Second sight: clock watcher who catches time by the tail

THIRTY minutes to go until my interview with Claudia Hammond, BBC broadcaster, lecturer, and author of a book about our relationship with time. Appropriately, I’m running late, crawling north on a London tube, counting down the minutes every time the doors sigh open. People get on. People get off. The doors sigh closed. Each announcement feels like a 12in, extended disco version.

Time, Hammond would explain if she were here, is warping. Everything is happening so very slowly, yet the minutes are whizzing by like greyhounds in a race as the interview approaches. Only now that I’ve finished Time Warped, I’m wondering… is it me who is approaching the interview?

Thirty minutes. Let’s take a moment to consider it. (A moment, by the way, lasts two to three seconds, probably the time it’s taken you to read this sentence). Half a lunch break, half an episode of Homeland, the amount of time we should spend exercising each day, the time it takes (allegedly) to cook a Jamie Oliver meal. All these activities take thirty minutes, but why does half an hour watching telly fly by when it feels like an eternity on the treadmill? Hammond claims the answer lies in us. “The experience of time,” she writes in Time Warped, “is actively created by our minds.”

Hang on a minute. Is this the same time that waits for no man? The same time that can be found ticking away in Greenwich, on our wrists, and in our phones? How do we create it? And if we do, does this mean we can manipulate it, cheat it, stretch it like an elastic band?

The answer, according to Hammond, is yes. We have now time-travelled to 6pm, and are sitting on the sofa in her flat. I got here five minutes early, not thanks to time stretching or hotwiring a DeLorean, but good old-fashioned Google Maps. “It’s because we construct our own relationship with time that we can change that relationship,” Hammond explains. “And it’s precisely because we do construct it that time warps. It’s part of what makes us unique. Time will continue to warp, and we will continue to be surprised by it.”

Physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, poets, Proust, the dancers stepping to the right in the Rocky Horror Picture Show – all have grappled with the mysterious concept of time. Hammond, known for her BBC Radio 4 programmes All In The Mind and Mind Changers, takes a different approach, using psychology and neuroscience to explore the subject.

“I first had the idea of writing a book about the future,” she explains. “Masses of research has been done on memory but far less on how we are able to hold the future in our minds. Then I started thinking about the past and present and our perception of time. This subjective experience of time, of how it does such strange things, is fascinating. It strikes us all the time. We are constantly amazed by how fast holidays go at the time but how far away they seem when we get back. Or the feeling of a week disappearing. Most of all we feel time is speeding up as we age.”

Time accelerating as we get older is the most poignant example of warping. It speaks to our mortality. It reminds us that we have a finite amount of it. It’s no surprise that the question Hammond was asked most often when people found out she was writing a book about time was “how can we slow it down?”

The answer is oddly liberating. Yes, we can slow time but why would we want to? Most of the situations in which time crawls are bad. A slow life isn’t necessarily a good life, which throws into question our modern hankering after a more time-rich existence. “When people are depressed, suicidal, ill, feeling lonely and rejected, or even just bored, time slows down,” Hammond points out. “None of these are situations you would choose. So, in fact, if time is flying, your life is busy and full. That’s something I’ve taken from writing this book. I don’t complain so much about not having time to do everything.”

How does she explain the feeling that the summer holidays stretch on forever when we’re children, but Christmas comes earlier each year as we age? Or as Wordsworth puts it, ‘Sweet childish days, that were as long / As twenty days are now’. “It’s so universal a feeling,” she says. “I think it’s caused by what I call the Holiday Paradox; the idea that we experience time prospectively – how it’s passing now – and retrospectively – how we look back on it. When these don’t match up, time warps in a weird way. Also, there are more markers of time as you get older, and fewer new experiences. Novelty slows time down, which is why the way back from a walk seems shorter than the way there. On the way there, you have new experiences. On the way back you don’t.”

Hammond tells me she has always been obsessed with time. She comes across as a super efficient person, someone who makes the most of her time. She talks fast, knows exactly how long 30 seconds lasts thanks to “a lifetime working in radio”, and has been known to knock on neighbours’ doors asking whether they feel they are going towards the future or the future is coming towards them (I’m in the former category, Hammond the latter). She wears two watches; one around her wrist and the other, an old wind-up pocket watch, on a chain round her neck. “It’s an hour out,” she says with a laugh, which is apt considering the subject at hand.

We talk about her discovery that 20 per cent of us apparently see time in our mind’s eye. If this makes no sense, you don’t do it. “These were extraordinary discoveries,” Hammond says. “To an extent we all see time in space. If you give people flashcards of past, present, and future they will put past on the left and future on the right. Go to China and they will do it vertically. But the time pictures I’m talking about were really imaginative. People had years shaped like Zimbabwe and centuries shaped like Slinkys. There was one picture of a wallpaper pasting table with the current century laid out and the earlier ones all curled over the end of the table in scrolls.” She laughs. “It made my oval of the year look very dull.” So she does it too? “Yes,” she replies. “I assumed everyone did until I wrote this book.”

It’s fascinating stuff, though the tips on how to change our relationship with time can seem self-evident (such as practise mindfulness if you want to slow time down). Still, there are plenty of startling facts. “Time” is the most used noun in the English language. There is no single organ or location in the brain for perceiving time. We remember events that happened three years ago particularly well.

Hammond also interviewed people who have an unusual relationship with time. The book opens with Chuck Berry, the Kiwi king of base-jumping, falling out of the sky on a glider whose wings have just snapped off. As he plummets to his death, he thinks about his life, impending death, what’s happening, and whether he can save himself. This rich, layered thinking takes place in just five seconds; an extreme feat of time-stretching. Hammond also interviews BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who taught himself how to harness time and adapt to its painfully slowed pace when he was kidnapped and held in Gaza for four months.

Most fascinating of all is the story of French speleologist Michel Siffre. He spent two months alone in complete darkness in an ice cave to see how he would cope outside time. He became disorientated, lost his appetite, slept odd hours, and his only solace came from a pet spider, captured and kept in a box. Pioneering stuff, or a complete waste of time? “That experiment was about the extent to which the body can keep time without the usual markers,” Hammond says. “What’s extraordinary is that Michel actually thought he had another 25 days to go at the end. It’s almost as though his body knew what was happening because his rhythms were normal, but his mind didn’t. It shows us how important it is for us to know the time.”

Can we really change our relationship with time? The fact is, if you’re running late, you’re not going to make the train, no matter how much you meditate. And as Samuel Beckett knew, waiting for Godot may feel endless, but it’s still not going to put off the end. Time ticks on. The world keeps turning whether we perceive it or not.

Nevertheless, Hammond maintains her relationship with time has changed since writing the book. And as a result, she’s happier. “I don’t worry so much about time speeding up because now I know why it happens,” she says. “That’s huge. I don’t worry about getting older in the same way. Actually, I think time speeding is a good thing now. It’s a sign that life is interesting.”

With that, our time is up. Hammond is heading out to dinner, or as she sees it, her dinner party is heading towards her. We’ve been talking for one hour, one minute and 39 seconds, though it feels much shorter. Time has warped once again.

• Time Warped, Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, Canongate, www.claudiahammond.com