First, this would make time speed up, while you are actually doing the exercise, he suggests—and then afterward, the continued attention to body signals might reset you to some kind of on-the-clock calm. “Say I go jogging for an hour and then I calm down, but still feel very active; I am very much feeling myself, and I feel myself in time, and I feel that everything is happening much slower because my body is much more activated and I feel myself much more intensely.”
To try out the slowing and speeding up of time based on activity in the mind versus the body, I arrange for a Saturday of intense time-perception self-experimentation in which I will experience two extremes in the same day. First, I will attend another silent meditation day retreat—this time, thankfully, without a migraine. Then, by way of contrast, my family and I will head to a roller disco for the evening. Will a few hours of mindless exercise, high-energy pop, and slight anxiety about my son breaking a bone feel longer or shorter than hours of sitting, lying, and moving meditation where the only thing that moves is my attention?
Unsurprisingly, the roller disco flew by. The first forty minutes felt more like twenty, and I nearly forgot to look at the clock, because I was having such a blast, whizzing around to loud music and pretending I was thirteen again. This all fits into the body-time theory quite nicely: I was exercising, so my body signals were ticking by faster, and I was engrossed in the music, which took my attention away from time and let it fly by unnoticed. This seemed to work great, even though there was a huge digital clock on the wall and I was also aware that my son was up way past his bedtime and that his next fall could trigger a meltdown.
As for the meditation, my experience of time was mixed. If I took an average of the day, I’d say that time felt slow—although the first session of the day was the complete opposite and felt a lot shorter than forty minutes; interestingly, that one was a meditation about bodily awareness.
GO WITH THE FLOW
So that is slowing time and speeding time. Given the challenge I set myself in trying to change conscious perception while also living in it, I think it's about as much success as anyone can expect. I won’t go as far as to say that I have applied neuroplasticity and changed my brain to perceive time differently, but I would definitely say that I have gained a few tips on how to use it more effectively—and perhaps more flexibly. So in that sense, it has been a success.
There is another state of psychological time, though, when time disappears and we step into another zone altogether. It's back to the idea of flow, or the “zone” again, which I first played with in Boston, although at the time I didn’t pay much attention to what it did to my perception of time. By now, I have over a year of practicing that zone under my belt, and I’m intrigued to see what time psychologists have to say about other potential ways to slip into the flow and out of time.
John Wearden told me about the little-known research of Elizabeth Larson, an occupational therapist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has been studying time perception from the point of view of patients who are injured or disabled. She figures that if you can work out what kinds of experiences get people into an enjoyable state of flow, then it might be possible to tweak certain aspects of patients’ lives to make them more enjoyable and less stressful. If there are things they could be doing—things to get into a state where time “flies by” or ceases to matter—this could be a good goal to aim for to improve well-being. It seems like something that we could all benefit from.
Larson has found that our perception of time shifts in a kind of wonky bell shape (see graph below), depending on how well the needs of a situation match our skills. If whatever we are doing is so easy that we can do it without thinking too much, then time feels slow or about the same speed as it says on the clock. It speeds up and reaches flow when we are doing something that is just right for our skills and we are in the “relaxed and ready,” flow-like state, which I experienced (eventually) in Boston when the computer training was aligned to my own personal level. Then, when the job gets beyond our capabilities, we are unceremoniously ejected from the flow, and time starts to grind to a halt again.
Which reminds me of my second time-bending experience—the long flight that wasn’t: how does it feel to be trapped in a metal tube with no internet signal for most of my waking hours?
Figure 5.3. Larson's model. (Elizabeth Larson and Alexander von Eye, “Flow of Time from Qualities of Activity and Depth of Engagement,” Ecological Psychology 18, no. 2, pp. 113–30. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd.)
TIME OVERRIDE EXPERIMENT 2
Ten-Hour Flight, London–Atlanta
When I booked my trip to take in the labs of Russell Epstein in Philadelphia and Lila Chrysikou in Kansas, it made perfect sense to go via Atlanta. Then I looked on the map and the flight time: ten hours, starting at 9.30 a.m., with a three-hour layover in Atlanta. It was going to be a long day.
On the plus side, this was the first time in weeks that I had had a whole day to myself. No dog to walk, no dinner to plan, nobody wanting me to chat about their day or play Lego with them. All I had to do for the entire flight was get on with the work I’d been struggling to fit in recently. If I got tired of that, then I could ask the nice lady to bring me a glass of wine and I could sit back and watch a film. Bliss.
To anyone with a full-time job and/or no kids, it might sound strange to be excited about a whole day of work. For me, though, it's a much-needed chance to get my teeth into something that I find fascinating and just the right amount of mind-boggling. In short, when I’m in the mood for it, work puts me right into the top of Larson's wonky bell-shaped curve. That chimes with a study by psychologist Regina Conti, from 2001, which found that it matters whether you are doing something for yourself or just because you have been told to.4 Only choosing to do a task for yourself sets you free from the drudgery of clock watching.
