Time Warped

Have you ever felt that time speeds up as you get older, or slows down when you're afraid? Claudia Hammond’s Time Warped invites you to question this everyday experience. She argues that time isn’t a fixed external force ticking away on a clock—it’s something your mind actively constructs, stretches, and compresses depending on emotion, memory, attention, and circumstance.

Through captivating stories—from BBC reporter Alan Johnston’s four-month captivity in Gaza, where hours felt like years, to skydiver Chuck Berry’s near-death freefall that unfolded in seconds yet seemed eternal—Hammond explores time as a psychological reality rather than a mechanical one. We don’t perceive time linearly; our minds bend it according to how we feel, what we remember, and whether we’re focused or bored. The book reveals the mind’s remarkable ability to warp time, helping us understand why an hour can feel eternal or vanish in an instant.

How Minds Manufacture Time

Hammond shows that our brains don’t possess a single organ devoted to time perception. There is no internal clock like a heart or a liver. Instead, time arises from the interplay between neural networks, memory consolidation, and attention. The cerebellum, basal ganglia, frontal lobe, and insular cortex each contribute, working together to measure different scales—from milliseconds to years. When fear floods the brain with adrenaline, we create a higher density of memories per second, making moments feel elongated. When we’re absorbed in flow—reading, painting, playing music—time flies because we’re not conscious of it passing.

Emotion, Memory, and Attention

Three forces—emotion, memory, and attention—shape subjective time. Emotional intensity can stretch or shrink perception. Alan Johnston’s terror in captivity made nights endless; Chuck Berry’s adrenaline-soaked freefall expanded seconds; depression and boredom both decelerate time drastically. Memory also distorts time retroactively. We judge how long something lasted based on how many distinct memories it left behind. Busy, novel experiences (like holidays) produce rich memory traces that seem long in retrospect, even though they felt fleeting in the moment—a phenomenon Hammond calls the Holiday Paradox. Attention acts like a gatekeeper: when focused internally (as in anxiety or mindfulness), time slows; when engaged externally in flow, time accelerates.

The Architecture of Time Illusions

Our minds are full of time illusions. The experience of “chronostasis”—when the ticking second hand of a clock appears frozen for a moment—is one example. We also misjudge durations under stress or rejection: rejected participants in laboratory experiments estimated a 40-second wait as lasting 64 seconds. Even body temperature, medication, or social conditions can warp duration. Fever makes time crawl; Ritalin can alter temporal sensitivity in ADHD patients; cultures with fast economic tempos—like the USA or northern Europe—literally “move” quicker when walking, perceiving time as more precious.

From Space to Society

Time perception is also social and spatial. Hammond draws on research showing how individuals and cultures map time differently. Some visualize the future on the right and the past on the left, influenced by reading direction. Others see time vertically—Mandarin speakers often imagine earlier events above and later ones below. People even lean physically forward when thinking of the future and back when recalling the past, suggesting that time is embodied. Social norms further shape how we use time: Benedictine monks regimented their days with bells, while modern cultures equate speed with productivity. Yet paradoxically, technology designed to save time—cars, emails, computers—often amplifies our time poverty.

Harnessing the Psychology of Time

In its culmination, Time Warped becomes a practical exploration of how to reshape your relationship with time. Hammond distinguishes between times that race (busy, fulfilling lives) and times that drag (fear, boredom, illness). She offers evidence-based techniques to slow down time’s passage or accelerate it: create novelty, vary routines, engage attention, and savor present-moment immersion. From mindfulness training to memory exercises, she demonstrates that time can bend to the mind’s will. The book closes by affirming our unique capacity for mental time-travel: we can revisit the past, imagine the future, and, in doing so, enlarge the experience of life itself.

Time, Hammond reminds us, is not an indifferent cosmic flow—it’s a human construction. Understanding how our minds perceive it can help us live longer—not biologically, but psychologically, by enriching the texture of experience and turning fleeting hours into memorable years.

