The Psychology of Time

Introduction to Time

0:00how do our minds construct the very thing we live inside of time from internal body clocks mind time cultural attitudes and how our language embeds the concept of time time is certainly an interesting thing to talk about from a psychological perspective with me to discuss the psychology of time is dr richard gross author of the psychology of time from routledge publishing and also he's the

0:34author of the book that anyone who studied psychology would be very used to because it's been the core textbook on psychology a-level courses in the uk from well since before i was at school the book is psychology the science of mind and behavior you're going to learn why your brain is always half a second behind you and yet your experience still feels live and continuous you'll hear how extreme situations from car crashes to old age can make seconds feel like minutes

1:09and why the memory of an event not maybe the event itself often stretches time and you'll also discover why age culture and our language can reshape the sense of time and what that means for how you plan

Psychology of Time

1:26and you live your life so richard thank you so much for joining me pleasure to start with why is a psychologist interested in the concept of time at all well i suppose that one one answer is is that psychology is is almost defined by its its breadth of of interest that it it it's really the the the the child if you like of many parents one of which is philosophy and another is physics and another is

2:03mathematics and you know if you look at the history of psychology i think um it's perhaps not surprising that somewhere in there will be uh an interest in time in the subject of time um because it's it's

Research on Time

2:21certainly not a mainstream topic but if you if you dig you'll find a lot of research in into time which clearly you know my book reflects although it's quite a slim volume so you know there's a lot more to the research than than i could put put in it um but memory plays a huge part in of course yeah the psychology of time a memory is such a huge topic as i'm sure you're aware you know within psychology

2:52sort of mainstream psychology you mentioned for philosophy there and that's interesting because you know william james was the the the founder of i guess the science of mind um wanting to move away from introspection into a science um and therefore psychology and you start your book uh the psychology of time with uh william james's idea of that stream of consciousness yeah could you explain what did he mean by that i think what he meant basically i think the key word really here is to continuity

3:27that our experience is continuous in the sense that things if you take the example of just physical objects in our in our environment yeah they stay put they persist over time we don't our perception our experience is not of a series of sensations that aren't linked together that aren't joined our experiences of just time flowing you know things don't suddenly become don't suddenly appear out of

4:02the blue um you know things are fairly kind of predictable i suppose is um it i mean the physical

Stream of Consciousness

4:10world is pretty predictable because things are stay stay put but and i think an example an example an example is if you think about yeah perhaps this is the extreme one if you've undergone anesthesia you wake up from an anesthetic or you on a nightly basic you know you wake up in the morning and you're still you you recognize the the room you're in usually um everything is continuous you know

4:42you're the same self that you were when you went to sleep and you um you pick up precisely from from where you left off i think that yeah that for me is that's my understanding of what he meant by you know the idea of a stream which is flowing but another example i don't know if this would help is that again i'm sure you know if you think about the number of times we blinked during a you know our waiting hours yes and admittedly a blink doesn't doesn't last very long but but there is there are

5:17those momentary um tears of blindness if you like and and cumulatively it might might amount to i don't know several minutes a day you would have thought so wouldn't you yeah if you added it all that added all that up yeah and yet we don't we don't have to kind of reset our our vision the brain somehow fills in even those you know those momentary periods of blindness which is perhaps an odd way of putting

5:51it but that's essentially what it effectively what it is you also in the book make a distinction and i

Time and Duration

5:57wonder if this is what you were saying there between time and duration and you give those sort of separate words there now i imagine a lot of people use time and duration as a synonym meaning the same thing could you explain what you think is different between time and duration yeah i mean i think it's easy easy to start with duration which is usually simply defined as how long something takes so you

6:28know it's an event events last a certain amount of time and it begs the question sort of how you how you measure it and it is measurable um whether it's actual duration or perceived duration so that's another important distinction that we might well you know come back to we will definitely get back to all right yeah uh so duration is is how long something lasts okay but time one technical definition

