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Time warped by claudia hammond5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() The philosopher and psychologist William James observed in 1890 that “a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.”Ī French explorer learned this the hard way in 1962 when, after shutting himself in a cavern to study the effects of isolation, he experienced a strange distortion of time. ![]() When memory comes into play, our sense of time can become even more erratic. Sadness can lead to a deceleration of time, and so can fear, as the neuroscientist David Eagleman confirmed when he dropped his subjects from a tower at an amusement park in Houston, each participant instructed to stare at a stopwatch in free fall until being caught by a net. But you might not have expected a role for body temperature: cold can make the seconds tick faster, while heat can slow them down, as one scientist found when he asked his wife to repeatedly count the seconds as her fever rose. At each duration she finds distortions and paradoxes, revealing the persistent “capriciousness, strangeness and mutability” of time as we sense it.Īnyone who has waited for a red light knows that not all minutes are created equal. In “Time Warped,” Claudia Hammond, a British radio journalist and psychology lecturer, delves into scores of experiments on how we track the seconds, hours, months and decades. For a sky-diver whose parachute won’t open, a few seconds can seem to last forever, but safe on the ground an hour can pass in a flash. ![]()
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