How we experience time

Why does one hour drag by, but a year can pass in a flash? And how does our relationship with time influence our behavior? This hour, TED speakers share ideas on making the most of the time we have. Guests include artist Katie Paterson, cognitive neuroscientist Irena Arslanova, the late music director Robert Franz and the late psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Original broadcast date: May 16, 2025 Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, how we experience time. And we are starting with a call to an old friend. And I mean, a really old friend, one who is thousands of years old. This was an idea that artist Katie Paterson had in 2007 while she was living in Iceland.

• 1:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I made an artwork where I put a microphone deep inside a melting glacier in Iceland, Vatnajökull.

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  Vatnajökull is the largest glacier in Iceland. It covers around 10% of the country, and it is ancient.

• 1:41Speaker 07

  Its formation began during the last Ice Age, so like, over 100,000 years ago. And then its current shape forming about 1,500 years ago. So it's really old.

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  And Katie wanted people to be able to hear it.

• 1:59Speaker 07

  And so I'd set up a live phone line so people all over the world could dial this number and be connected live to the sound of this glacier slowly melting away. So it kind of collapsed the distance and the time between us and our human earthly time and this ancient, melting, thawing glacier that's existed for so long, but yet is melting so much faster than ever just now.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  I have to ask, how the heck did you get the microphone inside the glacier?

• 2:36Speaker 07

  It was a challenge. Yeah, we used a hydrophone, underwater microphone, and I camped by the glacier with a lot of equipment. And therefore, I was able to watch, actually, the phone numbers coming into the phone from the UK to China and India and even Iraq, and imagining all of these different people calling in to listen to this freezing, melting glacier.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Of course, there's something that's happening to glaciers now that wasn't happening for the majority of the Earth's history, which is that they are melting rapidly. Was that the idea? To help people connect, to actually be able to hear what that sounds like?

• 3:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. So putting a phone line in was trying to make a kind of intimate connection, really, with the glacier and allowing people to listen one at a time. Because if you dialed and somebody else was on the line, you got the engaged tone. Beep, beep, beep.

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  The glacier was busy.

• 3:43Speaker 07

  The glacier was busy, exactly. And so, yeah, part of it was trying to bring something closer. So you were listening live, really, to the sound of it melting. You know, in days gone by, that would have been a very natural occurrence. But now it's exponentially speeded up. I mean, sadly, it's already in Iceland. They've declared their first glacier totally dead, and they're melting so fast.

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  Through glaciers, stars, the universe, much of Katie Paterson's artwork explores deep time.

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  Anything way beyond the human lifespan, going really back in time into the Earth's deep history and even beyond that, back into the cosmic time of the universe. So we're thinking about millions of years, thousands but more, millions and billions of years. I've always been drawn to this very deep sense of how we think of time.

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  Time can be an abstract concept. Why does one hour drag by, but a year can pass in a flash? And how does our relationship to time influence how we act every day? From making decisions to feeling awed by the world around us? On the show today, how we experience time. Ideas about how our brain interprets minutes, hours, and days, and how we can make the most of the time we have. Katie Paterson's artwork often encourages us to think more broadly about the thousands and millions of years that came before we were born

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  and how space and time interact, as she did with a project called Earth, Moon, Earth.

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  So Earth, Moon, Earth involved beaming Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" to the moon and back to Earth using a kind of radio technology that's called Earth, Moon, Earth, or moon bounce. And it's a really underground, not very known about, technology where people literally send each other messages via the moon, using the moon as like a kind of transmitter. It just takes two and a half seconds to like bounce from the moon and travel that long journey back to Earth. So when I learned about this, well, at first, I thought it sounded like science fiction. And, you know, is this real? This is crazy. But I loved the idea of beaming messages and using the moon as this kind of transmitter

• 6:22Speaker 07

  of messages to one another. But instead of sending words, I decided to send a piece of music. And that was Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."

• 6:34Speaker 07

  The song I translated into Morse code because that's the way it's sent. The information is all sent in Morse code, which I kind of loved as well. And so, yeah, we broke down the score into A, C, Gs, and, you know, the different tones and even the treble clefs and all the different musical symbols we made into Morse code and beamed that from the moon. And then when it came back, we had a group of Morse code decipherers make it back into score. But what happened is because of the lunar surface and the weather and the shadows and the moon, not all of the notes came back. What you hear now is the sonata,

• 7:18Speaker 07

  but with little bits kind of missing that at first is very subtle, but by the end of the piece, you're hearing like whole chords that are gone. And I like to imagine that they're floating up there in the depths of space and time.