7:01is the ordinal succession of events so it refers to one event preceding another yes and by the same token obviously some events coming after yes certain other events so you so you mentioned just to sort of repeat what you said to see if i understood it duration is about how long one thing lasts and time is more about the sequence you know you've got ordinal succession as the term but i guess

7:37sequences are more plain english language that people might get um so how long it lasts and then the sequence of it yes in in a nutshell i think there's a bit of your book and it's fairly early on in your book and as you mentioned it's a slim volume um but it is wonderfully packed with interesting insights you get through a lot in a small volume um and one of the things that comes up quite early was a reference to philosopher craig calendar who first of all i love his name somebody who thinks

8:09about time is called calendar straight away i was amused by that yeah yeah but he suggests that time may be an illusion and that many actually theoretical physicists believe that time doesn't exist i mean that's mind-blowing is it how can that be i know yeah i've been grappling with that myself in perhaps inevitably and i'm sure the greatest minds in physics of which i mean one thing that occurred to me was and i put you know you might well uh no what you might well know more about

8:42physics than i do i don't claim to know much about physics at all except what i've learned and put in the book but it occurred to me that i think it's now what you know widely accepted that amongst physicists that time didn't exist before the big bang okay now if i'm right in in in thinking that's common opinion well it raises two two questions for me one is what was going on before the big bang in in terms of time you know we say there was a time before time

9:17existed now that is a bit of a contradiction stroke you know yeah a puzzle isn't it time existed before time existed almost yeah it's like the word when it's like when somebody says post-apocalyptic you think well if it's an apocalypse there isn't anything afterwards no that's right that's right the other thing that occurred to me was well if there was you know if time came into existence with the big bang forgetting the

9:51what we just talked about um then time is is something time is is real so aren't physicists who claim that time doesn't exist aren't aren't they contradicting this this early belief this you know fundamental belief i'd have thought that time you know came into existence with the big bang so let's go back to psychology let's let's go

Libet's Experiment

10:22into a more of a comfort zone um and in in your book you describe a an astounding study i think that that if people haven't heard this they're going to be astounded by by benjamin libe and looking at brain activity can you briefly share what libe's experiments did with participants and what they discovered the first thing to say is is to put it in some kind of context that um it's usually discussed

10:52in in relation to free will okay the study i think was based on the basic premise that we the common sense tells us that our intention to perform some action or other yeah um is what causes the action yeah yeah um and obviously associated with with the intention is some kind of change in in brain

11:25activity i mean you know you know that our brain is changing all the time depending on what we're what we're doing yeah um so we have the intention to do something that normally causes brain activity and then that causes action that's sort of a common sense sequence that people tend to think so basically that the the task he set people was to uh move um to flex their wrist um or to move a finger um i think for a number of times while watching a a light going around the a sort of circular

12:05screen okay and what they had to do was indicate when they had made the intention to move their finger or or their wrist by pointing out where the light was on the circular screen that they in front of them um at the same time their their brain activity was being measured by an electrode encephalograph and there was three three measures all together um what he called m which is uh the time at which

12:42the action actually took place um which is easy easy to do then he recorded uh the first signs of change in brain activity which he called the readiness potential the rp okay and then the third measure was the point at which the the intention had been formed so that sorry that goes back to the the light

13:13where the light was spinning on the screen yeah spinning on the screen so you've got you've got three measures so one is when the actual finger moved and it was it was repeated i think about 40 times or altogether it wasn't a one-off event secondly was the first sign of brain activity um the the rp readiness potential and then the third thing was what he called w which was the point at which the intention to move the finger yeah was made and the question is which came first was it the

13:50the the brain activity associated with the intention or was it the brain activity the brain change changes associated with uh the readiness potential yeah and consistent with free will um as we'd expect the uh w that is the um the intention to move preceded um the actual movement of the finger

14:25yeah that's what you'd expect the intention before the the action by 200 milliseconds okay very short period yeah but and this is the the crucial finding really that the readiness potential which was activity before any intention was signaled was yes indicated by the participants the readiness potential the readiness potential occurred another three to five hundred

