This is the hypothesis about time so far. We experience time speeding up as we get older because our experience of novelty decreases.
The novelty hypothesis also works for another clue about time’s weirdness. Our experience of time fluctuates. Within the general trend of speeding up, we experience “local” differences where one block of time is faster or slower than another block of time.
For example, Phil in his comment noted the difference we feel between time on holidays and time back home. Time on holidays feels like it’s fuller and longer than the comparable time back home. The hypothesis would say it’s due to the greater novelty on holiday.
Stefan Klein in his book, The Secret Pulse of Time, cites a case that adds to the hypothesis. It’s the case of Michel Siffre.
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In July 1962, Siffre, a young French geologist, descended into a cave in the Alps without a watch. Klein says:
He wanted to find out what happens when nothing happens for weeks on end ..
He set up a camp and a tent 142 yards down, and though he had a battery-operated lamp, he spent most of the time in complete darkness “sitting on a campstool.” He had a field telephone that he used to advise his support team about “when he got up, when he lay down … and how long he thought he had spent in the dark.”
Very quickly, Siffre “lost his orientation in time.” As he said afterwards:
When, for instance, I telephone the surface and indicate what time I think it is, thinking that only an hour has elapsed between my waking up and eating breakfast, it may well be that four or five hours have elapsed.
Klein says Siffre “was dismayed to realise that although the only thing he was still experiencing was the passage of time, this very experience was deceiving him.”
Siffre himself described it in his diary:
I feel motionless, but at the same time I feel as though I am being pulled along by the uninterrupted flow of time. I try to grab hold of it, but every evening I realise that I have failed.
By September 14, 1962 when Siffre was hauled to the surface by his team, he was exhausted and thoroughly disorientated. Although he had spent 61 days in the cave his last diary entry was dated August 20. Somehow he had lost 25 days.
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Siffre repeated his experiment several times after, and others did similar experiments. Each time they drew the same two conclusions:
- our bodies adhere to a strict biological timetable of between 24 and 26 hours, and this biological clock remains constant regardless of what’s happening or not happening
- we have a sense of inner time — a perception of “interval,” or what the philosopher Henri Bergson called “duration” – that relies on event or stimulation or novelty.
I think Siffre’s experiment also demonstrates a third conclusion about time.
By all accounts Siffre was “dismayed” at his inability to assess the speed of time passing. What I think upset him is what upsets most of us about time. Not so much that time is passing per se, but that it’s passing more quickly (or, if you’re a child, more slowly) than it should be passing. Clock time tells us one thing, and inner time tells us another. And it’s when the difference between these times is greatest that we feel distressed and used by time.
Thus, the hypothesis:
- we experience time speeding up as we get older because our experience of novelty decreases
- novelty also accounts for local variations in our experience of time, eg, that we experience holiday time as slower than “back home” time
- our perception of time is dismaying or distressing when there’s a big difference between clock time and inner time.
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Image: Siffre mistaking his scales for a clock
When we are waiting for something, like for food to cook or for a train to arrive, time seems to go slower because we don’t want to have to keep waiting. So we want the time to speed up. Therefore the fifteen minute wait seems like an hour.
But if we absorb ourselves in something while we wait, like surf the net on our laptops, the food will have cooked, or the train will have arrived, before we know it.
To make time disappear like this, is what any of us can do whenever we feel like it.
Oh yes, I can make time disappear very easily too. Blogging is pretty foolproof method ;)
The Siffre story was the best part of Klein’s book. Amazing resolve. (It might have been a study of other things besides time–such as light deprivation).
You asked me to ponder time during my vacation, which is a time capsule more pleasant than, but similar to, a cave.
Way back when I was single and childless, I tried to fill my vacations with adventure–ie novelty. Mongolia, Nepal, etc. So I remember them vividly and they did seem to pass “slowly”, meaning that so much living was packed into a week or two that, when I got back home, it seemed as though months had passed.
(Actually, the speed metaphor gets confusing here: If more distance has been passed, time should have gone faster)
The other kind of vacation is the total relaxation of staring at palm trees on a plantation just adjacent to a beautiful beach, where every day is deliberately the same, ie devoid of novelty. The goal is relaxation, recovery. And yes, time speeds up in the sense that the days blend into each other, you lose sense of which day of the week it is (to the extent that you need to check your plane ticket to discover that your vacation is already over). You don’t know afterwards where the time went.
But: this time around, I didn’t quite sink into that second (pleasurable) time acceleration, and the reason is children. Perhaps because their time is so slow, but really because they exhaust and thrill you just as much on vacation as at home, time does not really accelerate whenever they’re around.
There’s holiday time and holiday time, huh? And then there’s kid time which is a whole other dimension :) Know what you mean. I recently did a bit of volunteering at a childcare centre. Found out that 20 x 4 year olds make 2 hours seem like 10.