Is time a figment of our imaginations?

3 hours ago 3

When was the last time you raced against an unforgiving clock? Perhaps you skipped breakfast, broke a sweat, shelled out for a taxi or missed time with your family. Many of us have become slaves to time, with huge portions of our day spent chasing appointments and deadlines. But what is this thing we’re trying to beat?

We tend to imagine time as incessant and non-negotiable, ticking by somewhere out in the world, impossible to slow or stop. Yet an emerging scientific picture is that such “clock time” isn’t a standalone, physical phenomenon at all. It’s a mathematical tool or book-keeping device – useful for coordinating our interactions, but with no independent existence of its own. As with other key innovations, such as money, we can no longer get by without it. But I hope that debunking the myth of the clock can help us to focus on how life really progresses, and how much power we have to shape it.

The importance of being “on time” is one of the first things children learn, and we’re rarely out of reach of some form of clock. Yet time itself seems scarcer than ever. Psychologists have identified the rise of “time famine”, where the more efficient and productive we try to be – the more precisely we measure time, and the more we try to pack into our busy schedules – the less time we actually feel we have. This has a big impact on quality of life: studies show that people experiencing time famine are less likely to do things they enjoy, eat healthily, seek medical attention when they need it or help each other. We can become stuck chasing seconds in a vicious cycle of ever-decreasing time.

Time is elusive in other ways, too. We have no sensory organs for detecting it, nor any dedicated brain areas for tracking it. Our experience of time can vary hugely: minutes drag if we’re bored or uncomfortable; hours race if we’re excited or having fun; we can easily be fooled about how much time has elapsed. And in certain circumstances, our sense of time can even go in circles, break apart or stop altogether.

Take Lara, who suffers from a condition called akinetopsia, in which events no longer progress smoothly but in sudden jumps. When she pours tea, the liquid appears as a frozen column in the air, before suddenly overflowing the cup. One man with psychosis described repeatedly reliving the same half hour. In one classic study of the psychedelic drug mescaline, an intoxicated volunteer ate a spoonful of soup before glancing away from his plate and back down: “It had been in front of me for hundreds of years.”

Rather than being mere mistakes or distortions, these effects reflect something deeper: the role we all play in creating our own time. Because even cosmologists, measuring the universe, don’t find any moving river of time: most believe there’s no physical flow of events beyond our perception, no moment of “happening” or “becoming” in which the future slips into the past. Quantum physicists come up empty-handed, too. The famous double slit experiment shows that a physicist’s choice of how to measure a photon influences what they observe: whether it travels through one slit, like a particle; or through both, like a wave. But there’s a lesser known variant of this experiment, in which the physicist doesn’t decide what measurement they’ll make until the last possible moment.

In this case, their choice, at the point of measurement, apparently influences not just the current status of the particle they find, but the journey it has already completed: even “past” events are unfolding as we look. As the novelist William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

Time, then, is less a universal truth than a feature of how we interact with the world. This insight is reflected in the way some indigenous communities experience time. The Aymara people of Chile, for example, don’t see the future as laid out in front of them, like we might, but hidden behind them, unseeable and unknowable. The Amondawa of the Amazon have no clocks at all, and no word for “time”. What we’re left with, when we release ourselves from the cosmic clock, is “lived time”: our personal, malleable experience of change.

This gives us a different way of thinking about how our lives progress that might be able to release us from the relentless beat of the clock. Lived time is different from clock time because it isn’t defined by a numerical counter that chops things into seconds, or milliseconds, or microseconds. Each moment is more like a tapestry, woven from changes wreaked on multiple timescales.

When you hear music, the notes make sense only as part of a longer phrase or piece; to taste a favourite dish or recognise a loved one takes not just one instant but an entire lifetime of sensations and experiences. It’s a creative process that’s vital not just for our sense of time but of who we are. If you’re sitting in a cafe, sipping your coffee, anticipating a friend’s arrival while picturing a memory you both share, you’re drawing past, present and future into a single, human “now”.

To combat time famine, then, remind yourself that the clock is a tool, not a master. Beware of digital alerts and alarms that divide your day into ever smaller pieces; consciously zoom out from fast-changing sensations to stable, longer-term threads. And while we all have to meet deadlines, pay attention along the way to the rich pattern of changing connections that wire us into each moment: the immediate back and forth of a conversation; the daily rhythm of a commute; the appearance of spring flowers; natural cycles of light and dark.

In contrast to clock time, lived time expands the more we focus on it, becoming richer rather than narrowing or contracting. Instead of something we chase and never catch, it’s a flow that carries us and connects us with each other. And rather than being imposed from the outside, lived time comes from within – from what we pay attention to and how we interact with the world.

In Search of Now: The Science and Mystery of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant is published by Canongate.