Time Warped
Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2013 British Psychological Society's Book Awards Popular Science category.
Time rules our lives, but how much do we really understand it?
In Time Warped, we meet the people willing to go to extreme lengths to find out. They travel to Costa Rica to find out if hummingbirds can sense the passage of time, they walk towards the edge of a stairwell blindfolded and one man spends two months in an ice cave in total darkness - all in an attempt to fathom the tricks time can play on our minds.
Drawing on the latest research from psychology, neuroscience and biology, award-winning BBC Radio4 presenter Claudia Hammond delves into the mysteries of time perception. She shows us how to manage time more efficiently, why it speeds up as you get older and, ultimately, how to use the warping of time to our own advantage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whether you conceive of time as a "breeze" or a "crushing weight," Hammond's book is worth yours. Focusing on the experience of time rather than its "objective reality," the award-winning science writer and BBC broadcaster demonstrates how the timely coordination of brain, nerves, and muscles is essential for everything from reading time tables to understanding spoken language. But, as everyone knows, time rarely seems to pass at a constant rate it seems to slow when you are stressed, and go too fast while you are in vacation mode. As such, Hammond explores how time perception (or "mind time") is "elastic"; investigates the various ways in which people conceive of time in spatial terms; and examines the various causes for the experience of distended or contracted time depression, ADHD, chemical processes in the brain, and even temperature can fool us into the belief that time is speeding up or slowing down. Along the way, readers are introduced to curious characters like Bob Petrella, whose hyperthymesia makes it impossible to forget anything, and Michel Siffre, a French speleologist who spent months living underground to determine whether humans have an internal clock. This lively introduction to the psychology of time perception is an intriguing take on the fluidity of reality.
