Robert has now conducted more than 72,000 measurement sessions and tells me he has no plans to stop.
Robert’s main interest is in how the timing of medical treatment might affect its efficacy. Does it work better in the morning or the evening or on a particular day of the month? It’s a field that he acknowledges is regarded with scepticism by the medical community and, seeing the sparsity of the evidence, it’s likely to remain so. But what interests me is a sideline of this research. His decades of measurements of time-estimation reveal another factor which slows down time – youth. During his period of isolation in Germany his time estimations showed that for him time was decelerating. But as he left his twenties the opposite happened and time appeared to be gradually speeding up. 18 This is a common sensation as people get older, and one that I’ll explore later in the book.
HOW TO MAKE TIME STAND STILL
So emotions, fear, age, isolation, body temperature and rejection can all affect our perception of the speed of time, as does concentration, or ‘attention’ as it tends to be referred to in the psychological literature. If you happen to be in a room that has a clock with a second hand that ticks rather than sweeping round smoothly in one motion, glance up at the clock face and see what happens. If by chance you catch it at the right moment the second hand will appear stationary for longer than it should. You wonder whether the clock has stopped, only for it to start moving again a moment later. This is a demonstration of chronostasis: the illusion that time stands still. If it doesn’t work the first time, glance up a few more times and eventually it will. The traditional explanation for this illusion is that in order to present us with a consistent image of the world that doesn’t blur every time we shift our gaze across the room, our brains momentarily suppress our vision whenever we move our eyes. The result gives us the impression of life as a smooth film. In order to compensate for this moment of suppressed vision we assume, not unreasonably, that most objects in a room are stationary. The ticking second hand tricks our brains. Or that’s the theory. The problem with this explanation is that the clock illusion occurs with other senses too. A similar phenomenon known as the dead phone illusion happens in countries where the dialling tone consists of beeps interspersed with silence. If you pick the phone up at the right moment the initial silence feels so long that you get the impression that the phone is dead.
So what does this have to do with attention and the warping of time? Well, the researcher Amelia Hunt has an alternative explanation for the clock illusion, one that sheds light on the way attention can affect time perception. We can catch a ball or drive a car safely while constantly gauging times with precision, but overt timings are more difficult to get right. 19 Her explanation for the clock illusion has nothing to do with vision and everything to do with attention. Time, she suggests, is distorted because we have glanced across the room and are concentrating on something new. When we focus our attention on an event, even one as brief as looking at the clock, it creates the impression that it lasted longer than it did. Attention can also explain why boredom slows down time. Writing in the nineteenth century, the influential psychologist and philosopher William James suggested that boredom occurs when ‘we grow attentive to the passage of time itself’. To illustrate this sensation, he suggested closing your eyes and getting a helpful person to tell you when a minute has passed. Try it: it seems like ages. And that silent minute will seem even longer if the preceding minute was filled with music or speech. Likewise the involvement of attention can explain why rejection slows time down. The rejection causes us to focus in on ourselves and our shortcomings, and once again time is