If we did, then for a 40-year-old every single day should flash by because it is less than one fourteen-thousandth of the life they’ve had so far.
We don’t judge one day in the context of our whole lives.
The problem with the proportionality theory is that it fails to account for the way we experience time at any one moment. Among its famous proponents are Vladimir Nabokov and William James. One, known as the “proportionality theory,” uses pure mathematics, holding that a year feels faster when you’re 40 than when you’re 8 because it only constitutes one fortieth of your life rather than a whole eighth. Inversely, time seems to speed up as we get older - a phenomenon of which competing theories have attempted to make light. The same pattern was observed in novice skydivers, who estimated the duration of their peers’ falls as short, whereas their own, from the same altitude, were deemed longer. Hammond points to a study in which people with arachnophobia were asked to look at spiders - the very object of their intense fear - for 45 seconds and they overestimated the elapsed time. This plays out even in situations that aren’t life-or-death per se but are still associated with strong feelings of fear. “It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”) For instance, Hammond points out, we slow time down when gripped by mortal fear - the cliche about the slow-motion car crash is, in fact, a cognitive reality. ( “Where is it, this present?,” William James famously wondered. Discus chronologicus, a depiction of time by German engraver Christoph Weigel, published in the early 1720s and included in Cartographies of Time.Īmong the most intriguing illustrations of “mind time” is the incredible elasticity of how we experience time. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organize life, but the way we experience it. Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality. The trick is to harness it, whether at home, at work, or even in social policy, and to work in line with our conception of time. Time can be a friend, but it can also be an enemy. We construct the experience of time in our minds, so it follows that we are able to change the elements we find troubling - whether it’s trying to stop the years racing past, or speeding up time when we’re stuck in a queue, trying to live more in the present, or working out how long ago we last saw our old friends. As disorienting as the concept might seem - after all, we’ve been nursed on the belief that time is one of those few utterly reliable and objective things in life - it is also strangely empowering to think that the very phenomenon depicted as the unforgiving dictator of life is something we might be able to shape and benefit from. That’s precisely what acclaimed BBC broadcaster and psychology writer Claudia Hammond explores in Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception ( public library) - a fascinating foray into the idea that our experience of time is actively created by our own minds and how these sensations of what neuroscientists and psychologists call “mind time” are created. Rather than a personal deficiency of those of us befallen by this tendency, however, it turns out to be a defining feature of how the human mind works, the science of which is at first unsettling, then strangely comforting, and altogether intensely interesting. Perhaps the greatest gift of the practice has been the daily habit of reading what I had written on that day a year earlier not only is it a remarkable tool of introspection and self-awareness, but it also illustrates that our memory “is never a precise duplicate of the original a continuing act of creation” and how flawed our perception of time is - almost everything that occurred a year ago appears as having taken place either significantly further in the past (“a different lifetime,” I’d often marvel at this time-illusion) or significantly more recently (“this feels like just last month!”).
Given my soft spot for the diaries of notable minds, it should come as no surprise that I keep one myself.
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