• 7:34Speaker 07

  The pauses that you're hearing are the presences of the moon and the surface of the moon. And so I love the idea that the music had been on this cosmic journey through time and through space. And now you hear the fragments of it touched by the surface of the moon.

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  It's really beautiful.

• 7:57Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Let's turn to a newer piece of yours, "There Lay the Days Between." Tell us about this one.

• 8:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, so this is a ticker board, or like a changing number, the kinds that you normally see in stations and so on. So it's a very long number, 2 trillion, da, da, da, da, da, da. I don't think I can even say the full number, but it's a very long number. And what the number represents is the number of sunrises that have ever happened since the Earth began. And we ended up working with many different astronomers and the Astronomer Royal of Scotland. And it was a big challenge because when you go back to the very deep time of the Earth's very early years when it was just coming into existence, we don't really know its orbit rate at that time. So there's kind of periods

• 8:53Speaker 07

  in the Earth's history that we feel very certain about. And then there's periods that are very speculative. So we joined up all the dots and created one number that was as close as we could possibly get to feeling comfortable that that would be the number of sunrises that have taken place since the Earth began. And actually, we've left enough space for all the sunrises still to come, till the end of the Earth.

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  How many spaces did you leave, then?

• 9:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's got another several trillion spaces left.

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  What I find so funny about this piece of art is it looks like an old-fashioned alarm clock, kind of? Like where the numbers flip?

• 9:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, it is. It's like a flipping alarm clock, but it's telling you the kind of cosmic time of the Earth's history. And at sunrise every day, wherever the artwork is, it goes up one number according to that day's sunrise. So you have this kind of rattling of the flipped numbers turning and then stopping at one more sunrise.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  I found it disturbing. I was like, that's it? Just 2 trillion? It was something very weird to see it in numbers.

• 10:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think also because it could, you know, you could imagine it could be a string of numbers that was, you know, almost infinite, but in fact, you know, we have a very set time from when the Earth was born. And even though it's a huge expansive time, it's still got its own lifespan. It has a beginning and it has a positive end.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  I think that's what a lot of people don't want to think about that. And your art often makes people confront the sort of finiteness of space and time, which is deeply upsetting.

• 10:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I pivot between finding it like wondrous, you know, that we live in this huge expansive universe that just goes on and on infinitely. But then, at the same time, that everything in the cosmos has a kind of clock inside it, you know, from our moon and our Earth, all the way back to distant stars and all the way forward into time as well. And then our human life within those kind of enormous time spans starts to fade into a very, very small notch, I guess, or one, one second on the, on the huge cosmic clock. But I find that quite comforting. I, I kind of find it

• 11:29Speaker 07

  gives me some rootedness to feel like here we are, part of this, you know, enormous expansive time and how incredible to, to be part of that.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  What I love about your work, Katie, is that you take something that is so ephemeral and hard to grasp, time, and you turn it into a sensory experience through each of your pieces so that we can connect with it in a way that I don't think we do often. We're all busy and typing and swiping and connecting and going, you know, living virtually, that this idea of connecting to sort of the, the deep core of our being is something we, we, we don't usually make time for.

• 12:12Speaker 07

  Absolutely. And it's all right there, you know, if we choose to tune in. I think it is astonishing that when we take that larger picture, we can see that our lives are owed to every other living being that's been before us. And I'm absolutely somebody that's rushing about all the time as well. But yet, it doesn't take much to feel really astounded, you know, looking up to the sky or even looking at leaf and detail and kind of thinking, goodness. You know, we're part of something much bigger than ourselves and life that goes way beyond us and that will go ahead of us as well. So I find that that kind of way of thinking and expanding the time horizons

• 12:58Speaker 07

  can really help us connect to something much larger. And, and that's a really good feeling.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  That's artist Katie Paterson. You can see her TED Talk at ted.com. On the show today, how we experience time. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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• 15:09Speaker 00

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, how we experience time and the body's role, particularly the heart's role, in shaping our perceptions. Think back on a day in your life when it felt like time just flew by. Maybe you were on vacation or wrapped up in a hobby or a good book.

