Pod Insights Something You Should Know How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down About this episode One fear many air travelers have is catching a cold or some other bug when they fly on an airplane. Why is it that a lot of people seem to get sick on a flight? Is it the air in the plane or maybe it's the bathrooms? Listen as I explain what the most common cause of getting sick is and how to protect yourself. https://www.healthpartners.com/blog/avoid-getting-sick-while-flying/
We often do things because – well, that’s the way we do things. Organizations are often very resistant to change and stay stuck in procedures and processes because that’s just the way they are done – even if they are not working very well. When you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense but nevertheless, that’s the way it is. Dan Heath has examined this phenomenon and what he found will fascinate you – and help you figure ways to do things better for yourself or your organization. Dan has been a frequent guest here and has written some great books over the years. His latest is called Reset: How to Change What's Not Working (https://amzn.to/3DCbB4E)
Have you ever noticed how time tends to speed up when you are having fun and slow down when you are doing something unpleasant or boring? It’s weird because objectively we know that time moves at a constant speed – or does it? Is the way we measure time just arbitrary? Can we and do we experience time at different rates? For example, people often claim that when they are in a car accident, time slows down as if it occurs in slow motion. What is that? Here to explore this with me is Steve Taylor, PhD. He is a senior lecturer and researcher in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and he is author of the book Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time (https://amzn.to/4gNpvzz)
How many times have you looked at photos of yourself and been unhappy with the way you look? Well, there is something you can do with your face that will make you look better in any photo. It’s called the squinch and it was developed by legendary photographer Peter Hurley. Listen as I explain how to squinch. There is also a YouTube video that demonstrates it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff7nltdBCHs
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Transcript 10,157 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:27 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know: How to improve your chances of not getting sick on an airplane flight? Then, why organizations resist change and how they discourage new ideas?
1:41 Speaker 01 When you're told, "No, that can't work. We can't try that. No, somebody else tried that. It doesn't work. It's not your business. Stay out of it." When you're told that 100 times in a row, it's like you just kind of slowly build up these calluses.
1:56 Mike Carruthers? Also, what to do with your face so you look good in every photo? And your perception of time. Why it sometimes seems to fly by and other times seems to move so slow?
2:08 Speaker 02 Time perception is related to information processing. So, the more information you process, the slower time goes. And that's why new environments and new experiences usually make time pass more slowly because you're absorbing more information.
2:22 Mike Carruthers? All this today on Something You Should Know.
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4:22 Mike Carruthers? Hi, welcome. Happy New Year. This is our first episode of 2025, and it's a pleasure to have you here. We're going to start today talking about travel, air travel to be specific. And people who travel by air often worry about getting sick on the airplane. It does seem to happen a lot. And I think most people believe that it's because of the air in the plane. But actually, it's probably not. The air on airplanes is really clean. Thanks to HEPA filters and the efficient way that air circulates on commercial aircraft, the air that you breathe in flight is much cleaner than the air that you would find in restaurants,
5:03 Mike Carruthers? bars, stores, or even in your own home. It is much more likely the surfaces you touch. That's where germs can live and linger. So washing your hands and using wipes to wipe down the surfaces is probably a really good idea. But here's some other advice that you may not have heard before. Rethink how you board the aircraft. When passengers board by zones, when they call out your zone and then everybody from that zone gets in line and gets on the plane, that's when people tend to be closest to one another. This makes them much more likely to spread sickness. Researchers who looked at this said you're better off boarding the plane last. Wait till everybody else is on, and then come
5:48 Mike Carruthers? onboard and find your seat. Or at least, standing back from the long line of people waiting to board, so you're not all bunched together with possibly sick people. And that is something you should know.
6:05 Mike Carruthers? We all have a tendency to get stuck in our ways. We do things because, well, that's how we do things. A lot of times, it's probably fine. But for the big things we do, and the things organizations do because that's how they do things, well, that can be a real problem, and a problem you can become blind to. Here to explain this, and why it is so problematic, and what you can do to address this, is Dan Heath. He is a speaker and writer who's written some very important and well-received books over the last several years. His latest is called Reset: How to Change What's Not Working. Hey, Dan. Good to have you back. Welcome.
6:48 Speaker 01 Hey, great to be back, Mike.
6:50 Mike Carruthers? So can you start with an example, a story that you can tell that illustrates what you're talking about, about this idea of doing things because that's how we do things that doesn't work?
7:01 Speaker 01 There's a story that I love about a receiving area at a hospital, Northwestern Memorial Hospital. And so this is the group whose job it is to take incoming packages and get them delivered to their appropriate places in the hospital. And for a long time, their average delivery time from receipt of package to ultimate delivery was three days. So UPS or FedEx would deliver the package across the country in a day or two, and then to get from the receiving area to like, the third floor of the same hospital might take another three days. And I love situations like that because, let's be clear, the people working in this
7:42 Speaker 01 department, they were not lazy, they were not stupid, they were just stuck inside a system that had kind of hardened and become entrenched. And maybe my favorite quote in the book captures this, it comes from a healthcare expert named Paul Batalden, who says that "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." And I think that's the story of situations like that receiving area, where every day you come to work, as long as you can remember, it's taken you three days to get packages delivered, and you come eventually to kind of shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, maybe that's the way things work." And so it's situations like that that I'm hoping to help people get out of.
