passed: when you count the ticks, there are more of them in there compared with what the real clock says. If there are more ticks, there must have been more time, so in retrospect you perceive that it has passed more slowly.

  It makes sense and nicely explains why time is so wibbly-wobbly in psychological experiments, but if you want to make a sweeping statement about whether time goes faster or slower in a given situation, you can easily come up with two different answers. When watching an exciting movie, the ticks go faster, so time seems to fly—but when you look back on it, more ticks make you overestimate the time you spent watching it. Similarly, it's hard to predict whether, if I do manage to slow down the ticking of my internal clock, that will make time slow down or speed up; it sounds like it would make it slow down, but if there are fewer ticks in the accumulator, then that must mean it has seemingly taken less time, which should mean time has gone faster. It's mind-boggling. “You are not the only one who is confused,” says Wearden.

  In an attempt to make sense of it all, I decided to keep track of my own experience of time during specific “moments” that seem particularly relevant based on what I have read so far. I want to see if any patterns emerge based on how I am feeling and what I am focused on. So, with advice from Wearden and Dan Zakay—another veteran time psychologist, who is now at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private research center in Israel—I design my own experiment.

  Much as I have enjoyed being locked in windowless rooms and zapped in the head, I didn’t see any benefit of doing the experiments for this chapter in the lab. Lab experiments to measure passage of time involve getting people to do something, and then asking them, is time going at clock speed, faster than the clock, or slower than the clock? I figure this is something I can do just as well by just living it and noticing what is happening to time.

  I start logging my subjective experience of time (slow, fast, or the same as the clock), as well as making a duration judgment about an event afterward. To do this, I set up the stopwatch on my phone, turned it facedown on the table at the start of a moment, then turned it off at the end without looking at it. Then I compared my estimate of how long I’d been doing something to what the clock said. The results are in the table below.

  Figure 5.1. My estimations of time in the moment and after the event, and how it felt in the moment.

  What I found agreed with John Wearden's findings: my judgment of time in the moment, whether it felt fast or slow, didn’t always match up with my judgment of duration afterward. Sometimes, like when playing Lego with my son, time ran quickly, and I guessed that far less time had passed than actually had. But in the moment, time felt slow, because I was super engaged with what we were doing. Other times, I was painfully aware of time—like that awkward silence at the dinner table after telling my son off—and my estimate about the amount of time that had passed was double the real amount. This felt slow, too, but in a bad way. Similarly, underestimating time was sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing, depending on whether time was speeding along because I was having a great time or because I was frantically racing against the clock.

  It's all very confusing—and to make matters worse, Zakay sounds a word of warning about reading too much into these results. They are, he says, anything but scientific. “You know in advance what you are doing and what the expected outcomes should be,” he says. “For example, if you know that duration is expected to be felt as longer under condition X than under condition Y, then you can press the stopwatch after a longer period under X than under Y, not because this is what happened with time but because you knew, maybe unconsciously, that this is what should happen.”

  This is another basic feature of psychological research—the person being tested isn’t supposed to know anything about what he or she is being measured on. The power of expectation can be enough, even unconsciously, to totally skew the results. Which is fine, but if anyone is going to get any practical use out of any of this research outside of the lab, at some point that person is going to have to do what I did and give it a go, bias or no bias.

  But the results are confusing and, frustratingly, reveal no obvious rules about specific mental states and their effect on the passage of time. Slow time can sometimes feel good and sometimes bad, and negative emotions can make time seem to run faster or slower.

  If it's this difficult to measure my perception of time, how on earth am I going to change it? With no clear answers yet, I decide to follow my impulsive streak and just get stuck in with applying a few tricks that I have gleaned from various pieces of time-perception research.

  TIME OVERRIDE EXPERIMENT 1

  Migraine Day

  Wearden's most recent study confirms what most of us already know: time seems to pass more quickly if you are feeling happy, and more slowly if you are feeling sad. Whether you can engineer this kind of situation is less clear—I have my doubts, but I am willing to give it a go all the same.

  The perfect opportunity came along the day after my Skype chat with Wearden. For me, regular migraines are among the hormonal joys of womanhood—and although I hate them, on the plus side, each attack is predictable in that one is very much the same as the next. The moment I feel it creeping up from the base of my neck, I can guarantee that the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours are going to pass in a wonky-headed, blurry-eyed haze. And particularly in the hour when the painkillers have worn off but it's too early to take the next lot, time will drag painfully slowly.