Hammond demonstrates that emotion is one of the strongest distorters of time—capable of making seconds feel endless. When we are terrified, anxious, or profoundly bored, we perceive moments as longer because our minds record denser packets of memory per second. In Alan Johnston’s captivity, time felt infinite; each moment carried the emotional charge of survival. Similarly, skydivers and soldiers in near-death situations experience what Hammond calls “time deceleration.”

The Neuroscience of Terror

The neuroscientist David Eagleman proved that subjective time dilation in terror is not a real slowing of brain processing, but a byproduct of memory formation. Conducting experiments in Houston where volunteers fell backward from a 150-foot tower, Eagleman measured perception changes. Though every participant reported that their fall seemed to last much longer, no one could read flickering numbers faster—their sensory speed hadn’t changed. Instead, emotion had amplified their memory density, creating the illusion that time expanded. (Note: Eagleman later explored similar ideas in Incognito.)

Boredom and Rejection: The Other Slowdowns

Fear isn’t the only source of time dilation. Deprivation and emotional loss slow time dramatically. Participants told in experiments that others disliked them perceived intervals as longer than those told they were popular—a mere 40 seconds stretched to over 63. Lonely prisoners at Guantanamo were subjected to irregular routines precisely because unpredictability disoriented their sense of time. Similarly, depression and anxiety also warp time perception; psychiatrist Matthew Broome found that depressed patients reported durations as twice as long as those perceived by healthy individuals. Hammond speculates that depression might even be a “disorder of time perception.”

Physiology and Perception

Surprisingly, temperature and body states influence time’s felt speed. Hudson Hoagland discovered in 1933 that his wife’s fever made her believe a minute had passed after only 34 seconds. Later divers in Cyprus and Wales demonstrated that cold made time feel faster while heat slowed it down. Hammond broadens this to show that time changes not only with mental states but also physiological ones—temperature, hormones, and even medication can distort neural pacing. ADHD patients, whose internal clocks tick differently, experience exaggerated slowness; five minutes feels like an eternity.

Attention as a Temporal Lens

At the heart of these distortions lies attention. When your mind focuses inwardly—on your suffering, fear, or boredom—time crawls. When absorbed outwardly—playing tennis, painting, driving fast—it shrinks. This explains why flow states produce timelessness. According to Hammond, William James foresaw this connection as early as the nineteenth century: boredom arises when we “grow attentive to the passage of time itself.” Emotional attention makes hours expand; creative or joyful attention makes them collapse. Understanding this dynamic gives you power over the rhythm of your life.

Why does childhood feel long while adulthood feels fast? Hammond argues that the acceleration of time with age is not merely a product of proportion—each year forming a smaller slice of life—but a result of how memory operates. Early years are filled with novelty, generating overwhelming numbers of unique memories, while adulthood settles into routine, producing fewer distinct traces. Our minds judge time retrospectively based on memory density. When memories thin, time contracts.

The Reminiscence Bump

Between ages 15 and 25, we experience what psychologists call the “reminiscence bump.” This decade of firsts—first love, first job, first independence—creates vivid memories that stick for life. When asked to recall emotionally significant events, people cluster around this period. Because those years are so dense with novelty, they create the illusion that time then moved slower. As adulthood stabilizes and novelty wanes, time accelerates. Our autobiographical memory smooths over repetitive experiences into single blurred recollections, shrinking the perceived span of life.

The Holiday Paradox

Hammond introduces the Holiday Paradox: when you’re on vacation, time seems to fly in the moment but feels long afterward. This paradox perfectly illustrates prospective versus retrospective time estimation. Prospectively—during the holiday—you’re absorbed and inattentive to passing hours, making time seem short. Retrospectively—after returning home—the surplus of vivid, novel memories expands your mental timeline, making the same period feel long. The reverse holds for illness or boredom: long in the moment, short when remembered. Understanding these two simultaneous “modes of time” explains why adulthood flies past—everyday familiarity erases distinction, condensing years into flashes.