8:25 Mike Carruthers? Well, what's interesting about situations like that, to me, is that because they're just situations like that, they aren't necessarily problems to fix, that's just the way things are done. And so you can't fix something if you don't identify it as something that needs fixing.
8:46 Speaker 01 That is exactly it. Yes, it's like you come to just almost accept the way things are as well. This is just the way nature operates, right? It's because that's all you've ever seen. I mean, every day you come to work, you work a hard eight hour day, you go home and next day it's the same thing. And so what often happens is, and in this case, this is what happened. An outsider came in who had a background in lean manufacturing. And so he comes in and he immediately realizes, you know, half dozen things that they could fix to get way better performance. But he's also savvy enough and wise enough to realize it's not enough for him to want to change. He's got to plant the seed with this crew.
9:26 Speaker 01 And so he starts by canvassing them to figure out, hey, I'm here to help us all do better work, to make your life easier, to make it smoother. If I can do that, will you help me? And the first thing he asked them is, what's getting in your way? What are your complaints? What are the stones in your shoes, so to speak? And they start flagging these very mundane things like, you know, they push the packages around on carts. And some of the carts have those kind of janky gummed up wheels like you get in the supermarket sometimes. And so this new guy says instantly, okay, new carts, new wheels, whatever it takes. That shouldn't be a source of friction in our work. What's next? And so that becomes a theme as well is if we're trying to get unstuck,
10:10 Speaker 01 motivation is the fuel for that change. And so this outsider, Paul Suet, that came into the receiving area, he was very, very attentive to motivation as the force that would help him achieve a higher level of performance.
10:26 Mike Carruthers? But isn't it hard to identify in your own life what you're stuck on? Because again, it's just what we do. It's how I do what I do. It's I haven't really thought about changing the way I do it.
10:41 Speaker 01 It is hard, and that's why it doesn't happen naturally. Why these equilibrium, if you will, kind of set in and we adapt to them. So one of the principles that that I offer is the notion of finding leverage points, which is to say, in situations where we're stuck, there's a lot of variables. There's a lot of factors involved. We can't change them all. We've got to find a place to push where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return. And so the next logical question is, okay, well, how do you find these magical leverage points? And that's what I devote many different principles to helping people explore.
11:25 Speaker 01 And one of those, just to give you a flavor, is the idea of studying bright spots. So this is a story, actually, from a therapist. There's a branch of therapy called solutions-focused therapy that is obsessed with bright spots. And one of my favorite examples has to do with this kid, Bobby. It was a ninth grader, always in trouble at school, always getting sent to the principal for discipline. Comes in, one day, there's a new counselor, just started, and he is a practitioner of this this branch of therapy. Counselor immediately asked Bobby, Bobby, when do you not get in trouble as much at school? I mean, think about the beauty of that question. Like, it's so natural to just kind of wallow in the problems and what's not working.
12:10 Speaker 01 The counselor's immediately looking for where are the bright spots? When is Bobby not getting in trouble? And so Bobby says, well, I don't get in trouble as much as Mrs. Smith's class. The counselor starts peppering him. Okay, well, what's different about Mrs. Smith's class? What does she do that's different? What has it feel different? And eventually identifies these three very specific things that Mrs. Smith does, one of which is to greet him at the door with a smile. Usually Bobby's other teachers tended to kind of, you know, slink the other way when they saw the kid coming, not Mrs. Smith. And she always checked to make sure he understood the instructions before assignments. And these other very practical things that the counselor then takes to Bobby's other teachers and says, hey, I know you've had some struggles with Bobby. Will you try these things? Will you try greeting him at the door?
12:55 Speaker 01 Will you try making sure he understands the instructions every time? And basically Bobby goes from getting in trouble in about four or five out of six classes a day down to about one or two out of six a day. And to me, that's a kind of magic to take a situation where this kid had a really, really problematic home life in and out of foster care. You can't change that. You can't affect that. You can't go back in time and give him a more caring family. But what you can do is look for what's succeeding in spite of that. And that's, that's the notion of bright spots.
13:30 Mike Carruthers? I just love that. It's such a different way of looking at, at a problem by looking at the other side and looking at the solutions rather than what, you know, at what works rather than what doesn't. And not harping on what's wrong and why are you doing this? And but, but find the way to make it work.
13:51 Speaker 01 Completely agree. And I think what happens, especially in the, in the world of organizations, is our attention is just captured by the problems. You know, a lot of leaders just kind of careen from one emergency to the next and they're constantly putting out fires. And, and so when something good happens, it's not that people are oblivious. You know, we all know when things are working and we all know that the happy times and the best customers and so forth. But, but the trick is we don't study what's working. We just acknowledge it. We celebrate it. We're relieved that something's working because it gives us more time to work on the things that aren't working.
