How we experience time

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0:43And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, how we experience time. And we are starting with a call to an old friend. And I mean a really old friend. One who is thousands of years old. This was an idea that artist Katie Patterson had in 2007 while she was living in Iceland. Yeah, so I made an artwork where I put a microphone deep inside a melting glacier in Iceland, Vatnajökull. Vatnajökull is the largest glacier in Iceland. It covers around 10 % of the country, and it is ancient.

1:41Its formation began during the last ice age, so like over 100 ,000 years ago. And then its current shape forming about 1 ,500 years ago. So it's really old. And Katie wanted people to be able to hear it. And so I'd set up a live phone line so people all over the world could dial this number and be connected live to the sound of this glacier slowly melting away. So it kind of collapsed the distance in the time between us and our human earthly time and this ancient melting, thawing glacier that's existed for so long, but yet is melting so much faster than ever just now. I have to ask, how the heck did you get the microphone inside the glacier?

2:35It was a challenge. Yeah, we used a hydrophone, an underwater microphone, and I camped by the glacier with a lot of equipment. And therefore, I was able to watch actually the phone numbers coming into the phone from the UK to China and India and even Iraq. And imagining all of these different people calling in to listen to this freezing melting glacier.

3:08Of course, there's something that's happening to glaciers now that wasn't happening for the majority of the Earth's history, which is that they are melting rapidly. Was that the idea, to help people connect, to actually be able to hear what that sounds like? Yeah, absolutely. So putting a phone line in was trying to make a kind of intimate connection, really, with the glacier and allowing people to listen one at a time. because if you dialed and somebody else was on the line, you got the engaged tone. Beep, beep, beep. The glacier was busy. The glacier was busy, exactly. And so, yeah, part of it was trying to bring something closer.

3:50So you were listening live, really, to the sound of it melting. And, you know, in days gone by, that would have been a very natural occurrence. But now it's exponentially speeded up. I mean, sadly, it's already in Iceland. and they've declared their first glacier totally dead, and they're melting so fast. Through glaciers, stars, the universe, much of Katie Patterson's artwork explores deep time. Anything way beyond the human lifespan, going really back in time into the Earth's deep history, and even beyond that, back into the cosmic time of the universe. So we're thinking about millions of years, thousands, but more millions and billions of years.

4:38I've always been drawn to this very deep sense of how we think of time. Time can be an abstract concept. Why does one hour drag by, but a year can pass in a flash? And how does our relationship to time influence how we act every day? From making decisions to feeling awed by the world around us. On the show today, how we experience time. Ideas about how our brain interprets minutes, hours, and days, and how we can make the most of the time we have. Katie Patterson's artwork often encourages us to think more broadly about the thousands and millions of years that came before we were born. and how space and time interact, as she did with a project called Earth, Moon, Earth.

5:36So Earth, Moon, Earth involved beaming Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back to Earth using a kind of radio technology that's called Earth, Moon, Earth or moon bounce. And it's a really underground, not very known about technology where people literally send each other messages via the moon using the moon as like a kind of transmitter. It just takes two and a half seconds to like bounce from the moon and travel that long journey back to Earth. So when I learned about this, well, at first I thought it sounded like science fiction. And, you know, is this real? This is crazy. But I love the idea of beaming messages and using the moon as this kind of transmitter of messages to one another.

6:24But instead of sending words, I decided to send a piece of music, and that was Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The song I translated into Morse code, because that's the way it's sent, the information is all sent in Morse code, which I kind of loved as well. And so, yeah, we broke down the score into ACGs and, you know, the different tones and even the treble clefs and all the different musical symbols we made into Morse code and beamed that from the moon. And then when it came back, we had a group of Morse code decipherers make it back into a score. But what happened is because of the lunar surface and the weather and the shadows and the moon, not all of the notes came back.

7:15What you hear now is the sonata, but with little bits kind of missing. that at first is very subtle, but by the end of the piece you're hearing whole chords that are gone. And I like to imagine that they're floating up there in the depths of space and time. The pauses that you're hearing are the presences of the moon and the surface of the moon. And so I love the idea that the music had been on this cosmic journey through time and through space, and now you hear the fragments of it. touched by the surface of the moon. It's really beautiful. Thank you.