15:00milliseconds before that okay so it's a before the intention before the intention so putting all that together you've got roughly five to seven hundred milliseconds gap between the readiness potential first change of change of change in brain activity and the actual moving the finger yeah that's inconsistent with with free will and that's fantastic isn't it in in terms

15:32of you know in a simple summary that brain readiness potential occurs several hundred milliseconds before people reported deciding to move yeah suggesting that unconscious processes actually are the things that start the action not the conscious processes and therefore the intention and therefore as you keep saying you free will who is starting the action i mean that's mind-blowing yeah i mean it was it was certainly at the time i think we're

16:04talking about early 70s the research was done originally i think um it was it was seen as a kind of major blow to those who believed in in free will yeah um you know for the reasons that you've explained the the brain seemed to be in charge almost rather than the person making the intent you know with the yeah we became we being the conscious we being made aware of it second yes we talked about lee bay's

16:34experiment being a a very astonishing interesting look into free will but what does it tell us about the psychology of time you know my attempt to define time a little while ago in terms of sequence and the ordering of events and i suppose if we think of you know a logical order of intention brain change you know the common sense view then then action that's time in action

17:07yes in a sense in that sequence in action yeah yeah so time is a sequence and lee bay's experiments show us a sequence even though it isn't the sequence we make common sense exactly but if time is a sequence and lee bay showed us that maybe our common sense feeling about that sequence is incorrect it is not the order in which we think when we think about time in more general terms it flowing in one direction for instance could we

17:40could our common sense perception of that also be incorrect absolutely and i think again in psychology generally we being western psychologists you know must be wary of applying our own views and theories you know to all all cultures yeah so i think i'm something we haven't mentioned yet which i'm surprised we happen is is the arrow of time yes so and and my understanding is that this is actually

18:14stems from newton and i think this this idea of the arrow of time as something kind of fixed and an absolute and the same for everybody and and in the whole universe it's a compliment if you just think of an arrow pointing to um if you look at it on the page pointing to the right so you know the past would be at the other end of the arrow in the middle is the present and then the arrow head kind of indicates the future yeah for for newton i suppose the apple never falls back into the tree

18:50absolutely absolutely so i think we tend we talk about the past as being behind us but we can look look forward yeah to the future you know the future is kind of open open-ended if you like the past is is is fixed it's done well in chinese earlier events that is past events are up and later events are down but even more interesting i think is the amara it's a language in the andes i think

19:31are people who live in the andes and for them the future is behind and and the past is in front and that's the the logic for that i think is is there is a clear fairly clear logic to that i think which is and this is what i've read is the reasoning behind it is that the past because it's already happened you know it you know about it yeah so it's in in that sense in front of you it's it's in front of

20:04your eyes yeah because it's already happened it's perceivable and it has been perceived whereas the future is unknown because it hasn't happened yet so it's it's behind you that's interesting is it almost like they're and again maybe i'm pushing the idea the metaphor too much but they're almost walking backwards they can see what's happened but they can't see where they're going you know that

20:35then leads us into you know from that different cultural views of the conception of time or the philosophy of time into language because that's a huge aspect of time isn't it you know we have so many words and phrases that have time just embedded in them you know we spend time we waste time we invest time we save time or you're wasting my time this this new gadget will save you hours um you know we

21:07talk about time in a sort of almost like it's money you know all of those words spend waste invest save they're all they're all money words aren't they really yeah yeah yeah how does that i guess that metaphor of money in time change how we feel about time the word that i like to use in in this these sort of cases is is time as a commodity so i think in i think some cultures are kind of more time driven

21:38and yes where where time is money um you know kind of literally i mean you know a solicitor will tell you what their rates are oh my word yes yeah whatever anyone anyone who's bought a house would feel that yeah a half an hour phone call you get charged for it yeah yeah so it can assume a kind of literal form but it's also and again you know some examples you gave are more a less kind of literal