14:32 Speaker 01 And I think the twist that I'm adding is, hey, let's take that same discipline that we use to figure out, hey, that broke, why did it break? And how can we keep it from happening again? Let's flip that around and say, why did that work? So we can understand how to do it more.
14:47 Mike Carruthers? One of the ingredients that seems to be necessary in the kind of thing you're talking about and in the examples you've given is it needs like fresh eyes, like somebody has to come in and say, well, wait a minute. Why are you doing, you need a new perspective, I guess is what I mean.
15:07 Speaker 01 I got the best email from a reader who was saying that, that years ago, she had worked in a government office and one of her priorities as a leader was to, to canvas people on the front line to get their ideas and their inspirations. And, and she said, you know, this one woman had been working in the printing department for a long time. And she said, well, I've, I've got an easy idea for you. We need to start buying paper in bulk. And, and for whatever reason, you know, back to the notion of systems that just kind of set in and get sclerotic, they'd just been buying paper on a project basis. Like when they had something brewing, they'd go buy some paper, they'd do it. And then, but she said, you know, we go through a ton of paper. And if we just kind of anticipated what we would
15:51 Speaker 01 need and buy it in bulk, it would be vastly cheaper. And, and so the boss immediately runs with this, start buying paper in bulk. They save tens of thousands of dollars, no joke. And imagine what that does for morale, you know, number one, to be listened to, number two, to see that, that your suggestion was put into practice and to see it pay off. Like, not only was that a win for the organization, but it was also just a huge psychological win for the people involved.
16:20 Mike Carruthers? My guest is Dan Heath. He's author of a book called Reset: How to Change What's Not Working. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed way over to the left or the right, some of those you probably haven't worn in years. And yet there they hang, taking up space. But here's the thing, you could turn those
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19:33 Mike Carruthers? So Dan, you assume that people go into any job wanting to do their best, wanting for things to go well. I mean, there's some optimism there. And yet, we've all come across that worker, that often the government worker, who is so couldn't care less, so doesn't have any interest in what you want. That's not the way we do it here. And you wonder, what happens? Like, what happens to people that they get stuck in the way you're talking about, and they just don't care?
20:07 Speaker 01 I think it's like a slow realization of powerlessness, and which yields a slow accretion of indifference. It's like, I think that every human being coming into a new job means well, has ideas, notices things they would do differently. But when you're told, "No, that can't work. We can't try that. No, somebody else tried that. It doesn't work. It's not your business. Stay out of it." When you're told that, you know, 100 times in a row, it's like you just kind of slowly build up these calluses. And eventually, you shrug your shoulders and you say, you know, "Well, that's just, this is my degree
20:50 Speaker 01 of freedom. It's tiny. But if I want to keep this job, I'll stay within that degree of freedom." And so, a lot of times, like in situations like that, you need that outside catalyst, you know? And so, it may be that some of these situations have just not yet found the right catalyst.
21:07 Mike Carruthers? And how does that usually happen? Is it just some new, fresh eyes on a problem?
21:13 Speaker 01 I think that's right. I think that's right. Like, the receiving area story where it was taking them three days to deliver within the hospital. I think what happened there is, you know, the muckety mucks in the hospital had gotten enough complaints with people that were frustrated, "Hey, we can't get our medicines and our gloves on time." And that they brought in a new person. And that was the spark. I don't think it always takes that. I mean, that would be kind of depressing if, you know, a new boss was the answer. But I think there often does need to be a new catalyst.
21:47 Mike Carruthers? You know, listening to that story about it taking three days for things once they arrive in the hospital to get to where they're going, seems so unbelievable to me that nobody would have said, hey, wait a minute, that you would just accept that because it doesn't take three days to walk from the receiving area to any other place in the hospital. Why can't somebody, why couldn't a lot of people say, hey, here's a problem, let's fix that, rather than go, you know, it just, it takes what it takes and that's three days?
22:22 Speaker 01 Well, here's something that's interesting about that story, which is, I think a lot of the things that they had done unwittingly were motivated by, by good goals. Like, I'll give you an example. They had a lot of batch processes baked into the way they handled things. And, you know, batch processes are great, sometimes. Like, nobody puts one spoon at a time in the dishwasher and then runs it and puts in a fork. I mean, we, we load it up, right? It's a batch, or the same thing with laundry. And so batch processes can, can work wonders for efficiency. And so that was the thinking behind some of the things they had done. Like, for instance, when FedEx and UPS would pull up, lay some packages
23:06 Speaker 01 down, and then they would kind of wait until there was a pile of packages before they did the first level of processing. Maybe it was zapping the packages into the inventory system or whatever. And then maybe they'd let a second pile build up before they did the next thing. Maybe it's sticker-ing the boxes with their destination in the hospital. And so the thinking was, this is making us more efficient because when we get around to sticker-ing the boxes, like, we can go slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, and do 20 of them at once. But what the new guy realizes is that, no, no, no, this is not a system where you need batch processes. Like, he completely changes their mental model and says, I want you to imagine letting packages flow like a river. And so our job is to help packages flow from
23:50 Speaker 01 the delivery trucks through our system to their places in the hospital. Our job is to remove friction, to remove delays. And it's like, once they put on those lenses, they were able to reimagine the way that they work. And they, they were able to realize, not only would it be a lot better for the people in the hospital, It was also a lot better for them. It was actually less work to create the better system. Like, here's my favorite example of that. They had a red phone in the receiving area that they had to answer all the time with people from within the hospital complaining about their packages and asking for someone to check on them. And so, you know, they pick up the phone, they handle these complaints, they've got to go rushing around looking for the package.
