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"  I&amp;#039;ve been thinking a lot about time lately. I reached a significant birthday last year and then, a few months later, gave birth to my third (and final) child. You&amp;#039;d think that a baby would focus you on beginnings\u2014and it does. My daughter Sylvie is an addictive presence, a golden girl. She wriggles with joy, like a puppy, when you turn your attention to her. It&amp;#039;s like our family has acquired its own personal sun, radiating warmth and light. But when that sun goes down, I find myself lying awake in bed, wondering how the day could be over when I was just getting started. There&amp;#039;s so much to do\u2014so much I want to do\u2014and time evaporates the moment I touch it. I&amp;#039;m constantly running the numbers, shifting my schedule around like a Rubik&amp;#039;s Cube, trying to get all the dates and time slots to align. It&amp;#039;s like I&amp;#039;m at the best party of my life, but I can&amp;#039;t enjoy it, because I know it will end. You may think of time as more an immutable force of nature than a psychological phenomenon\u2014after all, the sun rises and sets no matter how you feel about it. But in her new book, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, British journalist Claudia Hammond makes the case that it is the experience of time that really matters. How quickly or slowly our days seem to pass is mediated by our emotions, physiology, age, sensations, and memories\u2014and thus, promisingly for someone suffering from time melancholia like I am, somewhat under our control. According to Hammond, time-perception researchers (a surprisingly eccentric lot\u2014they constantly seem to be throwing people off buildings or crawling into ice caves for months to see how extreme circumstances alter &amp;quot;mind time&amp;quot;) have not located any single internal-timing device in the brain. The leading theory is that the dopamine system and several parts of the brain work in concert to mark packets or waves of experience. Humans seem to process the world in three-second increments (the duration of a handshake, the length of the annoying sound computers make when they start up, and the periodic rhythm of speech), and we develop a sense for how those increments sync with clock time. Time can warp when our brain receives much more or less input than usual in a three-second span. (For example, time slows down when you are about to crash your car, but you can easily lose a whole day watching things on YouTube.) Bad internal timing seems to be a symptom\u2014or perhaps a cause\u2014of many psychiatric illnesses and disabilities. Hammond reports that schizophrenics often say that time speeds up, repeats, or distorts. Studies show that clinically depressed people make mistakes of time estimation, thinking that a minute should be over long before it is. Children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) make similar errors, and Ritalin has been shown to improve their inner clocks. Researchers are also developing a form of cognitive behavioral therapy in which kids with ADHD are simply taught to judge time more accurately. Most people think that time speeds up for us as we get older because of simple mathematics: When you are four, a year represents 25 percent of your life; when you are 40, it&amp;#039;s only 2.5 percent. But in a survey of 1,500 Dutch people, most adults, no matter their age, said that their weeks, months, and years went by &amp;quot;fast&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;very fast&amp;quot;\u2014there was no pattern of time moving more quickly as adults grew older. However, people&amp;#039;s perception of decades did get faster as they aged. So each day is about the same to them, but when they look back, it seems like the days add up to 10 years much more quickly. Psychologists attribute this to a trick of memory called the &amp;quot;reminiscence bump,&amp;quot; Hammond writes. When we are young, we have a flurry of fresh experiences\u2014we go to new schools, meet many different people, and have tons of &amp;quot;firsts&amp;quot; (first sex, first sushi, first airplane trip)\u2014and these novelties consume a lot of brain energy, thus imprinting them in our memories. But unless something really excellent or terrible happens, the hundred-and-fiftieth time we have sex will make less of a mark. So when we review the decades, the ones that were full of the new will seem to have taken up more time than others. Memory not only adds richness to our lives, it also allows us to think about the future. The minds of people who&amp;#039;ve sustained injuries to the areas of the brain that create memories are often as blank going forward as back. Neuroscientists theorize that our pictures of the future are actually made up of memories\u2014like a new film we splice together from old scenes. Future thinking can both be fun (anticipating your next vacation or how great Thanksgiving dinner will be) and a necessity for functioning (you can&amp;#039;t arrange a vacation or cook a turkey without the ability to plan). But spending all our time thinking\u2014or worrying\u2014about tomorrow is also one of the ways we turn our years into one blurry sludge. This is a point that hits home for me: I&amp;#039;m guessing I pretty much nailed this angsting-about-the-passing-of-time thing the first time I went out for a run and found myself sobbing when Joni Mitchell started warbling &amp;quot;The Circle Game&amp;quot; over my iPod. I&amp;#039;m not going to create a lot of new memories doing that over and over (I may, however, develop an interesting reputation in my neighborhood). The goal, then, is to find the right balance of forming memories, making the most of the present, and shaping a splendid future. You don&amp;#039;t want your days to slip by without your noticing, but you also don&amp;#039;t want to slow time to a standstill. Studies show that, from minute to minute, time is decelerated most by traumatic events: being terrified, imprisoned, or very ill; listening to the sound of a woman sobbing; or looking at pictures of mutilated bodies\u2014not exactly the stuff of a life well spent. But finding your bliss isn&amp;#039;t enough to stave off boredom and the befogging of years. Television, video games, and Web surfing, for example, though pleasurable, have caused research participants to lose subjective time (they underestimate the minutes or hours they spent in front of a screen). And a study of British expats who took off for a life of leisure in the south of France found that once the subjects finished working on their new houses, they actually became less happy than they&amp;#039;d been in the workaday grind in England. (Recently, in the throes of my time-lament, I told a friend that I worried I was wasting too much of my life renovating apartments and houses, and she shrugged and said, &amp;quot;The secret to life is that&amp;#039;s all there is. You decorate, then you redecorate, and then you die.&amp;quot;) Hammond instead suggests we first stop stressing out about time so much. In fact, we have more free time than our forefathers did: five hours, six minutes a day of leisure time for the average American woman; five hours, 48 minutes for men-. And then we should develop an &amp;quot;energetic timetable,&amp;quot; injecting as much of the unfamiliar into our days as possible: Vacation in a variety of places, plan outings for Saturday and Sunday, take unusual routes to the office, throw parties, try exotic foods, learn new skills, and generally follow the advice of the nineteenth-century philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, who said that to lengthen time, &amp;quot;Fill it, if you have the chance, with a thousand new things.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a13907/book-review-time-warped-claudia-hammond/>