  To try and make this one pass a bit more quickly, first, I’m going to try to improve my mood. I don’t
have high hopes: I’m about as grumpy as a journalist with a sore head and a lot of work to do. But in the name of science, I download my favorite comedy podcast: the Adam and Joe show. These two always crack me up, so if anything is going to improve my mood, it's them. I turn the volume down as low as possible so it doesn’t hurt too much and hope for the best.

  And…it definitely cheered me up a bit, but dealing with the noise did make it feel like longer than the twenty minutes I managed to tune in for; their particular brand of silly song-based humor is a bit much for a migraine day, it turns out. My other option seems even more of a nonstarter: find something that demands all of my attention, emotional investment, or a lot of skill. My head hurts too much, and my eyes aren’t working together—so I can’t even focus, let alone concentrate. Which leaves me only one time-bending option: give up altogether and go to sleep. I would love to do this, but I have to do the school run now. So, off I trudge, with one eye closed and a hat pulled over my face.

  The verdict? Migraine: 1, time override: 0.

  While wondering what on earth to do next, I happened upon a new theory of time perception, which specifically focuses on changing how time feels in the moment. It seemed perfect for what I was trying to do. Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, in Freiburg, Germany, has come up with an idea, broadly called “body time”—which sounds altogether more useable than an invisible internal clock somewhere in the brain.

  Over Skype, from his office in Freiburg, he tells me that time is always, always to do with how we focus. I kind of suspected that already—in fact, given its central role in sustaining attention, anxiety, navigation, and creativity, I am starting to think that everything is about focus. But, he tells me, it's about more than just where in the outside world we place our attention. Much more important for our sense of time is where our focus is physically, inside the body, at any one moment. In fact, he goes as far as to say that time is what is going on in our bodies at any one moment.

  “It's meaningless to say I’m attending to time—psychologists use this term a lot, but where are you attending to? My idea is that you are attending to yourself, to your bodily self, your mental self—and that is how you attend to time,” he says.

  Wittmann has even suggested a good candidate for these kinds of “in the moment” time judgments in the brain: an area called the insular cortex, or insula. If you want to imagine where this bit of the brain is, go about an inch above your ear on either side and imagine pulling apart the top layer of the wrinkly cortex in the deepest fold there. Underneath is another layer of cortex, which is the insular cortex. The brain has a matching pair, one on each side of the brain.

  The insula is a part of the brain that keeps track of bodily sensations and processes emotions. These two things together are what gives us the impression that we are one person, made up of a seamless physical and emotional self. It also, he suggests, gives us the impression of a “self” that is moving through time. If you wanted a glib tagline for this, you could say that the insula puts the “me” into “time.”

  Rather than being a competitor with the internal-clock model, the body-time idea actually fits into the theory pretty well. “You could say that the pulses are our body signals,” says Wittmann. As for the attentional switch—that is, the extent to which we are or are not paying attention to our body signals—this also fits.

  Wittmann also has a slightly different but related line of work, which concerns how long a moment lasts in conscious awareness. Though our minds make a seemingly seamless story of our lives as we are living them, in reality the present moment only lasts an instant before being shunted into memory or forgotten altogether. If what I want to do is stretch that moment or ignore it until it goes away, then it would be helpful to know what I’m working with.

  The general consensus is that a psychological moment lasts approximately two to three seconds. This was confirmed a couple of years ago in ingenious experiments where psychologists scrambled tiny fragments of movie clips to see if people noticed. They only noticed, and lost the plot of the scene, if the mixed-up scenes lasted more than two to three seconds.2

  Intriguingly, this short window of now-ness feeds into our lives in all kinds of ways. Greetings and good-byes—including hugs, kisses, waves, and handshakes—all last about three seconds on average. Holding any of these for much longer than that, especially with a stranger, is a sure-fire way to make both of you feel awkward.

  More intriguingly still, Wittmann has done some experiments that suggest that, with enough training, it might be possible to extend this moment: he asked one group of expert meditators, and another of people with no meditation experience, to look at an optical-illusion image that can flip between two interpretations—the most famous is the Necker cube (below), which can be seen either with the cube going up and away from you toward the right or down and toward the left. Normally, the image flips between one and the other interpretation every two to three seconds, Wittmann says.