24:35 Speaker 01 And that's all wasted effort. Because the people in the hospital didn't want to have to call about their packages to check on them. And then, you know, to have to spend 10, 15 minutes fielding each one of these calls. When the packages start flowing and they start getting where they need to go on the right time schedule, those calls disappear. And all of a sudden, you don't have to do that work anymore. It's actually easier to stick with the better system.
25:01 Mike Carruthers? So what's the advice here? And then, it does seem like it's kind of a top-down problem. You need a new manager to fix this. Like, but what can people do to plug into this?
25:12 Speaker 01 The heart of what I'm saying boils down to a two-part framework. If you're trying to get unstuck, number one, find leverage points. So those are those, you know, places where a little bit goes a long way, like the batch processes in this receiving area. Like, that was a place where if they cut that out, they could get big gains quick. And then the second part is about, okay, now that you've found a place to aim in the leverage points, how can you muster resources to push in that new direction? And resources might be, you know, your time, or your energy, or your motivation, or your systems. And the problem that most of us have is, we don't have extra of any of those things.
25:55 Speaker 01 You know, you can't just walk to the office supply cabinet and pull down a satchel of cash, or, you know, tap some idle employees to come off the bench. Like, you're stuck with what you have. And so, we have to be smart about, how do we reconfigure those resources to push in a new way?
26:11 Mike Carruthers? I guess it starts though, I mean, you have to start thinking about like, well, what's not working? So many of us, like we talked about before, are doing things because that's the way we do things and not realizing that maybe there's a better way. And I guess that motivation has to come, because if the way we're doing it isn't really bothering you, even though it's not a very good way, but if it's not bothering you, then maybe there's nothing to fix. I mean, you've got to find, you've got to find the thing to fix first.
26:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, well said. I remember years ago, I talked to this, this kind of genius systems thinker named Steven Spear, and I was asking him about some of the changes that he'd seen. And he said that the change tends to start with an insufferable frustration. You know, when people just, you know, fed up, and they're like, you know, we want this to be different. That's often the motivating factor. Now, that said, I think all of us can play a role in helping other people discover that insufferable frustration. You know, imagine if you were in the receiving area, and you took one of your colleagues to like, another hospital in Chicago and showed them how theirs worked, and it was, it was clean, and there weren't
27:22 Speaker 01 piles of boxes, and they weren't answering frustrated calls, and the packages were just zipping along. Like, an experience like that has a way of creating an insufferable frustration. Like, why do we have, why is ours so much worse? Why do we have to live like this? And so I think we can, we can help unite and rally our colleagues around a new direction.
27:42 Mike Carruthers? So in researching this subject, did you find, was there anything else that you found that was really striking that we should probably mention?
27:51 Speaker 01 One thing that, that really struck me, what I call considering the goal of the goal. I came across the story of a guy named Ryan Davidson. So he buys a new truck, a Ram truck at a dealership. And then, you know, within hours of him driving off the lot, they're immediately pestering him to fill out a survey about the, the experience he had. And when I say pester, I mean, at least five different people from the dealership hit him up and At least three different media, email, texting, calling, I mean, just hounding the guy. And not just for insight, they wanted like positive scores. I mean, they, they basically said as much. We would really appreciate positive scores on these surveys.
28:35 Speaker 01 And so Davidson kind of reluctantly fills out this survey, probably all of us have been through some form of this. And, and after he's been pestered and pestered and pestered and pestered for feedback, he fills it out, gives them the feedback, never hears from anyone again. Except for his salesperson who text him to complain about not being given all 10 out of 10s on the survey. And when you think about a charade like that, I think what's going on is at some point, people thought, hey, we want to deliver a good experience for people who buy cars and trucks from us. Okay. So far, so good. We need things to ma- to, to measure so that we know if we're getting better or worse. Okay. Well, let's try a survey at the end. That, that makes sense. Okay. So far, so good.
