CHAPTER 5

Mind-bending, Time-bending

‘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 (DR 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, 15 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 26 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 towards 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: 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 40-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, socialising, 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 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 afterwards. 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 judgements 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 UK. 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 judgements 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 — 500, 1000, or 15,000 seconds — 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 judgements were completely disconnected from judgements of the passage of time,’ Wearden says. ‘If you reported that time was going quickly, it didn’t affect your judgement of [how long] a second [lasts]. The two seem 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 afterwards 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 afterwards 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, is seems, are illusions created by the brain, and making that judgement 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 to because he’s knowledgeable enough to know every twist and turn in the past 30 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 judgements, given after the event: ‘how long did that movie clip last?’, ‘how long have we been talking?’ or prospective judgements, 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 was in the slow-mo of a car crash, every thought and feeling larger than life and twice as colourful? 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, I’m not only trying to understand consciousness: I’m attempting to change the very nature of that consciousness as is it 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 anyone 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 realise 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 humour 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 the 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 cuppa at Jeannie’s house a few months later, I get the full story. She first noticed the problem a few weeks after leaving 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, 40 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 20 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 wellbeing 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.’

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 wellbeing. 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 needs 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 visualise, 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 makes 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 centre 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 judgement about an event afterwards. 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 table 3, below.

	Guess time passed	Actual time passed	Over/under estimation	Time felt	I felt
Silence over dinner, after telling my son off	6 mins	3 mins	Over	Slow (bad)	Angry
Playing Lego with my son (and enjoying it)	15 mins	32 mins	Under	Slow (good)	Relaxed and engaged
Faffing about on the internet (should be working)	15 mins	5 mins, 15 secs	Over	Slow (bad)	Bored, annoyed with myself
Silent lunch (meditation retreat)	20 mins	40 mins	Under	Slow (good)	Relaxed
Roller disco	20 mins	40 mins	Under	Fast (good)	Happy, having fun
Breath and body meditation (part of day retreat)	30 mins	40 mins	Under	Fast (good)	Focused
Being in a hurry (school morning)	20 mins	30 mins	Under	Fast (bad)	Panicked
10-hour trans-Atlantic flight (engrossed in work, followed by a film)	5 hours	8 hours	Under	Fast (good)	Engaged / entertained

Table 3. 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 judgement of time in the moment, whether it felt fast or slow, didn’t always match up with my judgement of duration afterwards. 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 they are 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 they are 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: that 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 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 36–48 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 favourite 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 20 minutes I managed to tune in for; their particular brand of silly song-based humour is a bit much for a migraine day, it turns out. My other option seems even more of a non-starter: 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 judgements 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 goodbyes — 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 towards the right or down and towards the left. Normally, the image flips between one and the other interpretation every two to three seconds, Wittmann says.

Fig 15. A Necker cube.

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 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’. 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 practising 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 someone says 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 10 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.’

First, this would make time speed up, while you are actually doing the exercise, he suggests — and then afterwards, the continued attention to body signals might re-set 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 40 minutes felt more like 20, 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 13 again. This all fits in to 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 40 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 practising 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 wellbeing. 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.

Fig 16. Larson’s model. (Source: Larson and von Eye, Ecological Psychology, 18 (2), pp. 113–30)

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?

TIME OVERRIDE EXPERIMENT 2
10-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 am, with a three-hour layover in Atlanta. It was going to be a long day.

On the plus-side, this was the first time for 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 3000 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 centres. 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 60s and early 70s, 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 is what matters 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 15 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 table 3, on page 180, 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.