Making Time E-Book

Steve Taylor

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Seitenzahl: 390

Beschreibung

Why does time seem to speed up as we get older? Why does it seem to drag when we're bored or in pain, or to go slowly when we're in unfamiliar environments? Why does it slow down dramatically in accidents and emergency situations, when sportspeople are 'in the zone', or in higher states of consciousness? Making Time explains why we have these different perceptions of time, suggesting that there are five basic 'laws' of psychological time and uncovering the factors which cause them. It uses evidence from modern physics and unusual states of consciousness to suggest that our normal sense of time is an illusion, 'created' by our minds. But perhaps more importantly, on a practical level, this book shows us what we can do to control our sense of time passing, to make it pass slowly or quickly in different situations. It suggests that it is possible for us to live through more time in our lives, and so effectively increase the amount of time which we are alive for. In the final chapter, Steve Taylor uses insights from Buddhism - investigating the practices of mindfulness and meditation - to show how we can actually transcend linear time, and learn to live fully in the present moment.

Leseprobe

‘A major landmark in our understanding of how human beings experience time, written with great intellectual agility and creative insight.’

Stanley Krippner, author of A Psychiatrist in Paradise

‘This remarkable book addresses crucial questions. After Making Time, you may never view time – and your life – in the same way.’

Larry Dossey, author of Space, Time & Medicine

‘Raising some fascinating questions about the nature of time and answering them admirably, this book will grab your attention, befuddle you slightly and leave you feeling invigorated with a new perspective, if not thoroughly enlightened. Using both psychological and physical science Taylor explores these ideas in an entirely accessible and engaging way, leading the reader calmly through a tangle of theory and philosophy. Time you read it.’

The Crack, August 2007

‘In what is both a practical manual and a text-book of psychology, [Steve Taylor] illustrates that time itself is in some senses an illusion determined by circumstances such as our age, our boredom threshold, and our childlike eagerness for exciting things. It is possible to alter our perceptions in order to make time pass quickly or slowly, just as we wish, and Taylor shows how it can be done.’

The Good Book Guide

‘A fascinating book completely worth reading.’

The Odyssey

To Hugh and Ted

Steve Taylor teaches courses on personal development at the University of Manchester and Salford College, and is a part-time house husband. He is the author of The Fall (O Books) and lives in Manchester with his wife and two small children.

Contents

Introduction

1 The First Four Laws of Psychological Time

2 How Information Stretches Time: The First Two Laws Explained

3 Absorption and Time: The Third and Fourth Laws Explained

4 When Time Stands Still: The Fifth Law of Psychological Time

5 Time Across Cultures

6 The Timeless Moment: Higher States of Consciousness and Time

7 The Illusion of Time

8 Controlling and Expanding Time

9 Expanding and Transcending Time

Acknowledgements

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

I’m six years old, in the car with my parents and brother, travelling back from our annual two-week holiday in Conway, North Wales. It’s dark and the journey seems to take forever. I lie on the back seat, watching the orange streetlights and the houses pass by, and wonder if we’re ever going to get home.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I ask my father.

‘Don’t be silly’, he says. ‘We only set off half an hour ago.’

My mum plays the ‘Yes/No’ game and ‘Twenty Questions’ with us to make the time pass faster. We listen to the radio for a while. Then I fall asleep. When I wake up it seems like I’ve been in the car for an eternity and I can’t believe we’re still not home.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I ask again.

‘Not far now’, says my father.

We play some more games and finally I recognise the streets of our suburb of Manchester. I feel bored and miserable and tell myself that I’m never going to spend as long in a car ever again.

The journey from Conway to Manchester took two hours when I was a child and still takes roughly two hours (although slightly less due to improvements in roads). I made the journey again a few years ago and couldn’t believe how short it seemed now, from my adult perspective. Those two hours – which seemed like an eternity when I was six – were nothing. My girlfriend was driving, and we chatted, listened to tapes, watched the Welsh countryside give way to the urban sprawl of north-west England, and we were back in Manchester almost before we knew it. It was a little frightening – what had happened to all the time that two hours contained when I was six years old?