29:19 Speaker 01 But then sometimes these goals just take on a life of their own. So rather than using those surveys as a diagnostic of whether the experience is getting better, the survey becomes an end in itself, right? It's like they just want you to literally bubble in 10 out of 10 regardless of what your actual experience was. Because if they get a 10 out of 10, they'll get a bonus or something. And, and so that's why I think this prompt, if we can learn to consider what's the goal of the goal. I think that's a useful corrective. So in this situation, you know, the goal of the goal, in other words, why are we collecting the survey data?
29:57 Speaker 01 Surely it's not because we want our team to get better and better at, at hectoring customers into giving falsely inflated scores, right? That surely can't be the goal of the goal. The goal of the goal is to provide a better experience. And if that's what we care about, this, this whole charade. Of bugging people to give 10 out of 10s is is just on the wrong path altogether.
30:21 Mike Carruthers? What a great example, because everyone has had that, you know? I'd really appreciate if you would give me 10 out of, you know? Well, how about if I just tell the truth? What, you know?
30:30 Speaker 01 Right, right. Why are you asking me for feedback if you fundamentally do not care what the feedback is?
30:36 Mike Carruthers? Wouldn't it be better if I told your company? How I really feel rather than give you 10 out of 10, but?
30:42 Speaker 01 Exactly right. There's a law called Goodhart's Law that says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And I love that because that's what happened in the survey story, right? It's like, as soon as you start layering on carrots and sticks to get the 10 out of 10, when the measure becomes a target, it's no longer a good measure of anything.
31:04 Mike Carruthers? Well, what an interesting conversation about a topic that everybody has probably thought about to one degree or another. But nobody ever really talks about this, but it's really interesting when you think about why we do the things we do and why we don't do them better. I've been talking to Dan Heath. He is a speaker and writer who's written some great books over the years. His latest is called Reset: How to Change What's Not Working. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Great to have you back. Thanks, Dan.
31:35 Speaker 01 Thanks so much, Mike. Great to be with you.
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34:36 Mike Carruthers? the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Something we all experience is the passage of time. Time goes by, it never stops. We measure it with a clock. We can tell how much time has gone by and what time it is now, but we can't really control time.
35:21 Mike Carruthers? We can't go back in time. We can't speed up time. Still, we've all had experiences where it seems like time flies by quickly or drags on so slowly it's agonizing. In other words, even though time, according to the clock, goes by at the same rate, it doesn't always feel like that. So is there something to this? That's what Steve Taylor is here to talk about. Steve is a senior lecturer and researcher in psychology at Leeds Beckett University in the UK, and he's author of the book, "Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time." Hi Steve, welcome. Good to have you on Something You Should Know.
36:05 Speaker 02 Hi Mike, great to be with you.
36:08 Mike Carruthers? So tell me why you want to understand and research this idea of time perception in the first place?
36:15 Speaker 02 The topic is what I call "time expansion experiences." So these are moments when our normal sense of time slows down drastically. It's almost as if we open a kind of wormhole into a different experience of time. And these experiences often occur in accidents. And I had my own, my own car crashed about 10 years ago, in which I had this type of experience. So that encouraged me to investigate them as a psychologist.
36:39 Mike Carruthers? And why is it important to talk about this and investigate this as a psychologist? Because, because why?
36:46 Speaker 02 Well, I have my own experience. Well, maybe I'll tell you a bit about it. I was, I was driving down the motorway, as we call them here in the UK. And it was quite a busy, a busy highway. And there was, there was a truck on the inside lane that came out and crashed into my car. So our car started to spin round in the middle of the highway at maybe 60 miles an hour. But immediately, as soon as the, the truck hit us, everything went into slow motion. The cars behind us seemed to almost freeze. And I felt as though I had so much time to try to analyze the situation, to try to work out what to do, to try to take some sort of preventative action. And my perception became very clear and detailed. Everything looked very bright and intense. And I felt this very strange sense of calmness, you know?
37:28 Speaker 02 I never expected to, to feel so calm in a kind of life-threatening situation. But in, in real time, this experience probably lasted just three or four seconds before we, we veered towards the left and crashed into a barrier at the side of the road. But in my mind, it was more like 30 seconds, maybe 40 seconds, even longer. So to me, as a psychologist, it, it kind of exemplified that time is a, is a kind of construct. You know, it's something that we create with our minds. And there's nothing absolute or fixed about it. It varies according to our state of mind, according to our mood, according to our state of consciousness.
38:07 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, but if, if there was a video camera taping your car crash and we all watched it later, we would all agree that it took three seconds. It didn't take 30 or 40 seconds the way you perceived it while you were in it. It took three seconds. Objectively, it just took three seconds. So those experiences, and, and also those experiences where time not only slows down, like in your accident, but it also speeds up, like, you know, time flies when you're having fun and, you know? But at the end of the day, eight hours is eight hours. And whatever happened during that eight hours, that's what happened.