8:01Let's turn to a newer piece of yours. There lay the days between. Tell us about this one. Yeah, so this is a ticker board, or like a changing number, the kinds that you normally see in stations and so on. So it's a very long number, two trillion, I don't think I can even say the full number, but it's a very long number. And what the number represents is the number of sunrises that have ever happened since the Earth began. And we ended up working with many different astronomers and the Astronomer Royal of Scotland. And it was a big challenge because when you go back to the very deep time of the Earth's very early years, when it was just coming into existence, we don't really know its orbit rate at that time.

8:51So there's kind of periods in the Earth's history that we feel very certain about. And then there's periods that are very speculative. So we joined up all the dots and created one number that was as close as we could possibly get to feeling comfortable that that would be the number of sunrises that have taken place since the Earth began. And actually, we've left enough space for all the sunrises still to come to the end of the Earth. How many spaces did you leave then? Yeah, it's got another several trillion spaces left. What I find so funny about this piece of art is it looks like an old-fashioned alarm clock, kind of, like where the numbers flip.

9:32Yeah, it is. It's like a flipping alarm clock, but it's telling you the kind of cosmic time of the Earth history. And at sunrise every day, wherever the artwork is, it goes up one number according to that day's sunrise. So you have this kind of rattling of the flip numbers turning and then stopping at one more sunrise.

10:00I found it disturbing. I was like, that's it? Just two trillion? It was something very weird to see it in numbers. Yeah, I think also because you could imagine it could be a string of numbers that was almost infinite. But in fact, we have a very set time from when the earth was born. And even though it's a huge expanse of time, it's still got its own lifespan that has a beginning and it has a posited end. I think that's what a lot of people don't want to think about that. And your art often makes people confront the sort of finiteness of space and time, which is deeply upsetting. yeah I mean I pivot between finding it like wondrous you know that we live in this huge expansive universe that just goes on and on infinitely but then at the same time that everything in the cosmos has a kind of clock inside it you know from our moon and our earth all the way back to distant stars and all the way forward into time as well and then our human life within those kind of enormous time spans starts to fade into a very, very small notch, I guess, or one second on the huge cosmic clock.

11:25But I find that quite comforting. I kind of find it gives me some rootedness to feel like here we are, part of this enormous expanse of time and how incredible to be part of that. What I love about your work, Katie, is that you take something that is so ephemeral and hard to grasp, time, and you turn it into a sensory experience through each of your pieces so that we can connect with it in a way that I don't think we do often. We're all busy and typing and swiping and connecting and going, you know, living virtually. This idea of connecting to sort of the deep core of our being is something we we don't usually make time for.

12:12Absolutely and it's all right there you know if we choose to tune in. I think it is astonishing that when we take that larger picture we can see that our lives are owed to every other living being that's been before us and I'm absolutely somebody that's rushing about all the time as well but yet it doesn't take much to feel really astounded you you know, looking up to the sky or even looking at leaf in detail and kind of thinking, goodness, you know, we're part of something much bigger than ourselves and life that goes way beyond us and that will go ahead of us as well. So I find that that kind of way of thinking and expanding the time horizons can really help us connect to something much larger, and that's a really good feeling.

13:03That's artist Katie Patterson. You can see her TED Talk at TED.com. On the show today, how we experience time. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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14:53Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, how we experience time and the body's role, particularly the heart's role, in shaping our perceptions. Think back on a day in your life when it felt like time just flew by. Maybe you were on vacation or wrapped up in a hobby or a good book. A lot of people have experienced a state of flow, you know, where time just disappears. This is cognitive neuroscientist Irena Arslanova. And sometimes when you're just having, you know, a lot and doing a lot and you're busy, it just all seems to kind of slip away.

15:50Or maybe you've been stuck at the airport for hours and it felt like time was barely moving at all. So why is that? Why does time feel different depending on the situation? Irena wondered if it had something to do with interoception. This is how the brain makes sense of the signals the body sends it. From the heart, but also from the gut and our immune system. And the brain needs this information about how the body is doing to predict what it will need. So ultimate purpose of the brain is to make predictions to keep us safe. How long until I'll be too hungry to function? Can I stay up another few hours before I have to sleep?

16:37The brain reads the body's signals and makes predictions. And in order to make these predictions, on one hand, we need a sense of time. Time is constructed in the brain, but it is molded by the body. And essentially my research is trying to kind of connect those two things, so interoception and the sense of time. Here's Irena Arslanova on the TED stage. I work in the lab of action and body at Royal Holloway University of London. And in our lab, we look at the brain from an embodied point of view. What this means is that we believe we cannot fully understand the workings of the brain if we take it out of the body.