A few years ago I made another journey which gave me an indication of how much more quickly time is passing to me now. This was a fifteen-hour plane journey, from Singapore to Manchester, which also seemed to last forever. I’m not a very good flyer and it wasn’t a very good flight: we flew into two typhoons over India and it was rocky almost all the way. I hoped I’d be able to ‘kill’ some of the time by sleeping but it was impossible. Every time I drifted off my anxiety woke me up again. Failing that, I hoped I’d at least be able to make the time pass quickly by distracting myself with in-flight entertainment or books and magazines, but my mind stubbornly refused to move from the moment-to-moment reality of the situation. I was aware of every minute passing, and as a result time seemed to drag horribly. Every time I checked the clock – which was every few minutes or so – less time had gone by than I expected.

My subjective sense of how long that journey took is, I realised recently, very similar to my sense of how long my childhood journey to Conway took. To me they seemed to involve roughly the same amount of boredom and impatience and lasted roughly the same amount of time. This suggests that what was two hours to me as a child was equivalent to fifteen hours to me as an adult – which means, rather frighteningly, that time was passing around seven times faster since I had grown up. Where has all the time gone? Why do I seem to have lost so much of it?

About fifteen years ago, not long after I’d left university, I joined a rock group as bass player and toured Germany. While we were over there I fell in love with a girl, and decided not to go back home at the end of the tour. I moved into her flat and ended up staying in Germany for four years. The first few months were a magical time. It was eastern Germany, just a couple of years after the wall had come down, and everything was so different. It was an exhilarating experience just to walk down the street, to see the houses black with coal dust, crumbling to the ground, the strange socialist architecture and the people with the different clothes and hairstyles and language. Everything was incredibly real and exciting – I was in my first serious relationship, making friends with new people all the time, playing in a new band, learning a new language, and starting to teach English. Everyday I was bombarded with newness – new sights, smells, sounds and experiences.

After I’d been there for eight months I went back to Manchester for a holiday and when I arrived, I felt like a Roman soldier returning from years away fighting in a distant country. I couldn’t believe it was only eight months since I’d left – it seemed more like eight years. So much time seemed to have passed that I was amazed that everything was still exactly the same, that all the shops were the same with the same people working in them, that all my friends were still doing the same jobs and living in the same houses. Time seemed to have stretched out for me, as if I’d been in a spaceship travelling at close to the speed of light.

This book is my attempt to explain why we experience different perceptions of time such as these. It answers questions which puzzle all of us: Why does time seem to speed up as we get older? Why do new experiences often seem to ‘stretch’ time, as happened to me in Germany? Why does time seem to ‘fly’ when we’re having fun, or to drag when we are bored or anxious (as in my flight back from Singapore)? And why does it slow down drastically or disappear altogether in accident or emergency situations, in drug experiences, for sportspeople who are in ‘the Zone’, or for people with mental disorders such as schizophrenia?

Before Einstein, scientists believed that time was something absolute, which flowed at the same rate everywhere in the universe. But Einstein showed that the rate at which it passes depends on two things: speed and gravity. The faster an object moves, the more slowly time passes for it. A clock on a spaceship which was travelling at 87 per cent of the speed of light, for example, would run twice as slowly as a clock on Earth. In a similar way, the more gravity an object has, the more slowly time passes for it. Time runs more slowly on the surface of Jupiter than on the Earth, for example, because of its larger gravitational field.

Einstein dealt with time as it flows in the universe – universal time, if you like. But in this book we’re going to investigate psychological time, time as we perceive and experience it in our lives. I’m going to sketch out a kind of parallel Theory of Relativity that deals with the inner world rather than the outer, looking at the factors which make time pass at different speeds to us as individuals.

I’ll explain that all of our different perceptions of time are based on the same factors working in different ways. By understanding these factors we can learn to control them, and so overcome our sense of time passing too quickly. Our normal state is to feel at the mercy of time – that it’s running away from us, never allowing us to do as much as we want to, and taking away our youth, good looks and health. Time is an enemy, eating our lives away and taking us ever closer to death – as the French saying goes: ‘The hours are killing you, one by one.’