38:45 Speaker 02 That's true, but you know, you can actually experience more or less time in eight hours. Eight hours is a very subjective experience. You can talk about this in terms of a whole lifespan, you know. I sometimes use the example of two twins. I think Einstein used this example in relation to relativity in physics. But in relation to psychological time, there could be two twins. Let's say one twin grows up to be a very conventional person and lives a very normal life, doing the same job for forty years in the same area. And they live according to a routine and don't have many new experiences. But the other twin goes off travelling around the world, doing lots of different jobs. And maybe they have a lot of time expansion experiences.
39:26 Speaker 02 Maybe they take psychedelics or engage in meditation to change their state of consciousness and therefore time expands. But when these, you know, if these two twins, if they, let's imagine that they died on the same day, on the same date. The second twin, who went travelling around the world and had many new experiences and time expansion experiences, they actually live for longer. You know, they actually experience a lot more time in their lives than the first person. So that applies to any period of time, whether it's a day or a month or a whole lifetime.
39:56 Mike Carruthers? It all seems, you know, very subjective. And at the end of the day, I mean, what do we do with this? I mean, it's interesting and I think people have all experienced these time expansion kind of moments, but so now what?
40:11 Speaker 02 Well, most human beings, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think most human beings feel oppressed by time. We feel that we don't have enough time. We feel that time is an enemy, that it's always running away from us and speeding up as we get older. But if we know that time is flexible, it's subjective, it's not a fixed, even a real phenomenon, then it changes our attitude towards time. You know, we no longer, we don't, we no longer have to be afraid of time or feel that time is our enemy because we have some degree of control over it. And there's nothing really, you know, fundamentally real about it.
40:46 Mike Carruthers? Well, what's the control? I mean, you could go get into lots of accidents to slow it down, but that might kill you.
40:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's not really advisable.
40:56 Mike Carruthers? Yeah. But how can you control it? Because I, like you just said, as you get older, time speeds up. It just, it just does. I mean, a year when you're in your 60s is not a year when you're 14. It's a, just a different thing. But can you fix that? Can you change it?
41:16 Speaker 02 To some degree, on the one hand, time perception is related to information processing. So the more information you process, the slower time goes. And that's why new environments, new experiences, you usually make time pass more slowly because you're absorbing more information, because it's all unfamiliar, it's all novel and fresh to you. And that's normally why time seems to get, seems to move more slowly, sorry, more quickly as we get older. Because as we get older, there are fewer new experiences, our lives tend to become more repetitious and full of routine. But we don't necessarily have to allow that to happen. You know, we can bring in new experience into our lives. If you keep changing your life in some way, and if you keep, say, exposing yourself to
41:59 Speaker 02 new environments by traveling, new information by being curious, you keep challenging yourself, you know, taking in new experiences and new information, then time doesn't necessarily go more quickly. So to a degree, it depends on what you do with your life.
42:17 Mike Carruthers? I want to understand, because, you know, I get what, you know, that people have a subjective sense of time and how it passes. But there's also, but we've also come up with a way to measure it. We can measure time passing with a clock. And, and that doesn't change. I mean, a second is a second, and there's one, oh, there's another one, there's another one. And at the end of the day, that much time has passed on my clock.
42:46 Speaker 02 That's true, but how you actually experience a second can be different. You know, a second to a person who's very bored is longer than it is to a person who's absorbed in an activity. A second to a person in an accident is, can be much, much longer than a second to a person who's sitting at home watching TV. So, you know, it's all about subjective perception. I mean, in, in time expansion experiences, people may only experience, say, five seconds of clock time, but in their mind, in their subjective experience, they actually go through maybe one minute of, of subjective time, and they're actually able to do things which would only be possible in a minute of normal time. There are so many time expansion experiences from accidents and emergencies where people
43:30 Speaker 02 report being able to, you know, go through a really complex series of thoughts and actions, which would be impossible if time had been running at a normal speed. And, um, so for, for example, I did a, a survey recently of 300 people who'd had time expansion experiences, not just in accidents, but also under the influence of psychedelics or in meditation or in sports, for example. And almost, well, more than three quarters of people were sure that their time expansion experience allowed them to do things that would be impossible in a normal passage of time. So in that sense, time really does expand. It really does move more slowly to these people.
44:10 Mike Carruthers? Well, one of the things I've always found interesting is how the, because in an accident, in, in a traffic accident, time passes more slowly, but you have, you don't know it's coming and, you know, then it's over. But you know that an hour in the dentist's chair is a lot longer than an hour, you know, at an amusement park. It's, it's a different, because it's unpleasant. And why does unpleasant slow it down?
44:42 Speaker 02 There's a whole category of negative experiences in which time goes very slowly, whether it's boredom, or whether it's a waiting situation, or whether you're in pain, or whether you're anticipating pain, when you're in some kind of discomfort, that almost always makes time pass very, very slowly. And I think that's because in these situations, we can't focus our attention. You know, we can't get absorbed in any kind of activity or entertainment. And therefore, we're in this kind of very open state of awareness, in which our minds become very busy. Our minds start to worry, start to think about the future, start to envisage lots of scenarios, start to think about the past. So our minds get very kind of agitated and very, very busy. So in other words, they get full of information, massive amount of thoughts pass through our consciousness.