And guess what? The journey flew by. I wrote three thousand words (some of which I didn’t delete later) and enjoyed all eight of the hours I worked. In fact, it made me wonder whether internet-free travel might be the productivity tool I have been looking for. After eight hours, I had done everything I wanted to do, so I put the computer away, ordered a Baileys, and watched a film. Before I knew it, we were landing in Atlanta.
So it does indeed seem to be true that if you can get your brain to engage properly, not only will it mean you are less aware of time in the moment, but after the event, it seems like less has passed. Even looking back on it after a long day's travel, the London–Atlanta stretch didn’t feel that bad at all. It's a win-win.
Just don’t ask me about the three-hour layover. By then, I was too tired to work, and there was only American football on the overhead screens, in a domestic terminal with no shops. Three hours feeling bored and tired felt way longer than ten hours of satisfying work. And nothing I did to try and change it made the slightest bit of difference. Damn.
Verdict? Long flight: 0, time override: 1.
Layover: 1, time override: 0.
So it seems as if Larson is right: one way to step out of time is to become totally absorbed in a task. But what if you have succumbed to boredom and no longer have the mental energy to drag yourself into that state? Here, it might be a better idea to revisit Wittmann's ideas about body time. If perception of time relies on physical and emotional signals being processed in the insula, what happens if you deprive it of any stimulation at all? Or perhaps flood the senses so that the body signals don’t get a look in?
Depriving the brain of bodily and emotional stimulation might explain the timeless state that expert meditators describe once they have managed to quiet down all the mind-wandering. Another option perhaps is to become absorbed by music. Drowning out your body signals and playing with your emotions with the right tune might be one way to get into this state without that much effort. It's speculative at best, but Wittmann seems convinced, so it's good enough for me: “Totally,” he agrees when I suggest it. “It's like instant meditation.”
Wittmann also describes the feeling of slipping out of time when he went into a flotation tank—a stress-relieving tool found in some expensive spas and dedicated flotation centers. The water in a flotation tank, or pod, is set to body temperature and is salty enough to entirely support the body. Because you can’t tell where your body starts and ends, and it is fully supported by the water, you drift into a state of calm that makes the stresses of normal life disappear.
“I went in there for two hours…. Your mind is wandering, and then suddenly it stops. I had an extreme experience of which meditators have, just after the second time of going in there.” With his body supported and nothing left to think about, he says, “Time evaporated.”
I had a similar experience in a flotation tank many years ago, although it took ages to “let go” of my tense neck and let the water support my head. But I can kind of see what he means. It was a bit like that dreamy state before you fall asleep at night. I felt weightless, calm, and with no perception that time was passing at all.
So what can we take from all of this? For me, learning to override my natural perception of time has been a partial success. I may not have found the mental throttle that will allow me to speed away from a boring or painful situation, but that's probably because there isn’t one. Time perception seems to arise out of whatever is happening in the brain and body right now—and if the mind and body are feeling tense and trapped in time, the only way out of that is to persuade either the body or the mind that it isn’t. Some strategies that seem to work include exercise, music, or, if you’re not already too miserable, something engaging to take your mind off time.
On the other hand, slowing down the good times is a matter of learning to engage your attention to the minute details of what is happening right now. Time won’t fly quite as much, but you stand a much better chance of remembering the fun.
As for whether any of this will stop the time from flashing by as we get older, Wearden's latest study has cast doubt on the idea that this is even true. In the study were two groups of people—one of people in their late sixties and early seventies, and the other young adult students. As with Wearden's other studies, people of different ages were interrupted with a smartphone app to ask them what they were doing, how they were feeling, and how quickly time was passing. They found that there were no significant differences in how young and old people perceive time in the moment. Whether you are young or old, the only thing that changes your perception of time in the moment is what you are doing and how you feel about it.
In short, it doesn’t matter what age you are—if you are happy right now and/or are engaged in what you are doing, you report that time is going faster; if you are sad or bored, you report time is going more slowly. Emotion and attention are what matter for time in the moment. Age doesn’t matter a bit. “The idea that time goes more quickly in old people is not borne out,” says Wearden. “I’m not sure why people say that, but they do…. Is it because it's not real, or is it because it is real and we’re not clever enough to measure it?”
I think the reason people say that is because, like me, most adults feel like the months are passing by faster every year. This has nothing to do with the feeling of how time is in the moment—and anyway, it's impossible to measure, because there is no way to spool time back in to check how time felt fifteen years ago compared with how it feels now. Research done about ten years ago by Wittmann, and then repeated by others all around the world, has found that the only consistent perception-of-time illusion is that as people get older they feel like the past decade went particularly quickly. Anything less than ten years, and time feels like it is passing at the speed that the clock says. And that, it would seem, is because it is.
