The COVID-19 TIME-WARP: HOW ARE YOU EXPERIENCING TIME?

The COVID-19 TIME-WARP: HOW ARE YOU EXPERIENCING TIME?

SHORT VERSION: Time, as we are experiencing it in this new COVID-19 reality, is warping in strange ways. It is both speeding up and slowing down, but as each day passes, it will continue to accelerate. Now is your chance to create meaningful memories despite the foreshortened spaces we are contained within.

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Exactly one month ago today at around 4 pm in the afternoon I found myself seated on a wicker chair straddling shiny Saltillo tile. In front of me was a heavy wooden table laden with tortilla chips, salsa, queso, and margaritas. After we ordered our main courses from the menu, my daughter, girlfriend and I chatted and snacked until our waitress brought us a second bowl of chips. Eventually, our fajitas and chicken mole’ made their way out of the kitchen and we finished our repast. The waitress returned, I gave her my credit card, left a tip and we left. This was just another day… until… it wasn’t.

This was the last meal we have eaten outside my home since. And the same goes for everyone in Illinois and a with few days variance, the United States and the WORLD. Let that sink in. A month ago there was signature-change for the planet: the music of life was no longer a steady 4/4 beat.

This was only one month ago. Yet it seems like 2 years.

How is it possible that life was “normal” just a month ago? Just 3 days prior to this last supper, I had returned from Tyre and Sidon in Lebanon to rumors about some sort of flu. I paid it little attention at the time. Then I heard the next day that Stanford and Rollins College (where my daughter attends) would be canceling in-person classes for the rest of the semester. Subsequently, in the space of a few days, the rhythm of the world completely unraveled… entering a “Bitches Brew” of time changes and key changes. The entire tenor of the world conversation octavated to a shrill new tone.

Remember restaurants? Remember waiters and hostesses? Remember hotels and lobbies, hugs and handles? Remember TSA lines, airplanes, concerts and movie theaters and going to the lakefront or to the dentist? Remember small talk about the weather, traffic, and office gossip? A huge swath of typical human activities disappeared in the space of a few days. What was, what is, and what will be the impacts to the human psyche?

I can’t speak to most of these larger questions - I only study “chronoception” - the field of time perception. That said there are some very interesting things happening when it comes to our perception of time during this pandemic. Time, as most of us perceive it, is simultaneously slowing down and yet speeding up. It seems almost impossible that the lockdown started only a month ago, and yet… we don’t know what day it is. Yesterday’s Wednesday is nearly indistinguishable from last week’s Wednesday. Repetition and routine have quickly set in and a new normal has already been established such that the weeks are flying by. Time, now, a few weeks into the pandemic is accelerating into warp speed… Yet, despite this, the days themselves are long in their tedium.

What is happening? What is going on in our brains? In my forthcoming book “Counterclockwise: Unwinding Cognitive Time” I describe the law of inversion – that time, as we experience it in the present tense, the “now,” is often inversely proportional to how we remember it. And the key here is that remembered time is all that matters when it comes to chronoception. With the COVID quarantine we are simultaneously “telescoping” our way into the past and “microscoping” our way into the future. In terms of memory and time perception, “telescoping” is a perceptual artifact that happens when a memory grows more significant with the passage of time; much like a setting sun fills the frame in a zoom lens, dwarfing the small figures and dwellings in the foreground. Most memories shrink with the passage of time, but a few “telescope” and dwarf the surrounding temporal events. Often, these are significant events like 9/11 and perhaps now, the onset of COVID 19.

But there is yet another wrinkle: with the isolation born from social distancing most of us are experiencing another shift. Even as we broke out our telescopes to enlarge the first days of this crisis in retrospect, we simultaneously broke out our microscopes to peer inwards as our worlds shrank. Our physical geographies have diminished to the square footage of our households and the screen sizes of our devices. We zoom in to the repetitive patter of utensils into the dishwasher, the thuds of suds and clothes in the washing machine and the visceral vibrations of text messages or social media responses on our phones. Compared to the onset of COVID, we have become that tiny figure in the distance, leaned over his phone in chiaroscuro, silhouetted against the giant sunset of this pandemic.

Here’s the dark secret you already know… that there is an inversion of time that happens within our memory. When time seems long and slow in the present, when tedium and boredom reign, when the world is small and mundane, when your experiential life shrinks to observation mode as you peer around your domicile and into your electronic microscope… well then the brain allows most of those details to slide and the days become weeks become months with nary a marker. In our routines, time contracts, life accelerates, and death comes ever faster as we are sucked into the temporal void.