45:27 Speaker 02 And all of this information passing through our consciousness stretches time. So if you compare that to, let's say, you're waiting, and you're waiting to go on holiday at the airport. So you're in a good frame of mind, looking forward to your holiday. Maybe you're reading a book in the waiting lounge at the airport. And time can go quite quickly in that situation because you're in a state of absorption. You're relaxed and you're focusing on a magazine or a book. Maybe you're talking to your partner. But so when you're at the dentist, or when you're waiting for, I don't know, for a doctor's appointment, or maybe you've been waiting for a long time for a bus or a train, and you're getting quite agitated. Time passes very slowly because your mind gets very agitated and full of information.
46:09 Mike Carruthers? But I wonder why, for example, you can watch a two-hour movie, and it flies by because it's a great movie. The next day, you could watch a two-hour movie. You're just as absorbed in it, but it's taking forever, like get to the point, you know, he's the bad guy, get him. But it's, it's the same experience more or less, but the time, the time that passes feels very different.
46:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, it's actually to do with absorption. Again, because when you watch a really good movie, you forget about everything. You forget about, you know, your life, you even forget who you are because you're so absorbed in the film. Everything kind of drops away, and you become completely absorbed in the, in the story or the characters of the film. So that kind of intense absorption makes time pass really quickly. But if a film isn't very good, and if you don't believe the characters, if the story's not very enthralling, then you can't really get into absorption. And again, your mind gets a bit busy. You start to think about other things. You start to think, hmm, what shall I do tomorrow? Or what happened, you know, what happened at work today? So again, your mind gets full of information again, which stretches time.
47:22 Speaker 02 In a way, you can judge how how good a film is by how quickly it seems to pass.
47:27 Mike Carruthers? Another experience that I have, that I think most people, well, you tell me, but. So if you if you take a car trip, you you're gonna go someplace you haven't been, and it takes two hours to get there. And you and you know, it's that, oh, God, are we there yet? Are we there yet? The trip back always seems to take less time. It it takes the same amount of clock time. But the trip, the return trip always seems shorter than the going trip.
47:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a very common experience. In my view, that's due to familiarity. Because when you go to a place, when you travel to a place for the first time, the journey is fresh. You're looking at everything for the first time. But even when you come back, even if you just traveled back a few hours later, it's already slightly familiar to you. You've done the journey before. So you're pressing, you're processing less information the second time you do the journey. And it's kind of interesting, because I I once did a survey at an airport, where I interviewed people who'd returned from their holidays. And people often said that the the first week of the holiday went really slowly, but the second week went really quickly. And that was just, that's just because of familiarity, because after a week, the environment's already slightly familiar to you.
48:44 Speaker 02 You're already settling into a routine. And therefore, the mixed time passed more quickly.
48:51 Mike Carruthers? Well, my theory has always been about that, about taking a trip and coming back, is that on the way back, even because on the way there, you never know when you're gonna get there, because you don't really know where you're going, and you don't know how long it's gonna take. So it's a big, open-ended question. On the way back, within an hour of your home, things start to look so familiar, you feel like you're almost home.
49:18 Speaker 02 It's also to do with awareness of time, you know, when we're when we're aware of time and when we focus on the concept of time and we're thinking about, hmm, when am I going to get, when am I going to get there? How long is this going to take? That awareness of time actually makes time pass more slowly compared to when you forget about time, then time seems to go quickly.
49:36 Mike Carruthers? You said something about people in sports and their perception of time, and I haven't heard that before. So can you explain that?
49:45 Speaker 02 Well, I've collected hundreds of examples of time expansion experiences in my research. And I found that about 50% of them come from accidents and emergencies, but about 10% of them come from sports people. Some sports people report that in their highest moments, in their moments of peak performance, time seems to slow down and they seem to have more time to position themselves, to respond to their opponent's actions. And they often report that, you know, because time was moving so slowly, they were capable of astounding feats. And, you know, it was these feats which enabled them to win competitions or to break records.
50:25 Speaker 02 And my my theory is that the, you know, the most elite sports people, the best athletes in the world have this ability to slow down time. And there are many reports from athletes, you know, speaking about this. Do you remember the baseball player Ted Williams? He said that, you know, he had a, he felt that he had a slowed down experience of time, which and that which gave him more time to see the ball as it was hurtling towards him. He said that he could even see the seam on the ball. You could see the stitches on the ball as it flew towards him. You know Lionel Messi, the soccer player? He has the same ability. I think the reason why most people say he's, he was or is the best soccer player in the world is because he has this amazing ability to slow down time.
51:07 Mike Carruthers? Something I heard, I don't know if you have ever looked into this, but and I don't even know if it's true, but I like the fact that it might be true, is that one of the reasons that it is so difficult to swat a fly is that a fly's perception of time, that we're moving so slow that he can see us coming a mile away, that for him, we're not even close. And yet for us, we're trying to get him real fast. For him, that's forever. And for us, it's an eighth of a second.