In addition, the fact that the time is always moving forward means that any happiness we find is only going to be temporary, because the conditions which produce it will soon change. Everything changes – people and relationships change, while success, wealth and good fortune fade away. As the philosopher Schopenhauer wrote: ‘In a world like this, where there is no kind of stability, no possibility of anything lasting, but where everything is thrown into a restless whirlpool of change … It is impossible to imagine happiness.’1

As a result of this, most of us work hard to hold back the onward flow of time. Some of us exercise and eat healthy foods to try to make sure that we’ll live for longer; some of us use moisturiser and beauty products to try to slow down the ageing process, and others have plastic surgery to try to convince themselves (and other people) that they’re younger than they are. Many of us also try to preserve our happiness by making our lives as secure and stable as possible – with steady jobs and relationships, routines that never change, insurance policies and pensions – so that ‘time the destroyer’ can’t get at them. (But it always does in the end, of course.)

Time is also our enemy because it seems to work against us in an almost perverse way: it often ‘shortens’ enjoyable experiences and ‘lengthens’ miserable or boring ones. Why should a boring afternoon in the office seem to last for an eternity, while an evening out with friends races by?

But my point is that we don’t need to feel helpless in this way because we can learn to control the flow of time in our lives. It’s actually possible for us to expand time, to alter our perceptions so that we experience more of it. We don’t need to try to cheat the ageing process or extend our lives for as long as possible – it’s actually easier, and more beneficial, to expand time from the inside, by changing the way we experience the moment-to-moment reality of our lives.

We’re going to begin by looking at the different perceptions of time we experience in our lives. There are five basic ones I’ll put to you, which I call the ‘Five Laws of Psychological Time’. These obviously aren’t ‘laws’ in the normal scientific sense of the term – they can’t be, since we’re dealing with the realm of the subjective, where there are no concrete, verifiable and indisputable facts. The laws I outline should be seen as statements which are generally true, which fit with most people’s subjective experience, and which have been supported by research. Over the last four years, I’ve investigated differing time perceptions and unusual experiences of time – and I’ll refer to my findings from numerous experiments and interviews.

Then we look at why these different perceptions of time occur. We’ll see that, just as universal time is relative to speed and gravity, psychological time is relative to two factors: information-processing and the ego. By ego, I simply mean our sense of being an ‘I’ inside our heads. It’s the part of us which exists as a self-conscious individual and thinks, plans, makes decisions, daydreams and analyses our experience; it makes us feel separate from the world and from other human beings. And the ego is, it seems, closely linked to our sense of time. We’ll see how all the unusual perceptions of time we experience can be explained in terms of ego and information-processing, from the endless days of childhood to the ‘timeless moment’ of higher states of consciousness and the slowing down of time which goes with pain and discomfort.

After this we move on to the second major purpose of this book, which is to investigate what time actually is, and to question whether it really exists, at least in the sense we normally understand it. We’re going to look at time from a cultural and historical perspective, and we’ll see that our normal linear perception of time isn’t something absolute, but is particular to the kind of ‘psyche’ – or consciousness – through which we experience the world. In my book The Fall, I suggested that other peoples in the world – and in history – have a different kind of psyche to us, and so experience the world in a different way. And one of these differences is their sense of time. For example, some cultures have a cyclical sense of time rather than linear, while others don’t have any concept of time at all. We’ll also look at what paranormal, mystical and near-death experiences, together with modern physics, tell us about time. The conclusion we’ll consider is that our normal linear sense of time is a kind of illusion, created by our minds. In the light of this, we’ll see that not only is it possible to expand time, but also to transcend it altogether.

In the final section of the book we’ll look at exactly what we can do to control our sense of time passing, to make it speed up or slow down as we like. We’ll discuss how to expand the amount of time that we live through, so that we actually experience more time, meaning we live for longer. And we’ll also investigate ways to free ourselves from the tyranny of linear time, the ‘hurry sickness’ which many of us suffer from, the sense that time is running away from us and slowly stealing our lives away, moment by moment. The key to this is the present. By giving our attention to the present moment and our present experience – rather than to the ‘thought-chatter’ inside our heads – the future and the past cease to exist as realities and our sense of linear time is replaced by a powerful awareness of the ‘nowness’ of things.

