by JASCHA HOFFMAN
‘Time Warped’ Looks at How We Perceive, and Misperceive, Time
Time can be weirdly elastic. 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.
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. At each duration she finds distortions and paradoxes, revealing the persistent “capriciousness, strangeness and mutability” of time as we sense it.
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Playing down other explanations for this lifelong sense of acceleration — that our internal clocks naturally slow as we age, or that every minute represents a smaller fraction of our life span — she argues that the real reason for the quickening of time is that a high concentration of strong memories occur in the teens and 20s, making that period a “benchmark for our judgments of retrospective time.” As new memories become sparser, later life seems brief compared with our eventful youth, giving the illusion that time has sped up.
The New York Times for more