Why Memory Shapes Identity and Time

Memory is not merely an archive—it defines identity and our relationship with time. Neuroscientist James McGaugh’s study of hyperthymestic individuals (those who remember every detail of their lives) reveals that perfect recall doesn’t necessarily feel timeless; instead, it burdens the mind with unfiltered data. Conversely, philosopher William James wrote that monotony “shrivels up time.” The lesson? Time expands through variation, emotion, and narrative meaning. If you want years to feel longer, seek novelty—travel, learn, and disrupt routine. Create vivid landmarks that give temporal texture.

Practical Recalibration

Hammond’s advice mirrors cognitive science: to slow time, create more memorable moments. Change environments, explore new routes, or rotate weekend habits. Like the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau said in the 1800s, “Fill time with a thousand new things.” Your mind will record more detail—building richer memory archives and making your life feel longer. It’s not that time races; it’s that memory speeds it up. Learning to manipulate your memory system is the secret to making life feel expansive again.

Our greatest gift, Hammond claims, is the ability to travel through time in the mind. We can revisit the past and project ourselves into the future—a capacity philosophers call chronesthesia. Patients with hippocampal damage, like Henry Molaison, who lost the ability to form new memories, also lose the ability to imagine the future. This reveals how deeply memory and imagination intertwine. We construct future scenarios by remixing fragments of past experience.

The Neuroscience of Foresight

Neuroscientists Demis Hassabis and Eleanor Maguire found that imagining a future activates the same brain areas as remembering the past: the hippocampus, frontal and parietal lobes. When you picture dinner next week, you’re recombining stored sensory fragments—lights, smells, rooms—from memory. Damage to these structures, as in amnesia, erases foresight. Future thinking is thus another form of memory reconstruction, except turned forward.

Animals Without Tomorrow

To highlight humanity’s uniqueness, Hammond reviews experiments on animal cognition. Dogs, chimps, and even clever birds like the western scrub jay can plan mechanically but not imagine the future. These creatures hoard food instinctively yet don’t consciously envision future hunger. Our ability to form mental movies of tomorrow gives rise to creativity, anticipation, and anxiety—uniquely human emotions born from temporal imagination.

Imagination, Happiness, and Decision Errors

Future thinking fuels both hope and distortion. Psychologist Dan Gilbert’s research on the Impact Bias shows we mispredict how we’ll feel about future events. We exaggerate joys (like winning the lottery) and terrors (like losing a job) because we imagine peak emotions without accounting for adaptation. Hammond explains how the brain simplifies the future, focusing only on the “chief features” of events—forgetting mundane details that moderate emotional reality. This bias also drives procrastination: we always assume we’ll have more time later.

Practical Uses of Mental Time-Travel

Once we understand how imagination shapes reality, Hammond advises the deliberate use of imagery for planning and resilience. Visualizing the process—not merely the outcome—helps achieve goals, whether exams or sports, a technique supported by psychologist Walter Mischel’s marshmallow tests. For cognitive therapy, guided mental simulations of a hopeful future can counter depression and suicidal ideation, replacing destructive flash-forwards with constructive ones. Our brains live partly in yesterday and tomorrow—and we can choose which parts to inhabit longer.

Not everyone experiences time the same way. Hammond devotes a chapter to how cultures and individuals visualize time. Some people see calendars, dominoes, or spirals of months in their mind’s eye—a phenomenon she links to spatial synesthesia. For around 20% of people, time has shape and color. They might see Monday as red, July as an oval loop, or the twentieth century as a zigzag ribbon. These subconscious maps help us organize life and memory.

The Geometry of Time

Through listener contributions to her BBC program All in the Mind, Hammond discovered striking patterns: people visualize weeks as horizontal grids, years as circles, or centuries as lines moving left to right. These mental shapes correspond with linguistic and cultural habits. English speakers tend to see the past on the left and future on the right, mirroring reading direction. Mandarin speakers place yesterday above and tomorrow below, reflecting vertical text layouts. The phenomenon, studied by Lera Boroditsky and David Casasanto, reveals how language and culture literally sculpt cognition.