17:22Because after all, the main reason for us to have a brain is to keep the body alive. And for that, it needs to understand what our body needs at any moment in time. That additional internal sense is called interoception. And one example of interoception is the perception of our own heart. Yes, the heart. I think all of us know that the main function of the heart is to transport oxygen-rich blood all through the body. And like other bodily functions, it is controlled by the brain. So when I want to move, the heart should start beating faster to provide more oxygen. When I need to slow down and focus, it will also slow down to preserve the oxygen.

18:09But what many of you may not know is that the activity of the heart itself shapes the activity of the brain. Irena says the heart and the brain are in a constant rhythmic dance. Every time the heart contracts, it sends a signal to the brain, telling it to get ready for action. When the heart relaxes, no signal gets sent. Communication goes silent. The brain gets a chance to take in the world around it. So there's a balancing between action and perception. So what is really important is when your heart rate changes. So when the heart speeds up, we get more beats. And the period between the beats becomes shorter.

18:59So the scale is really tilting towards action. However, in contrast, when the heart slows down, we get longer periods between the beats. So we're now scaling towards perception. This constant conversation between the heart and the brain and the almost imperceptible balancing act between action and perception got her thinking. If the heart shapes perception in such a way, will it also shape the perception of time? is there a causal relationship between our heart and how we experience time? Of course, we tested that in our lab. We invited 67 volunteers to participate in a study. After hooking these volunteers up to an ECG machine so they could monitor their heartbeat, Irena and her colleagues would flash different stimuli at the volunteer.

19:54These could be sounds, images of simple shapes, images of people showing different emotions. Some were flashed on the heartbeat. Others were flashed in between heartbeats. And what we found was that stimuli that occurred during heart's contraction were perceived to last shorter than stimuli that occurred between the beats when the heart was relaxed. What this means is that the momentary state of the cart caused time to contract and expand within each heartbeat. When they were exposed to a sound or image on the heartbeat, participants thought it went by more quickly. Time seemed to go just a little bit faster.

20:45Why am I so excited about this finding? Well, because it shows that perception of time is an embodied experience. It seems intuitive, you know, that something rhythmic like the heartbeat would influence something rhythmic like time perception. But now we have a scientific evidence for that intuition. I'm just thinking about like when I'm about to go into an important meeting and maybe I get a little tense. My heart rate definitely goes up. And therefore, you have found that time seems to move faster. Did I get that right? Yeah, it's never really clear cut. So there's obviously a lot of interacting factors.

21:33So for example, you know, let's take our experience of time right now, me and you. This hour will feel very different for you. The fact that you're taking in information, your time might feel much longer. You're taking in more information. Your heart might also be beating slower. When we're thinking about me, so I am doing a lot of motor activity right now. I'm trying to scramble my thoughts. I can feel my heart. It's pretty fast. So for me, time is moving much faster. You're saying because the body and the brain and that interaction is incredibly complex, plus throw in some cardiovascular exertion or whether you haven't eaten enough this morning to fuel your brain, it's really dynamic.

22:22It is, it is. It's also really subjective and that's why it's really hard to kind of have a general rule. So for example, in an extremely threatening situation like a car crash, your heart rate may be accelerating through the roof yet you may perceive everything in slow motion. But remarkably, another person could be in the same exact situation, the same exact heart acceleration, but they may report that everything happened so quick they couldn't even catch their breath. How we feel the passing of time can be highly malleable. When we are bored, in pain, but also when we encounter something novel or extraordinary.

23:08Time feels to be passing much slower than when we are busy or simply having fun. Do these distortions serve some function? And can we gain some level of control over how we feel time? Time is the ultimate master of our lives. We are all constantly faced with its fleeting nature. one of the things i've been thinking about a lot is people feel like time is moving faster but one of the reasons why i wonder they feel that way is because they're consuming so much information they are so externally oriented in some ways so it's really when you're attending to time when you're kind of mindful and you're being present, that's when time tends to elongate.

24:04Whereas when you're engaging in distracting activities, but also when you're doing something really absorbing and fun, you know, like you just get distracted from time, it seems to move faster. And that's why sometimes it's still good to just stop and reflect and actually attend to time for a second in an intentional way. Is that why people then say, you know, take a very long, deep breath, try and listen to your body? Yeah, so there's a lot of talk now about how meditation can actually increase our perception and expand time. But what works for me, for example, is to focus on something slow or still, you know, like focusing on something in nature.