Just one point before we start: I don’t want to present any of my ideas or theories in this book as ultimate truths. I’m putting them forward in a spirit of debate, as suggestions with which you’re free to agree or disagree. To me, none of them are fixed; they’ve evolved as I’ve been researching and writing the book and they’ll no doubt continue to do so. In the same way, it may be that some of the laws or statements about time won’t fit with your own experience. Perhaps you feel that time hasn’t got faster as you’ve got older, or that it doesn’t go slowly when you’re in unfamiliar environments. That’s only to be expected since, as I mentioned before, we’re not dealing with objective facts or conclusive theories. As you’ll no doubt realise, I’m the kind of person who likes playing around with theories and evaluating different answers to the same problem. I’ve developed these particular theories because, in my opinion, they are the most coherent and cohesive way of explaining the different perceptions of time we experience. But I’m always open to other theories – and if you come up with any of your own, I’m willing to listen.

Just to summarise then, I hope that you’ll take away three things from this book. First of all, you’ll take away an understanding of time – why it seems to pass at different speeds in different situations and how it’s created by our minds. Secondly, you’ll gain a control over time in your life, and an ability to expand it so that you can effectively live for longer. And finally, perhaps most importantly, I hope that this book will help to give you what’s ultimately the only thing that we have: the present.

1

The First Four Laws of Psychological Time

1. Time speeds up as we get older*

Here’s another example of vanishing time, which was given me by a friend. At the age of fifteen he went on a school trip to France. He had the misfortune to go to an all-boys’ school, but the special feature of this trip was that girls from the local girls’ school were going too. He had a great time, as you can imagine. He drank lots of French beer, smoked French cigarettes, and started a fumbling teenage affair with one of the girls.

A year later he was sitting on a bus and realised that two girls sitting opposite him seemed familiar. After a while it clicked: they were two of the girls who went on the trip with him. He realised that it was almost a year to the day that they went on the trip, and it made him feel nostalgic. As he told me:

That year seemed like such an enormously long period of time, so long that I’d forgotten what the girls looked like properly, even though I spent most of the holiday drooling over them. I wanted to go up and speak to them but it seemed so long ago that I was afraid they wouldn’t remember me (although maybe I was just making up excuses for my shyness) … If I had to put it in terms of how time is passing for me now, I’d say it was the equivalent of about four years.

Of course, this first law of psychological time is so familiar that it doesn’t really need to be illustrated with examples. We’ve all remarked on it: how Christmas seems to come round quicker every year; how you’re just getting used to writing the date of the new year on your cheques when you realise that it’s almost over; how your children are about to finish school when it doesn’t seem long since you were changing their nappies …

Every time I give a lecture or run a course or workshop, I present this law and ask if people agree or disagree with it, noting down the figures and adding them together as a kind of ongoing survey. And at the moment over 93 per cent of people I’ve surveyed feel that time has sped up as they’ve got older. In fact the people who disagree with the law are almost always young people, in their early or mid-twenties, who presumably haven’t yet become aware of a speeding-up of time. Other, more formal questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone – including college students – feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were half or a quarter as old as now.1 And perhaps most strikingly, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to ‘reproduce’ these intervals, they guess a shorter amount than younger people.2

The two lives

It’s sometimes said that human beings live two lives, one before the age of five and another one after, and this idea probably stems from the enormous amount of time which those first five years of our lives contain. It’s possible that we experience as much time during those years as we do during the seventy or more years which come after them. As Bill Bryson puts it in his recent memoir of his childhood, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: ‘Because time moves more slowly in Kid World … [childhood] goes on for decades when measured in adult terms.’3

It seems that during the first months of our lives, however, we don’t experience any time at all. According to the research of the psychologist Jean Piaget (who conducted a massive number of experiments in order to trace the cognitive development of children), during the first months of our lives we live in state of ‘spacelessness’, unable to distinguish between different objects or between ourselves and objects. We are fused together with the world, and don’t know where we end and where it begins. And we also experience a state of timelessness, since – in the same way that we can’t distinguish between objects – we can’t distinguish one moment from the next. We don’t know when an event begins or when it ends. As the transpersonal psychologist and philosopher Ken Wilber writes, for a newly born child ‘there is no real space ... in the sense that there is no gap, distance or separation between the self and the environment. And thus, there is likewise no time, since a succession of objects in space cannot be recognised.’4