To me, the take-home message from all of this isn’t that we should fill our lives with new experiences to stop the last decade from seeming to fly by (it's not even clear if that is possible). Instead, it seems much more sensible to stop putting so much emphasis on the decades flashing by—because they aren’t, even if they feel like they are—and to focus on the here and now instead. Easier said than done, definitely, but it is almost certainly worth the effort.
One final note of caution, though: in a recent study, Sylvie Droit-Volet looked again at what happened to people's perception of time as she manipulated their emotions with happy and sad films. This time, though, she split the group into two and told half of them all about the research linking changing emotions to passage-of-time estimates. And the results were that the effect of emotion on time only works if you don’t know about it. If you are aware that comedy is supposed to feel short, and horror long, then they won’t actually feel like that. Perhaps the reason that my own results in figure 5.1 were so inconclusive was because, as Zakay pointed out at the start, I knew too much about what was supposed to happen. It is also possible that if you have read the whole of this chapter, then I might well have ruined the illusion for you. Sorry.
INTERVIEWS/CONVERSATIONS:
John Wearden, Skype interview, February 8, 2016.
Jeannie Campbell, interview, February 5, 2016.
Marc Wittmann, Skype interview, February 16, 2016.
Dan Zakay, email conversation, February 3, 2016.
Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
—Albert Einstein
After all of that pondering on the nature of time and consciousness, I’m ready to get my teeth into something a bit more solid. I’d prefer it if that solid thing wasn’t math, but there we are. For my last challenge, I have set myself the task of finding out if it is possible to improve on what I have long assumed to be a basic part of my brain's makeup: I just don’t have a “numbers” kind of brain. If there is any basic function of my brain that is going to be tricky to override, I think this might be it.
It's almost certainly going to be worth the effort, though. Mathematical ability is linked to the capacity for logic and reasoning—and the mental gymnastics needed to think about abstract things like geometry might just feed into my burgeoning sense of physical space. And anyway, being rubbish at math has proven to be quite embarrassing in my line of work, not least when I was an editor at New Scientist a few years back.
The tagline of New Scientist magazine is “For people who ask why.” And that pretty much describes everyone who works there. These are the people who as kids would annoy their teachers by asking questions about everything in between mucking about. The sub-editors are no exception, plus they have an almost pathological need for stuff to be grammatically, literally, and factually perfect. Their job is to point out anything that is ambiguous, wrong, or deeply implausible, as a last line of defense before the magazine goes to press. When I was a newbie freelancer, I was terrified of them: I’d imagine them as a pack of hyenas, cackling over my beautifully crafted words and picking out all the juicy bits. In reality, they aren’t like that at all; they’re generally lovely—especially the late John Liebmann, chief sub at the time I worked there. He was so keen on getting things right that he would stop himself midsentence to correct his own facts or grammar. It would take ages for him to get his point across, which could be frustrating when you were battling a deadline, but when he did finish a sentence, you could be damn sure he was right.
It was during a conversation with one of the other sub-editors that number skills got added onto my wish list of brain improvements. I was working on a graph to go with an article I was editing, and Sean, the sub, had come by to question my figures. My response didn’t go down terribly well. “Errr, okay. Let's have a look. I’m a bit rubbish at math….” Sean looked at me incredulously. “What? And what are you doing about that?” he asked. I was a bit taken aback. “Um, nothing really,” I mumbled. “I just don’t have a numbers kind of brain.” He stared at me for a moment and then finally shook his head. “I just don’t get how you can know that and not do anything about it.”
It was the first time that I’d been challenged on my asser
tion that I just don’t have a head for numbers. I’d always just assumed that you either “get” numbers or you don’t. In my mind, I don’t have the kind of mind that computes numbers, and, as a writer and editor, I was pretty much okay with that. You can’t be good at everything—and I could get there in the end with enough time and a calculator. And I always asked someone to check my sums for me afterward.
At the risk of sounding defensive, it's not as if I’m the only one who thinks this way. By one estimate, around a quarter of people have such an aversion to math that they give up even trying, and panic in situations where they have to do math under pressure, like when trying to work out a tip when the waiter is standing right there.1 At its worst it can turn into something that researchers call “math anxiety,” which sounds like a proper diagnosis but isn’t; it's just a more scientific-sounding description of the “aaargh, I can’t do this” feeling so many people get when given a numerical problem to solve. And this definitely sounds like me. I can almost feel the mental shutters come down when I see any kind of sum. Most of the time, I don’t even try. I just reach for my calculator, even for the simplest arithmetic.
It wasn’t always like this. When I was an eleven-year-old, math was embarrassing for a different reason. My math teacher, Mr. Griffiths, would ask a question and stare intently at the class, fingertips on the bridge of his nose, as he strode around the classroom, waiting for an answer. Eventually, when the silence got too much for him, he’d come to me for the answer. He’d say something like, “Come on then, Caroline, put them out of their misery.” I’d usually know the answer, although sometimes I’d pretend I didn’t so as not to seem big-headed. I was pretty good at math back then.
My Plastic Brain Page 18