22:10you know wasting my time or you know spending my time that's more kind of it's still money words but they're not necessarily but they're more more metaphorical in a sense because you don't you don't spend time because it's not that sort of a thing um but it makes you think about your life in a sense and including of course you know how much time is left i mean that that's another one

22:42you know i'm running out of time and that might be because you've got a deadline to meet or it could be because you're 76 and your life is literally um coming to or you know close to to an end 76 is quite far away from it i'm just going to say that richard thank you yeah i know you've got plenty of time left don't worry we've got to get we've at least got to get to the end of the podcast well for your sake i hope i hope that's the case but what we do see it as a currency don't we time and not only

23:17a currency but a scarce currency it's something to avoid being wasted and to and to use wisely and and all of these aspects precious yeah and i think the classic example is when somebody is diagnosed with a terminal illness and they're given a certain amount of time left to live um you know classically you hear them say you know i'm i need to make the most of every second every minute that i've got left and you know they go and do you think in people in those situations

23:51their perception of time changes i think there's a contradiction in a lot of the research on our

Perception of Time

23:59perception of time particularly like the speeding up and slowing down of time yeah sometimes we get the impression from the research i think that the more you do the faster time will go and sometimes i get the opposite conclusion that the more you pack in the more time will slow down as a study of people's perception of time during lockdown and it was a study of 604 people who spent between 14 and 38 days of

24:36lockdown during april of 2020 and they were asked to rate the speed of the passage of time per day or per week depending on how long they'd actually spent in in lockdown yeah summing up the the major findings um associated with slowing the slowing down of time um were being over 60 experiencing increased stress reduced task load which i think means

25:11much less going on much less to do okay yeah so the life is not as full as is it what it was yeah yeah and then finally um reduced satisfaction with social interaction so you know feeling cut off with other people and so on so those factors all contributed to a slowing down of time you know time dragging yeah the factors associated with time speeding up were being under 60 yeah having increased

25:42levels of social interaction decreased stress and increased task demands yes so yeah if you were if you kept busy and obviously so many people you know started working from home so they were still working and um not still interacting with their colleagues yeah and and so on you know remotely um but that that all contributed to a speeding up of time does that contradict i guess the memory explanation of perceived

26:17time or mind time uh as you call it in the book because studies such as uh eagleman's freefall studies where people fell off a tall platform i can't remember how tall it was about 30 meters in the air or something and then had to um guess how long it took them to fall and they always overestimated didn't they um how long it felt um to fall down so we didn't our perception against real was different there

26:48and the memory explanation is that intense high pressure or emotional events are encoded far more detail so when we replay them back because it's got more in it we think it must have therefore taken longer because it's got all of this in it so it must have taken longer um yeah but the way that you said there with actually the less demands less social interaction actually time slowed down my way out of that is simply to say that the two situations are so incredibly different that perhaps we shouldn't

27:25try and equate them both relate one to the other you know the eagleman study was more like the real life car crash situation where you know something terrible is going to happen and less like ogden's study of lockdown i just want to take a pause in time from the interview with richard to mention the sponsor of this episode at my best who you'll find at at my best dot com now the at my best range of

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29:03at the at my best store that's everything 10 right let's get back to talking about the psychology of time with dr richard gross one thing which i don't know if you have a view on but it it is an interesting glitch i suppose in the perception of time is deja vu because deja vu is that experience that people have of having done this before

29:34is that a glitch in somebody's perception or is it a glitch in memory how do psychologists i guess approach deja vu i think memory is is fundamental and probably common to all the explanations i've i've come across but i think the basic idea is that two lots of information become confused so one one view that i've come across is that a situation in conscious waking life might

30:11trigger a memory or part memory of a dream that we haven't we might not have consciously remembered so i think i'm sure we all have that experience that something can happen during the day and you say oh that's broken a dream you know you didn't wake up remembering the dream but something happens during the day and you say oh yeah that reminds me of a dream i had yeah so it might be that something that's happening in our waking life reminds us of a dream or part of a dream that we haven't