51:41 Speaker 02 That's true. I think that's a very true aphorism. Because, you know, animals have a different metabolism, a different kind of consciousness to human beings. And I believe that they do experience time in a different way. Usually, the rule is that the smaller an animal, the slower its sense of time is. So, you know, there are insects who may only live for a few days, or maybe a few weeks in human time. But in terms of their metabolism or their consciousness, they actually experience what would be to human beings a whole lifespan. So it kind of illustrates my main point, which is that time is totally flexible and subjective. You know, the human experience of time is totally different to an insect's experience of time. But also, you know, the experience of time
52:26 Speaker 02 that human beings have in different situations or different states of consciousness can be completely different to other situations or states of consciousness.
52:35 Mike Carruthers? You talk about the phenomenon of your life flashing before you, like when you think you're gonna die or something. And can you explain how that fits into this discussion? And first of all, is that really true? I mean, does that happen to a lot of people?
52:52 Speaker 02 It's not an uncommon experience. It usually happens when a person is close to death, for example, during a fall. Maybe a mountaineer falls off the side of a mountain. And in the few seconds that it takes before he hits the ground, then he has a life review. And that means that he or she experiences, sometimes literally every experience of their life is experienced again in a matter of few seconds, right from birth through their childhood, through their teenage years, right to the present moment. It all flashes before their eyes. And also, when people actually are clinically dead for a short time in what's called a near-death experience, in those, again, usually that's just for a few seconds or maybe a few minutes. In that short period of time before they are revived
53:37 Speaker 02 or resuscitated, they may have this life review. So sometimes it is literally every experience of their life which flashes before their eyes. And it's not just a question of memory, because people who have these experiences, they they say that they actually relive these experiences, don't just remember them, they actually relive them. They recall them in very intense perceptual detail. They even notice things from the events which were not apparent at the time. They sometimes see the events from different perspectives, uh, from what they experienced at the time. Sometimes occasionally they just see a number of salient or significant events from their lives. But, you know, it's it's completely paradoxical, kind of a complete mystery, really, how
54:21 Speaker 02 a whole lifetime of experiences can be recalled or relived in a matter of a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes at the most.
54:28 Mike Carruthers? That does seem impossible, doesn't it?
54:31 Speaker 02 It does seem impossible, yeah, and there are some kind of neurological explanations to to to try to account for the life review, but they don't really make sense. If you look into them deeply, they're quite flawed. I personally think the only way to make sense of these experiences is to think of time in a different way. And so I like to think of time as a kind of spatial phenomenon. And this kind of fits with Einstein's theory of relativity. It fits with some theories from quantum physics. So the the basic idea is that time is not linear. You know, we experience time in a linear way as a kind of arrow that moves towards the future. The past disappears when we enter the present, and then we move towards the future. That's our normal experience of time, like an arrow heading into the future.
55:15 Speaker 02 But I think in reality, at the kind of fundamental level, time is actually spatial. You know, it's all kind of laid out in a panorama. So then in some sense, the past still exists and the future already already already exists. So you can actually re-experience the past in certain states of consciousness because it's still there. And maybe in certain states of consciousness, you can, you know, you can glimpse into the future because it's already there. And as I say, that is, it sounds completely counterintuitive, but it does fit with some theories from physics. And it's really the only way to make sense of a phenomenon like the life review.
55:51 Mike Carruthers? Well, I would imagine that really everybody has had these experiences where time either seems to have sped up or slowed down. And although we've all experienced it, we tend to write it off as just, well, you know. It's not real, you know, it's not, it's not, it's just something that happens in the human brain. But as you point out, it's a real thing that we can make time speed up or slow down. We do all the time. Steve Taylor's been my guest. He's a senior lecturer and researcher in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. And the name of his book is Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Great, Steve. Good
56:36 Mike Carruthers? to have you on. Thank you.
56:37 Speaker 02 Thanks a lot. I'm all the best.
56:43 Mike Carruthers? It is staggering how many photographs are taken every day around the world. And there's a pretty good chance that you'll be in some of those photographs. So you might be interested in knowing, there is one facial expression that you can make in a photograph that will make you look better. It's called the squinch. Squinching is a word that was coined by professional photographer Peter Hurley. He has a YouTube video that went viral about this a while ago, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes so you can see it, because you kind of have to see this. But when you squinch, you're squinting your eyes just a little bit, narrowing the distance between the pupil and the lower eyelid. It
57:26 Mike Carruthers? creates a look of confidence. It eliminates that deer in the headlight look that you often get when you're in a picture. While squinching and squinting are similar, there's a big difference when it comes to photographs. A squinch is more subtle than a squint. And it won't give you that furrowed brow look. You just use your cheek muscles, not your forehead, in order to squinch. And to get a better understanding, you can watch the video. And again, the link is in the show notes. Something You Should Know is produced by Jennifer Brennan, Jeffrey Havison. Executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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