We only begin to emerge from this timeless realm as our sense of separation begins to develop. According to Piaget, this begins at around seven months. We start to become aware of ourselves as separate entities, apart from the world, and also to perceive the separation between different objects. And as a corollary of this, we begin to be aware of separation between different events. We develop a sense of sequential time, a sense of the past and the future, which is encouraged by the development of language, with its past, present and future tenses. According to Piaget, this process follows four stages. First, we recognise that people arrive and events begin; second, we recognise that people leave and events end; third, we recognise that people or objects cover distances when they move; fourth, we become able to measure the distance between different moving objects or people – and at this point we have developed a sense of sequential time.5

After this point of ‘falling’ into time, we become more and more subject to it. The sense of time speeding up isn’t something that we just experience as adults; it probably happens from early childhood onwards. If the sense of sequence is the result of our development of a separate sense of self, we can probably assume that the more developed our sense of self becomes, the more developed the sense of sequence will be – meaning that time will move faster. Time may pass for a two-year-old child, but probably only at an incredibly slow speed. But as the child’s sense of self becomes more developed, the speed of time increases too. Time probably moves faster to a child of four than it does to a child of three, and faster to a child of seven than it does to a child of six.

However, as my childhood journey to Conway showed, even at this age time passes many times more slowly than it does for adults. This is why, as any parent knows, young children always think that more time has gone by than actually has, and often complain of it dragging. As Bill Bryson puts it, to children time moves ‘five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of over five miles’.6 Primary-school teachers should be mindful of this when their pupils’ attention starts to wander – what seems to be a fairly short 40-minute lesson to them (and a fairly short day from 9 am to 3.30 pm) is stretched many times longer to the children. This could have some bearing on childcare practices too. There’s been a lot of debate recently about the effects of children being looked after by childminders or nurseries, and one factor which should be considered here is how children perceive the time they spend away from their parents. Let’s say a parent drops his or her son off at the childminder’s at eight in the morning and picks him up at 5.30 pm, and spends two and a half hours with him before putting him to bed. Those nine and a half hours of separation are long enough even from an adult perspective, but for the child they’ll feel significantly longer. And this ‘stretched out’ time could intensify the negative effects of separation, such as a subconscious feeling of rejection, or a weakening of the bond between the child and parents.

Young children’s sense of time is undeveloped in other ways too. They can’t accurately guess how long events last – in fact they only become able to do this in terms of seconds at the age of six or seven.7 They don’t have a clear sense of the sequence of past events either. When children between the age of two and four talk about what they have done, or retell the story of something that’s happened to them, they almost always mix up the order of the events, usually grouping them together in terms of association rather than sequence. Similarly, they generally aren’t able to arrange a set of pictures in sequence so that they make a story.8

Their awareness of the future is usually very limited too. We tend to forget that the future and the past don’t really exist. They only exist in our minds. All that really exists is the present, and it’s just that, while we’re in the present, we have thoughts about the future and the past. We remember what’s happened to us before the present and we anticipate what’s going to happen to us after it. As St Augustine wrote: ‘The past is only memory and the future is only anticipation, both being present facts.’9 And because young children don’t have the ability to think abstractly or rationally (according to Piaget, this doesn’t begin to develop until the age of 7), they find it difficult to conceive of the past or the future. A couple of years ago my wife decided to take her nephews and nieces to the theatre. That morning she saw her five-year-old nephew Charlie, who was crying for some reason. ‘Don’t be upset Charlie’, she said to him. ‘We’re going to see Puss in Boots this evening.’ Charlie just looked at her blankly, as if he didn’t understand what ‘this evening’ meant, and carried on crying. This reminded my wife of one Christmas time when she was a young child. She was having a tantrum and her older brother tried to cheer her up by saying: ‘Don’t worry Pam, it’s Christmas tomorrow – you’ll be getting lots of presents.’ She remembers that the idea of ‘tomorrow’ meant absolutely nothing to her. She shouted back: ‘But it’s not Christmas now!’