30:42consciously remembered before that moment yeah and so we're mixing the two things up another kind of more brain based uh time of explanation is that you know all our all our sensory information you know vision and hearing and so on all go through the thalamus in in the sensory of the brain before it goes off to the relevant higher brain sensors you know that

31:12deal with either vision or hearing or whatever yeah and and one one view i've come across is that sometimes there's a a kind of misalignment between the various signals that are coming from the thalamus and going to the higher brain center so they might not all travel together at the same time yeah so that even if it's a a you know minuscule gap brain in brain time it subjectively experientially it might seem like a much bigger space so that you know you're you think

31:48you're remembering something from the past which actually you're not it's just happen right now it's just gone to the wrong department in the brain almost yeah that's the explanation i've heard previously and again just to caveat this to anyone listening i'm not a memory um psychologist i'm very interested in it but no um that it's almost the difference between working memory and long-term memory to put it in very common plain language that most of our senses come in and just stay in

32:18working memory gets rid of most of the things that we don't need to remember and then files things away in the archive department but if something gets miswired and it goes straight to the archive department it feels like it's happened before because everything coming from the archive department has happened before yes yes so really deja vu is not a glitch in time it's a glitch in memory yes just just before we go we talked a little bit about that feeling of time changing as you near a deadline and

Finite Lifespan

32:54and you put it very well a deadline could be something short-term like a work deadline or it could be you feel like the deadline of life is it is cropping up and in your book you cover that that side of time and you write that humans suffer from metaphysical torture of knowing we would die how does that awareness of a finite lifespan i suppose change the way we relate to time i suppose the answer to that comes from from philosophy as much as um as it does psychology but i think

33:31when we're maybe up to our 30s although i think things change with the generations but there's a point during our early adulthood i think when we we're still seeing the future as i suppose if you think of the the arrow of time we're still seeing you know the the arrowhead way way into the into the future it's almost um you know we might begin to really you know take on board that we are yes we're going to

34:03die but it's so far in the future that it really isn't relevant to how we view the world or what we what decisions we make or yes our behavior and then as we clearly as we get older um it becomes more and more relevant this idea of you know time running out on a on a on a big scale oh so it so it switches

34:29at some point we switch from that thinking about time that's elapsed to time that's remaining yes okay because when you're when when you reach your say your 40s even

34:45certainly your 50s you've you've spent more time as an adult than as not yeah um so you've got a lot of you know experience obviously to to look back on which is good um but by the same token you've got less life left yes yeah i suppose for some people it might be triggered you know it's quite a sudden change in their kind of whole views of world because somebody dies you know a parent a trigger event

35:18happens and yeah and i guess it is it again my love of analogies and metaphors is like when you run a marathon of which i've never done so i'm imagining in that as well but you know when you start the marathon you probably spend the first half an hour or so thinking about how far away from the start you are how long you've been running but when you're half an hour from your finish you're more thinking about how much you've got left and can you still do what you need to do within the time you

35:50have left absolutely and i think that's kind of natural i you know to me that seems perfectly if not inevitable that that you are going to think that way yeah and i suppose i mean for some people it might make what time is left more valuable for others it might be a case of well i've lived my life it's behind me now i want to do yeah and and the other way because i work a lot with

36:26financial organizations who would love people to younger people to save money for their future in a pension or 401k in america and they have trouble because the younger person 20s starting their first job second job in their 20s view the future is so far away that why bother investing in it and and so they literally don't put money towards it and and feel painful and i know studies by um i

36:58think it was schlomo bonazzi saw that people view giving their money to their future selves as just as painful as giving their money to a complete stranger it's that painful and so that view of often what we try and do is change people's perception of what they need to be thinking about and and almost change that view of looking at instead of looking at elapsed time do look at um time you have left and then allow

