A little bit of time

Time—that elusive, invisible, swirling river that flows around us and through us, coming with us on our journey. Or so we have come to think. Time is the unbeatable, the imperceptible and the unknown. It can be unitised and measured but we have no idea what it’s made of.

So, as I write in my book How the Brain Thinks, time may be a purely human construct. We can measure time with some accuracy, but it is not an object we can see, smell, touch or taste. When we look at the horizon from a cliff, we can’t see ‘time’ in the frame. For us, it just is. There is only one thing we can be sure of: whatever time may be, for each of us, in this reality, it ends.

Time is unseen, unrecognisable, and may be related to the continuity of space, motion and gravity. We cannot stop it, we cannot turn it back and we cannot get ahead of it. The psychological arrow of time never points backwards, condemning us to move inexorably forward.

Time itself cannot be defined. The 1979 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, suggests that the function of time is to order things by preventing them from all happening at the same time. Take two theoretical entities called A and B. If A affects B, then B must occur later in time. Time is seen to be flowing along with us, producing order in our lives.

Time could also be an illusory emergent phenomenon from the complex system that is our universe, whatever that may be.

Hawking argued that all three arrows point in the same direction and that the thermodynamic arrow influences the psychological arrow. His book A Brief History of Time, is a fascinating and easy read.

We are so constrained by time. All our biological processes depend on it. Our hearts can only beat within certain limits. It takes time for chemicals to move across membranes. It takes time for impulses to move down neurons. Time can be seen to be our enemy when we’re rushing against the clock, but it can also be the great preparer, allowing us to get ready. The trick is to learn how best to use the time we think we have.

External time doesn’t change. The second hand on our watch continues to go ‘tick, tick, tick’. What varies to us is how much time we think we have: sometimes we have to think, decide and act quickly, while sometimes we think we have all the time in the world. Our perception of time can be influenced by our state of arousal, by the frequency of events we have to analyse, the type of stimulus we are presented with and our emotional state.

For instance, when we are wide awake, time appears to go fast; when we are sleepy, it appears to go slowly. Time appears to fly by if we are busy; if we have nothing to do, it drags. We judge sounds of the same length of time to be longer than a visual cue of the same length of time. When we’re anxious, time seems to go so slowly; but when we’re happy, it seems to go quickly. Time appears to move slowly for the young and rapidly for the old.

And so it is time that largely determines how we think. Since the first widely known reference—around 350 BC in De Anima (On the Soul) by Aristotle — human thought has been regarded as having two ways or systems or processes, where one system is used for rapid thinking and another is used for slow thinking.

These have had various labels such as passion and reason, emotion and logic, intuition and analysis, feeling and knowing, experiential and cognitive, thinking fast and slow using system one and system two.

There are some good examples of how the recent pandemic has changed our perception of time in a recent article in the New York Times. In an article titled The Year of the Blur, How isolation, monotony and chronic stress are destroying our sense of time, Alex Williams writes:

‘For Kate Baer, a poet in Harrisburg, Pa., 2020 feels like a time warp. She compared it to when she and four friends escaped to a woodsy cabin in Maryland and tried cannabis edibles. “Time stopped,” Ms. Baer, 35, said. “And this is how time feels in this pandemic. Fluid and very confusing.”

Avi Bonnerjee, 34, a tech analyst from Brooklyn, said that 2020 recalls the “ambient sense of timelessness” of Los Angeles. “In New York, each season has such a distinct character, there’s always a passive sense of forward progression,” he said. “In L.A., you’re in a perpetual state of warm weather, so you seem to hang in some sort of purgatorial state.”

To Dulci Edge, 34, a consulting creative director in fashion in San Francisco, 2020 reminds her of the old parenting adage: “The days are long, but the years are short.” Except in the pandemic, she said, “the days are long, and the year is also long.”

Do you feel like time has no boundaries anymore, that the days just bleed into weeks, that January may as well have been 2017?

You’re not alone if you feel that 2020, perhaps the most dramatic and memorable year of our lifetimes — and that’s before Election Day — seems shuffled and disordered, like a giant blur. A dream state, or perhaps a nightmare. That’s the paradox of 2020, or one of them: A year so momentous also feels, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.

It’s not entirely an illusion. Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories, psychologists say, and the and the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time.

Are we unable to remember this awful year, or simply unwilling?

But maybe the sense of jumbled chronology is not just in our heads — or rather, it actually is. Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.

Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation, said Lucy Cheke, a psychologist and lecturer at Cambridge University who is researching the effects of the pandemic on memory.

That might explain why Ms. Edge, the creative director from San Francisco, can’t tell what day it is sometimes.

“The usual time markers are gone, so everything is bleeding together into one amorphous blob of days,” she said. “It just keeps going and going in a way that reminds me of my teenage years. Like, high school was four years long, but it might as well have been 40. I remember feeling like I was watching paint dry, just kind of going through the motions until graduation day when my real life could begin.”

It doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually. We lose that sense of grounding, in place and time.

“Normally, there’s a good deal of variety in our lives, so this makes that process a lot easier,” Dr. Cheke said. “If you had lunch at your desk at work on Monday, that makes it easy to distinguish from eating in a cafe on Tuesday.”

It all adds up to the blur. Does anything change?’

In the blur it’s hard to see, but I know it will. Past experience says so. Hang in there.

For those of you approaching winter in the Northern Hemisphere, all the best.