According to the German developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson, human beings’ sense of time becomes fully developed between the ages of fifteen and sixteen. After living in a state of ‘temporal confusion’, we now have a clear ‘temporal perspective’.10 This is because, by this stage, our sense of self has become fully developed, including our sense of separation from the world and the ability to think abstractly and rationally. Our ‘fall’ into time is now complete, but in adolescence and early adulthood our lives are still so full of new experiences that time seems to move fairly slowly. Most people only begin to notice a speeding-up of time in their late twenties or early thirties. By this time we have often ‘settled down’. We’ve settled into our jobs, our marriages and our homes, and our lives have become ordered into routines – the daily routine of working, coming home, having dinner and watching TV; the weekly routine of (for example) going to the gym on Monday night, going to the cinema on Wednesday night, going for a drink with friends on Friday night, etc.; and the yearly routine of birthdays, bank holidays and two weeks’ holiday in the summer. After a few years we start to realise that the time it takes us to run through these routines seems to be decreasing, as if we’re on a turntable which is picking up speed with every rotation. As the French philosopher Paul Janet noted more than a hundred years ago:

Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.11

Forward telescoping

I’d like you to pause for a moment to answer a few questions. I’d like you tell me the year in which the following events happened.

1. The Lockerbie air disaster

2. The terrorist gas attack in a Tokyo tube station

3. The fall of the Berlin Wall

4. The Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal

5. The death of George Harrison of the Beatles

6. The death of Princess Diana

You’ll find the answers to these questions at the back of the book on p. 230, and most of you should find that – as long as you’re old enough to remember the events – you have, on average, dated these events too recently. This is the phenomenon which psychologists call ‘forward telescoping’: the tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. Marriages, deaths, the birth of children – when we look back at these and other significant events, we’re often surprised that they happened so long ago, shocked to find that it’s already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a niece or nephew is already ten years old when it seems like only three or four years since they were born. As one 83-year-old man told me: ‘I can never guess how long ago things happened. People ask me things like “When did so and so get married?” or “When did so and so die?” and I’m always way out. If I say it was two years it turns out to be five years. If I say six months, it’s two years.’ The same holds true for national and international events, such as the list above: studies have shown that people usually date these too recently as well.12 And perhaps this is because time moves more quickly as we get older, with every month and year shorter than the one before. It doesn’t seem like four years since a friend died or a baby was born, or since a famous person died, because during those four years time has been speeding up without you realising.

As adults our sense of the past and the future becomes very acute too. Our ability to deliberate and think discursively means that the past and the future become as important to us as the present. Children live in the here and now – they don’t worry about whether they’re going to get on with others at the birthday party they have to go to next week, or ruminate over what happened to them at nursery last week. Instead they give complete attention to the present moment, to what they’re doing, and to the people, objects and other phenomena immediately around them. But as adults we start to live inside our own heads rather than in the world and in the moment – we start to daydream, to deliberate, to worry and to plan. Instead of giving our attention to the here and now we give it the ‘there and then’, so to speak. We spend so much time considering the future and the past that we become alienated from the present. As Blaise Pascal wrote more than 350 years ago: ‘We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does.’13

Meanwhile the turntable keeps picking up speed, compressing every period of time, so that years pass like months and decades like years, until we reach our twilight years and time moves so frighteningly fast that days are over almost while we’re still considering what to do with them. One 79-year-old woman I interviewed told me: ‘I know I’m old and I’ve lived for a long time, but I don’t feel that old, because the last twenty years or so have just sped by.’

2. Time slows down when we are exposed to new experiences and environments

Here a student describes how slowly time passed for her when she started at university, moving away from her hometown for the first time.

Time was so slow that by the time I went home at the end of the first term it seemed like about two years. So much seemed to have happened in the three months. I felt like I’d been away for so long that I was surprised that everything was the same at home.

It seems that most of us experience a slowing down of time when we leave our normal surroundings and daily routines for a while. As the Buddhist and scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it: ‘The inward sense of time slows dramatically when you are off in some unfamiliar place engaged in some adventurous undertaking. Go to a foreign city for a week and do lots of different things, and it seems when you get back that you’ve been gone for much longer.’14 New surroundings and new experiences seem to stretch the hours and days longer than normal. When you return home your house seems strangely unfamiliar, and because the week you were away for is much longer than a week of ‘home time’, you somehow expect to have received massive amounts of post and answering-machine messages, and are always disappointed by the small number of them. The next day you phone your friends and expect them to have lots of news – but, of course, you find that nothing (or at least very little) has happened while you’ve been away.

