![]() asking whether people were experiencing coronavirus time as moving faster or more slowly than normal. So about a month ago she distributed questionnaires around the U.K. That's what's happening to us right now, when so much of the world has halted, which Ruth Ogden sees as a rare opportunity to do a mass study on how people experience time when you confuse their days for a long period. You're no longer doing the daily routine that you would normally use to mark off time like taking the 8:32 bus or 2 p.m. But sometimes it's the temporal markers that shift. ROSIN: So if you're in a car accident, you might say it feels like it happened in slow motion because you're comparing it to the external marker, say, your cellphone which tells you that it actually only took eight seconds. OGDEN: When people are talking about distortions to time, what they're talking about is how they feel about time in comparison with something else - their memory representation of time or some external temporal marker like a clock. But that very process of checking, it introduces a whole bunch of new factors - emotions, mood, memories - that throw everything off. But we're not all that conscious of it until we decide to check it. ROSIN: One popular theory about how we experience time is that people and animals have a kind of internal stopwatch tick-ticking away in our brains. OGDEN: My main area of research is trying to understand why time sometimes feels fast and why time sometimes feels slow for people. ROSIN: The baby belongs to Ruth Ogden, who studies time perception at Liverpool University, although she currently studies it at her house, where she is on lockdown with three children under 7, including baby Rosa (ph). It's like there's chaos once life becomes chaotic - very frightening and disengaging. So the ultimate irony of it is that this straitjacket of regimented do this, do that, tick this box, tick this box, tick this box, tick this box - is lifted, and we fall apart. Clocks and things, you know, they're like straitjackets. Lately, the days just seem so slow, and yet nearly every day I say out loud, how is it already 3 o'clock? That's why I tracked down Jeannie because she has been at this for a decade and she's figured some things out, like that we should pay attention to this problem because losing a sense of time feels a lot like losing yourself.ĬAMPBELL: Time controls us. ROSIN: I can understand this better than I would have a month ago. Every single time, it's impossible that you've got it wrong. I mean, you know, it's impossible that it's that time. You don't believe a watch that's telling you the wrong time. ![]() And an hour later, her colleagues found her still standing there and reading it.ĬAMPBELL: Oh, if only it was that easy. Or at work once, she left her desk just to check the bulletin board for a second. But in Jeannie's case, it didn't, so she'll be walking the dog thinking she's been out 15 minutes and come home to discover it's been two hours. Dyschronometria sometimes comes on after strokes. Jeannie was 50 when she took that shower, and she had just had a stroke. ROSIN: Her problem, Jeannie later discovered, was called dyschronometria, lost time syndrome. You know, I think it's some sort of mad joke. So she got out to check.ĬAMPBELL: So I look at the clock, and then I can't believe it. But in her mind, it had just been a few minutes. ![]() ROSIN: Jeannie remembers being in there enjoying the hot water and the nice smell of shampoo. I can remember my husband coming upstairs shouting at me to get out the shower - just shouted, come on out you've been in their ages. But Jeannie Campbell, she's been losing track of the time for years.Ĭan you tell me about the first time you noticed that maybe something was funny about time or something had gone off?ĬAMPBELL: Yeah. But the truth is, I never considered this problem before life turned into the slog of lockdowns and death counts with no definite end. HANNA ROSIN, BYLINE: I guess I would just Google it. JEANNIE CAMPBELL: If you don't know what day of the week it is, how do you find out? Well, Invisibilia's Hanna Rosin has a story for us about a woman who's been having problems tracking time for years. I know a lot of us have been feeling lately as if time is somehow distorted, like getting dressed for a Zoom meeting only to realize it's Saturday - or the feeling that the days are passing either very slowly or way too fast. ![]()
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