24:49And sometimes by focusing on something slow, you still kind of have this natural slowing of the heart. So taking a deep breath and slowing down your heart is an easy thing to do. And if it actually has such a strong influence on how we perceive time, then why not take a deep breath and see if that actually slows down time and if that actually improves how much information you can take in. Irena Arslanova is a cognitive neuroscientist at Royal Holloway University of London. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, how we experience time. So music is all about keeping time. The beats within a measure, every full, half, quarter note.

25:45It's also about the timing of a bass note, the rhythm of the percussion, the pulse of a chord progression as it dances with the melody. And when all of these elements come together, you get a cohesive sound, and it can have a transportive effect. I stand on the podium, conduct a two-hour concert. It feels like two minutes. This is Robert Franz, the music director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in Ontario, Canada. Even as a kid, Robert found himself entranced by music. He remembers his teacher giving him a recording of Dvorak's Cello Concerto. And I used to sit and listen to the first side, A side, first movement, over and over again.

26:30And I'd sit on the side of my bed and I'd imagine I was the one playing the concerto. and out my window we had a birch tree and the leaves would blow in the wind. It looked like people were applauding for me. I love that. You were the star of your own show. That's so great. I had the whole thing. I had the audience. I had the concerto. I had everything was done. That's great. So not everybody feels as enthralled, shall we say, by classical music. What are some of the things that you hear from people who maybe just don't get it? Well, it's complicated. It's fancy. It's boring. It's just not something that some people are used to engaging with.

27:16And I think part of it, Manoush, is that when you think about classical music, you think about going to a hall and hearing an orchestra play an hour-long symphony, let's say. Well, that's a lot different than a three-minute rock tune on the radio that you sort of bang your head with as you're driving down the road. That's a totally different experience. Robert has spent his career helping people better connect with classical music. and he's developed a listening toolkit for audiences, one that will likely alter the way you experience time and music too. Here's Robert Franz on the TED stage. I come from a family of music lovers, but not classically trained musicians.

27:59And so whenever we would go to a concert, it would be kind of an exciting event. My dad, my dad, Bob, his name is Bob. You know, he's kind of curious, like, well, what's this going to be like? So we were on a trip one day to a concert, and I said to him, I said, so today the concert is going to feature a world premiere of a brand new symphony, a symphony that lasts about 30 minutes or so. And he's like, oh, 30 minutes. Hmm. What should I listen for? I was like, what a great question. Thank you for engaging with me in that way, right? My dad and I are like having a conversation about how to listen to classical music.

28:36So I said, OK, Dad, I'm going to give you four tools to use while you're listening. I call them Bob's Four Tools. So I said, here's how these tools work. They're kind of like screens, screens that you would hold up on a window, but you hold them up over your ear. And you listen using these tools and these screens. And as you listen and adjust, if you find that one of them isn't working, lay it down without judgment and pick up another one. and continue to go back and forth between these four tools and these four screens. Okay, so Bob's four tools for engaging with classical music are rhythm, melody, texture, and visuals.

29:18Robert, walk us through each one of these, starting with the first one, rhythm. Sure. So these are basic elements in music. And when a composer writes a rhythm, there are basically two options. The first option is that the composer writes the rhythm that kind of goes along with your heartbeat, that maybe slows your heartbeat down or speeds your heartbeat up but works in tandem with your heartbeat. And so that's one option. The other option is that a composer can write a rhythm that goes against your heartbeat and makes you feel uncomfortable. And so having those two options, it's not about what you like or don't like.

30:01It's just about what is present in front of you. So I said to my dad, I said, listen to the rhythm and decide if the rhythm is with your heartbeat or against your heartbeat. And that will sort of give you an indication of why you're reacting the way you are to the rhythm that you're hearing. Okay, we're going to play a little bit of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 1.

30:30I find this very energizing. It gives me like, I'm like, let's go. Okay, so let me tell you why that is, Manoush. The pulse of this is somewhere between 96 and 100 beats per minute. If you relate that to your heart rate, that is a kind of a high heart rate. A resting heart rate is 60 or 70 per minute, right? And so if you're at 96 or 100, it's going, but it's really kind of pumping. It's almost like you're running. And that's the pulse.