On the other hand it may not be a question of expanding time by leaving your familiar environment but of new things happening in your life. I was very aware of this three years ago, after we had our first baby. People I hadn’t seen for a while would often ask me: ‘So how old’s your baby now?’ When I told them, almost without fail they’d reply: ‘No, he can’t be that old! I thought he was –’ and they’d mention a far younger age. ‘Wow, hasn’t the time gone quickly!’ they’d say. And I would always reply: ‘Not to me it hasn’t – to me it seems like about five years since he was born.’

And it was true – when I looked back to how my life was before Hughie was born, it seemed like a different era. Much more time seemed to have passed than actually had. And the reason for this, I believe, is the massive amount of newness which had entered my life since his birth. On the one hand there was the dramatic change to the normal routine of our lives, waking up at all hours, hardly ever going out in the evenings any more, spending all our time looking after this tiny helpless being in a cot at the bottom of our bed. And then there were all the new skills and tasks I had to learn (particularly in the beginning): changing nappies, bathing, changing and feeding him, making up bottles of milk, using the steriliser, and so on. And also the constant newness of watching him develop, as he learned to crawl and walk and then speak, and reacted more and more to his environment. This newness slowed down time; the normal progress of time speeding up as I get older was interrupted by a massive influx of new experience. (Significantly, I haven’t noticed this effect so much with our second baby, who’s just approaching his first birthday. This is presumably because there has been much less change and newness the second time around.)

It’s interesting to speculate that this slowing down of time may be one of the reasons why novelty and unfamiliarity attract us so much, and why we like to go ‘away’ as much as we can, either for day trips or holidays. The new experience itself gives us a kind of intensity and makes us feel more alive, but it may also give us a sense of freedom from time. In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann notes how ‘periods of change and novelty … refresh our sense of time … [During] our first days in a new place, time has a youthful, that is to say, a broadened sweeping, flow.’ This, Mann states, is the purpose of all our changes of scenery and trips abroad. But he also notes how this only lasts for a short time – he actually specifies six to eight days – and relates this to familiarity. He writes: ‘As one “gets used to the place,” a gradual shrinkage of time is felt … until the last week, of some four, perhaps, is uncannily fugitive and fleet.’15

A survey at Manchester Airport

In order to put this second law to the test, one afternoon last summer I went with a friend to the arrivals lounge at Manchester Airport. Over the course of two hours, we asked 220 returning travellers – almost all holidaymakers – three questions: ‘Where have you been?’, ‘How long were you there?, and most importantly, ‘Do you feel like you’ve been away for longer than ___ weeks/days?’ We often had to clarify the last question by enquiring further: ‘Do you feel like it’s been a long week/___ weeks?’ or ‘Do you feel as though time has passed quickly or slowly?’ The results did suggest that there was some degree of time-stretching due to unfamiliarity: 61 per cent of people felt that they’d been away for longer than the actual time of their trip, or that it had been a ‘long week/two weeks’. On the other hand, 14 per cent said that time had just passed at a normal speed, while 25 per cent said they felt that they’d been away for less than actual time, or that time had passed quickly.

These results do seem to support this second law, even though they perhaps weren’t as significant as I expected. But it’s important to note that that going on holiday doesn’t necessarily mean being exposed to new environments or experiences. A lot of the people we interviewed had returned from ‘beach holidays’ in resorts – the kind of vacations in which people usually have very little exposure to the actual culture of the countries they visit. In addition, many of the people who said that time had passed quickly or at a normal speed mentioned that they’d been to the place several times before. One lady told me that she’d been going to Malta for her holidays for 25 years; one couple told me that they’d stayed at the same hotel in Turkey every year for nine years. And interestingly, different places did show different results. We spoke to 56 people who’d just returned from Mexico, and 38 (68 per cent) said they felt they’d been away for longer than the actual time. Only 4 (7 per cent) felt the opposite, and 14 (25 per cent) felt that time had passed normally. There were similar results for people who’d just returned from Florida: of 36, 25 (70 per cent) felt they’d been away for longer than actual time. In contrast, we spoke to 44 people who’d just come back from a resort in Turkey, and only 16 (36 per cent) felt they’d been away for longer, with 22 (50 per cent) saying they felt time had gone quickly. A possible reason for this, I would suggest, is that the people who’d been to Mexico and Florida had – on average – more adventurous holidays than the people who’d been to resorts in Turkey, with more travelling and more unfamiliarity. (And indeed, some of the former did tell me that they’d been travelling around.) If you spend most of a holiday sitting on a beach or in bars, relaxing and reading novels and chatting, you’re exposed to so little unfamiliarity that there’s no reason for time to go any slower than it does when you’re sitting in an office or in your living room at home.