  Figure 5.2. A Necker cube. (Wikimedia Creative Commons, author: BenFrantzDale—Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2040007)

  When both groups were asked to hold one interpretation in mind for as long as possible, the meditators were able to hold it for around eight seconds, two more on average than the controls.

  Extending a moment by deliberately focusing your attention on your body or some aspect of your mental experience sounds like a pretty user-friendly way to slow down time as you are living it. It comes back to my mindfulness training: focusing on the minutiae of physical or mental experience takes more time than just flitting along in a dream.

  It is not a tool for all occasions, though, as I found out to my cost. After the end of my eight-week mindfulness meditation course, I signed up to a full-day retreat with my teacher Gill. I had been pleasantly surprised by how much I had enjoyed the two-hour session on the last day and wanted to know what a full seven hours of meditation practice would feel like.

  As it happened, the day retreat fell on day two of yet another migraine. I was hoping that a day of relaxed breathing would do me good, and maybe that I’d even find a way to be “present with the pain” so it wouldn’t matter so much. Instead, it turned into possibly the longest day of my life, with the notable exception of the two that I spent in the hospital having my son. Every time Gill asked us to “notice what's here” I would notice that my head hurt, my neck hurt, and that I felt sick. Every time she invited us to notice what the body needs, I thought, It needs to get onto that sofa over there and go to sleep. And, despite the fact that Gill had made it very clear that we should stop if anything became too challenging, I stupidly decided to press on. By the end of the day, I was so frustrated I felt ready to explode, and spent the last half an hour of the practice biting my tongue so I didn’t shout, “Just ring the bloody bell!!”

  I’m reliably informed that mindfulness can and does help people manage pain, with practice. In experiments, two groups of people were given the same painful stimulus (something hot against their skin), but one group was also tricked into thinking that time was passing faster than it actually was. These people reported experiencing less severe pain than the other group, for whom the clock was set at a normal speed.3 Whether it is possible to increase the speed of the internal clock to get a similar effect is less clear. I couldn’t find any research on the subject—and my “Adam and Joe” experiment would suggest maybe not.

  My experience of being mindful for a whole day did indicate that making each painful, nauseous moment feel like an eternity is a very bad idea indeed. When I told Wittmann about my experience, he looked horrified at the thought. “You shouldn’t do that, because you are so self-aware and so aware of your migraine. Pain is the perfect time modulator—time totally expands when you are in pain.” So I was in pain—which stretched time—then I stretched it further by focusing on my inner experience for seven hours. Good idea, Caroline.


  What I take from this is that practicing mindfulness might not be the best idea, if you are already struggling to get through the day. On the other hand, if you happen to be having a good time then choosing to be mindful of what you see, hear, think, and feel is a great way to potentially stretch the moment.

  What about speeding time up to skip to the end of a bad day or a long and boring journey? This, says John Wearden, is altogether more problematic, because when people say that “time flies,” they are nearly always talking about time that is already in the past. “They say, ‘I was so engrossed in this book I looked at the clock and it was ten o’clock. Therefore, time must have gone quickly.’ But they didn’t feel it go quickly; they didn’t really feel it at all.”

  It's a problem that Wearden has begun to raise with his colleagues in recent years, many of whom don’t seem to have thought of it before. “I spoke to a few time psychologists, and they said, ‘Yeah, now that you mention it, has anyone ever experienced fast time?’ And, in a sense, you can’t really, because you can’t fast-forward reality.”

  Which makes it seem that any attempt to skip to the end of a bad situation is unlikely to work, at least in the moment. One possible way around it perhaps is to disconnect from the whole experience of time by going to sleep or by finding something that grabs your attention so completely that you lose track of time. One of the best things for this is television, Wittmann suggests. If all else fails, you might not be able to make time speed up, but you can almost certainly lose track of it. That's pretty much the opposite of the kind of mind control I am aiming for, however.

  An alternative, according to Wittmann's theory of “body time,” is to do something to speed up the signals coming from the body. If the insula is constantly deciding how fast time is going based on signals from the body, perhaps exercise is a way to speed time along when you are bored? He agrees that it is definitely a factor. “There are two things: one is attention to time—meaning attention to your bodily self—and the other thing is activation. Activating your body and feeling your body are other ways to affect your perception of time.”