But, there is an antidote. There are ways to dilate time, to break from the routine. Dramatic shifts from the repetition of daily life can and will invert this effect. When we break from the mundane in significant ways, time telescopes, it stretches, speeding by in the present, but expanding in the rearview mirror growing ever larger. The first few days of the pandemic gave us this gift, this beautiful backdrop, the chiaroscuro outline of unlimited future “presents,” but how many of us are taking advantage of these gifts?

The film industry has a specific description of this effect – it is called the “Dolly Zoom,” or “Vertigo Effect”. This is when a camera is sped backward while simultaneously zooming in, keeping the central focal point at the same relative size and creating a perspective distortion whereupon the background (past events) expand even as the foreground (current events) move out of the frame and disappear entirely. I believe that many, if not most of us, are experiencing the vertigo effect right now.

Example of the Vertigo Effect (Dolly Zoom) from the Lord of the Rings:

If you find that the days are long but the weeks are short – this is a bad sign. Don’t give in to the monotony, don’t accept the tyranny of the mundane - instead leverage the gift of time provided to us by this pandemic and set your own metronome.

You are the sum of your memories. The “YOU” that you are, and the you that you can be, exist at the intersection between the “now” of the microscopic present tense, the “then” of the trajectory set by your telescopic past (and the events you choose or allow to be your base,) and most of all, by the macroscope: the infinite possibilities of your future – which can and are set and reset each day.

We have been given a gift – the gift of time. We have, right now, an opportunity to pull a reverse Dolly Zoom – to invert vertigo and to race the camera forward into the present while expanding the zoom taking in a broader set of details and perspectives for more of the “now.” The stress and trauma of COVID actually provides us a rare opportunity. Just as the body produces antibodies to stave off infections, the brain produces chemicals to ward off trauma. If you find yourself occasionally full of odd energy and positivity during these crazy times, well that’s your brain producing dopamine and serotonin. Some people will find themselves guiltily happier than before the pandemic. Lean in, use it.

Here’s a thought from my friend and deep thinker Scott McKinley:

“The internet, the omnipresent personal devices, and the thousands of neuroscientists building products that manipulate our dopamine responses to stimulus have caused a kind of "time confetti" where, despite actually having more time, we feel like we have less. We use our time in tiny multi-second pieces... A few minutes on FB or Twitter, a glance at Instagram notifications to see if I missed anything has robbed us of “present-ness”. Nobody has the time to read a book or watch a movie when YouTube can give similar pleasure without commitment. Perhaps COVID-19 can change all that. We have time. There is no rush. We can watch movies together. We might even pick up a book. I actually fucking gardened today... And enjoyed it. The kids are painstakingly rebuilding our dilapidated skate ramp... And loving the process. When in the last 30 years did anybody do a puzzle? Now it is a top-selling category on Amazon.”

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Have you been dreaming? I have been dreaming a lot. Every day I wake up with a myriad of memorable impressions from my slumber. It seems half are of some sort of tedium: cleaning up a mess, putting away papers, boring repetitious tasks. The other half are a mix of adventure or cataclysm. Sometimes I am saving the world, sometimes I’m drowning or falling. They are visceral, bright and recallable - unlike pre-COVID dreams were rarely recovered.

My friend, Moran Cerf, is a neuroscientist who specializes in time perception and dreaming, and he suggests that the brain, during dreams, is “defragging” – sorting and resorting memories and connections, disposing of unneeded data, and re-affirming the important connections and memories for faster access when needed. I feel like this quarantine is a bit of the same thing on a grand scale. I am winnowing down my material things, discarding old emails, filing old files. I want to leverage this COVID time. I want to remember. I want to be alive. I want to contribute. For sure it is hard, add yes it is uncertain, and yes, we are alone. But it is an opportunity to lean into the signature change, to learn new keys, new music.

A few days ago there was a hailstorm. It was the most notable thing that had happened in days. It was coming down hard with large pebbles exploding off the roofs of the cars in the parking lot below. My daughter and I stared out the window, mesmerized. Suddenly she blurted out, “we have to go!” I said nothing, just ran for the door, barefoot, and we pounded down the stairs and ran out the exit. Spinning in place we felt this visceral sense of life in the face of this force of nature. The pellets hurt and we got cold quite quickly, but never, ever will we forget the COVID hailstorm.

CONCLUSION:

It is time.

What memories will you take away from this pandemic, from this unique time in the history of modern humankind? Should we wallow in sorrow and bide our time or should we find meaning in the suffering to create memories worth keeping?

It is time: It is time to get busy dying, or to get busy really living.

To quote one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands, “I have never been so alone… and I have never been so alive.”