Spatial-Timed Emotions

We even embody time physically. People lean forward when imagining the future and backward when recalling the past. Emotional states affect whether we see ourselves moving through time or time moving toward us. Hammond presents the “Wednesday meeting” test: when asked, “If next Wednesday’s meeting is moved forward two days, is it now Monday or Friday?” people who answer Friday imagine themselves moving forward through time; people who answer Monday feel time moves toward them. These metaphors correlate with optimism and action—forward movement tends to accompany positive, goal-oriented outlooks.

Color, Language, and Cross-Cultural Perception

Time is tied to sensory experience. Monday may look red or feel hurried; Friday soft or blue. Cultures also conceptualize time through space metaphors: “long” time in English versus “much” time in Spanish reflects different dimensions—distance versus quantity. Casasanto’s research found that these metaphors alter perception itself. English speakers estimate duration through length; Greeks through magnitude. Hammond suggests that our phrases—“looking forward,” “time flies”—not only describe but shape how time feels.

Why Spatial Thinking Matters

Visualizing time helps memory, creativity, and planning. People who mentally map months or years perform better on tasks involving temporal sequencing. By turning abstract units into visual spatial codes, they make time tangible. Hammond urges readers to harness this skill: draw your timeline, color your months, mark your milestones. You’ll literally expand your mind’s time horizon—and perhaps slow life down.

The final section of Time Warped translates research into practical change. Hammond doesn’t offer mystical solutions or pseudo-philosophy; instead, she draws on evidence to help you manage time perception consciously. Whether you want days to feel longer, weeks to pass faster, or years to stop sprinting, you can adjust memory, attention, and behavior to manipulate subjective time.

Slowing Down Time

Time accelerates with age because life becomes routine. To counter this, Hammond recommends cultivating novelty and mindfulness. Vary routes to work, reshuffle weekends, learn new skills, or add unexpected adventures. The formula mirrors the Holiday Paradox—novel experiences encode richer memories, which make time feel expansive. As she writes, “Fill life with memorable things.” Mindfulness also slows time by heightening attention: noticing breath, sounds, physical sensations restores presence, like anchoring yourself in now.

Speeding Time Up

Sometimes you want time to pass quickly—waiting in queues, enduring boredom, or navigating long flights. Distraction helps: engage with environment rather than resist it. When stuck on a train, scan sights, sounds, smells. Hammond likens this to mindfulness inverted—focus fully on immediate sensory detail to absorb yourself and make minutes fly. Alan Johnston used cognitive tricks like this to survive captivity; by building mental games and imagining futures, he made endless days bearable.

Reframing Modern Time Pressures

Feeling time-poor is epidemic. Technology and productivity culture compound it. Hammond reveals that most people underestimate their free time by half—thinking they have 20 spare hours weekly when diaries show 40. Rather than chasing efficiency, she suggests reimagining time as a gift. Give hours to relationships that matter; spend them with those who benefit most from your presence. This reframing shifts perception from scarcity to abundance, alleviating anxiety about time slipping away.

Living in the Present vs. Future

Mindfulness teaches attention to the present, but Hammond cautions against eliminating future thinking. The future brings meaning, motivation, and planning. What matters is balance. Too much future-focus produces stress; too much present-focus (as in the amnesiac H.M.) strips life of continuity. She recommends alternating flow activities—painting, running, music—with reflective planning to engage both time perspectives. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” embodies this harmony: timeless immersion that paradoxically lengthens memory afterward.

Practical Implementation

Start measuring your time subjectively: notice when it stretches and when it shrinks. Experiment with variety, focus, and mindfulness. Plan realistically—acknowledge the Planning Fallacy, our tendency to underestimate task duration. Learn from Alan Johnston and Viktor Frankl: even in confinement or suffering, mental control over time restores freedom. In Hammond’s words, “Mental time-travel is one of the greatest gifts of the mind—it makes us human and special.”