Significantly, there also seemed to be a link between how long people were away for and how they perceived time. On average the people who had been away for shorter periods experienced more of a time-stretching effect, supporting Thomas Mann’s suggestion that time starts to speed up again after six to eight days in a new place. While most people we spoke to were away for two weeks or more, 62 of them were away for periods of between two and a half and eleven days. And a significantly higher number of these (71 per cent) felt that time had passed slowly. Presumably, as Mann argues, this is because a new place starts to become familiar after a week or so. In fact, several people said as much to us, remarking that: ‘The first week seemed to go slowly, then it went fast’ or ‘I felt like I’d been there for a long time and then the last few days sped by.’ Other people made interesting comments like: ‘When you’re there it’s slow, but when you’re back it’s too quick’ and ‘When I go on working trips abroad, I feel like I’m away for a long time, but when I’m relaxing on holiday it doesn’t seem as long’.*

The two twins

One of the interesting things about this second law of psychological time is that it shows how different two people’s perceptions of the same period of time can be. Here we can use the ‘two twins’ metaphor, which is often used to illustrate universal relativity. Let’s say there are two 30-year-old twins, one of whom decides to give up his job and go travelling around the world for a year, while the other carries on living his normal life, working in an office and looking after his children. For the twin who goes away, that year will, of course, contain a massive amount of time; while for the one who stays at home, it will pass quickly. So when they see each other again the first twin might say ‘It’s so long since I’ve seen you, I can’t believe it’s really you’, while the other twin might say ‘It only seems like yesterday that you left’.

In other words, this law shows that it’s possible for two people to live through different amounts of time in the same time period. The twin who goes away experiences more time in that one year than his brother does, he lives through more time, so in a sense, he has now actually lived for longer than his brother. As we’ll see later, this has important implications when we think about how ‘long’ our lives actually are, and how it’s possible for us to control time.

I’m aware that all of these judgements about time are retrospective ones, of course. We’re talking about becoming aware of how slowly time has passed at the end of the day, the week or the holiday. But what about our sense of time passing now, in the present, you might ask? Is it going slow or fast for us at this particular moment? But if you think about it, we can only be aware of the passage of time in retrospect. It’s impossible for us to say that time is going slowly or quickly for us at a particular moment, because we don’t have a sense of time moving, we only have a sense of a static present. We flow with time, we’re in it, and so can’t measure it. We can only do this when we stop and look back at what has just passed. Time really does move slowly for you during your holiday or your weekend away, just as it really does move quicker for older people – even if you only become aware of this retrospectively.

3. Time passes quickly in states of absorption

Here a young man I interviewed describes how his perception of time changes when he plays on his Gameboy.

Time just vanishes. I get so absorbed that I completely forget about time. And when I come out of it I’m always shocked at how much has gone by. It’s frightening – hours seem to pass by in minutes. Once I played on it for twelve hours and if someone asked me to guess I would’ve said that it was only three or four.

And here, similarly, an acquaintance of mine describes an experience of time passing quickly as a result of a similar degree of absorption. She had booked a coach from Northern Malaysia to Singapore. It was a twelve-hour journey, and she was dreading it. Apart from the sheer boredom and discomfort, she’d been ill with a migraine and was prone to travel sickness. But amazingly the journey turned out to be fairly pleasant.

Luckily there was a video player on it [the coach]. After a while they put Titanic on; I’d never seen it before and got completely absorbed in it. I forgot about time and it’s a very long film, about four hours, so the next thing I knew we weren’t far off halfway through the journey and it seemed like we’d just got started. Suddenly the journey didn’t seem so long after all. They put another film on, and I got absorbed in that too; and by the time it was over we didn’t have that much longer to go. The films put me into a sort of ‘timehole’ which made all the time pass by without me being there.

However, absorption doesn’t just mean entertainments like television or computer games, it also – perhaps mostly – means being busy. It means being engaged in an activity which occupies your attention and stops you being aware of your own thoughts and your surroundings, whether it’s making a meal, writing an email or running a newspaper shop.