37:30for that and start planning for that um it doesn't always work because we are so entrenched as human beings in the way that we are trying to change it all is is nigh on impossible yes and it will it will vary from person to person i'm sure there are cultural differences too you know depending on how how much we value the elderly um you know which i think we clearly don't and that will change i suppose well it will change when people start really living longer i mean people are living longer now

38:01from mid-century to now um but i remember philosopher aubry dubray i think his name was um said that the first person to live to 1000 years old is probably alive today now that was quite an extreme statement and he backed it up with with the advances in technology and the advances in aging longer somebody who was pretty much zero now would benefit from that and then throughout their life and would live

38:31to a thousand he did back away i think slightly from the thousand uh as an example to make people go what and then he sort of um caveated that slightly but you know his point was we're going to live longer and so if we live to 200 years old um suddenly our switching point might be 100 120 rather than that so we're gonna have a whole lot more things to do and i guess i'm then thinking of you know how martin heidegger the philosopher talked about our sense of being being completely rooted in the awareness

39:02that we are finite we our lives have an end point and if that end point keeps moving further and further away what does that mean of who we are how who we identify as at that point absolutely i mean i think i put in the last chapter of the book which is about death and time um you know just kind of pose the question about living forever you know going way obviously beyond beyond a thousand years um and what that would have would be it would be an interesting study i think to to conduct to see how different

39:37people feel about the idea of of living forever um and um you know a number of philosophers have made the point that you know life only has any meaning because it's finite yes you know if we thought we literally had all the time in the world then how would that change us you know would it change us in fundamental ways um that is difficult to imagine and i remember chatting with um david cohen on the

40:11episode that i talked about the psychology of vampires with him um and we talked about immortality of the vampire and how we are partly fascinated by with vampires because of their immortality and who they are when you don't have an end point yeah and you know and they're depicted as monsters yeah so i on personal no nothing scares me more than the prospect of living forever i must say but that's the other side of the coin from you know death terror which is also believed to be

40:44fundamental to who we are and but but yeah i i do believe that the finite nature of of life is is an inherent feature of it you know in nature everything dies and so yes you don't start a sentence with the intention of never finishing it it has to have a full stop at some point to have meaning yeah absolutely yeah and i like it we'll leave it there we've talked about a lot but i apologize i know i had so many more questions and i can chat to you about time and we wandered off into philosophy

41:18physics neuroscience but that's kind of the nice thing about this psychology of time it does cross those borders doesn't it it's the nature of the beast i really think it's the nature of the beast yeah richard thank you so much for your time i hope that was all right for you i enjoyed it very much thank you well i hope you've enjoyed listening to the psychology of time with dr richard gross and i guess if there's one big idea to leave you with i would say that it's that time isn't just on the clock

41:51time is in your mind it's in your body it's our culture and it's our story and i've scribbled three main takeaways down from my chat with richard the first is that our experience of time is constructed you know our brain knits together discrete moments into what feels like a continuous present and our sense of duration and speed can be radically at odds with clock time second i've put that our emotion our memory and attention all help to reshape time and we all

42:30know boredom fear excitement illness trauma old age car crashes all change how long events seem to last and finally i've written that how we talk about time matters metaphors like time is money and cultural stories about life stages influence our stress levels and our priorities and how we value our days so i guess becoming aware of these stories gives us more freedom to choose how we live our life within

43:05the finite time that we have to keep exploring how psychology shapes our everyday life you can while away your time by catching all the past episodes of this podcasts where i talk with some amazing guests about topics such as the psychology of the traitors psychology of cats cycling and even the psychology of vampires and if you don't want to miss out on some of the extras i put on the social media channels

43:36including bite-size explainers and some experiments from psychology that you can try yourself take the time to follow tiktok and instagram you can just search for everything's psychology on either one of those and you'll find us or me in the meantime thank you for listening right to the end please go off and have a look at richard's book the psychology of time um and a massive thank you to richard for spending the time with me to chat about his book and and wider issues around psychology and even physics and

44:08neuroscience well as well i've thoroughly enjoyed myself i hope you did too see you next time