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  A lot of people have experienced a state of flow, you know, where time just disappears.

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  This is cognitive neuroscientist Irena Arslanova.

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  And sometimes when you're just having, you know, a lot and doing a lot and you're busy, it just all seems to kind of slip away.

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  Or maybe you've been stuck at the airport for hours and it felt like time was barely moving at all. So why is that? Why does time feel different depending on the situation? Irena wondered if it had something to do with interoception. This is how the brain makes sense of the signals the body sends it.

• 16:19Speaker 06

  From the heart, but also from the gut and our immune system. And the brain needs this information about how the body is doing to predict what it will need. So ultimate purpose of the brain is to make predictions to keep us safe.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  How long until I'll be too hungry to function? Can I stay up another few hours before I have to sleep? The brain reads the body's signals and makes predictions.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  And in order to make these predictions, on one hand, we need a sense of time. Time is constructed in the brain, but it is molded by the body. And essentially, my research is trying to kind of connect those two things, so interoception and the sense of time.

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  Here's Irena Arslanova on the TED stage.

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  I work in the Lab of Action and Body at Royal Holloway, University of London. And in our lab, we look at the brain from an embodied point of view. What this means is that we believe we cannot fully understand the workings of the brain if we take it out of the body. Because after all, the main reason for us to have a brain is to keep the body alive. And for that, it needs to understand what our body needs at any moment in time. That additional internal sense is called interoception. And one example of interoception is the perception of our own heart. Yes, the heart.

• 17:52Speaker 06

  I think all of us know that the main function of the heart is to transport oxygen-rich blood all through the body. And like other bodily functions, it is controlled by the brain. So when I want to move, the heart should start beating faster to provide more oxygen. When I need to slow down and focus, it will also slow down to preserve the oxygen. But what many of you may not know is that the activity of the heart itself shapes the activity of the brain.

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  Irena says the heart and the brain are in a constant rhythmic dance. Every time the heart contracts, it sends a signal to the brain, telling it to get ready for action. When the heart relaxes, no signal gets sent. Communication goes silent. The brain gets a chance to take in the world around it.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  So there's a balancing between action and perception. So what is really important is when your heart rate changes. So when the heart speeds up, we get more beats. And the period between the beats becomes shorter. So the scale is really tilting towards action. However, in contrast, when the heart slows down, we get longer periods between the beats. So we're now scaling towards perception.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  This constant conversation between the heart and the brain and the almost imperceptible balancing act between action and perception got her thinking.

• 19:30Speaker 06

  If the heart shapes perception in such a way, will it also shape the perception of time? Is there a causal relationship between our heart and how we experience time? Of course, we tested that in our lab. We invited 67 volunteers to participate in a study.

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  After hooking these volunteers up to an ECG machine so they could monitor their heartbeat, Irena and her colleagues would flash different stimuli at the volunteer.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  These could be sounds, images of simple shapes, images of people showing different emotions.

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  Some were flashed on the heartbeat. Others were flashed in between heartbeats.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  And what we found was that stimuli that occurred during heart's contraction were perceived to last shorter than stimuli that occurred between the beats when the heart was relaxed. What this means is that the momentary state of the heart caused time to contract. And expand within each heartbeat.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  When they were exposed to a sound or image on the heartbeat, participants thought it went by more quickly. Time seemed to go just a little bit faster.

• 20:50Speaker 06

  Why am I so excited about this finding?

• 20:55Speaker 06

  Well, because it shows that perception of time is an embodied experience. It seems intuitive, you know, that something rhythmic like the heartbeat with influence, something rhythmic like time perception. But now we have a scientific evidence for that intuition.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  I'm just thinking about like when I'm about to go into an important meeting and maybe I get a little tense, I my heart rate definitely goes up. And therefore you have found that time seems to move faster. Is that, did I get that right?

• 21:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's never really clear cut. So there's obviously a lot of interacting factors. So for example, you know, let's take our experience of time right now, me and you. This hour will feel very different for you. The fact that you're taking in information, your time might feel much longer. You're taking in more information. Your heart might also be beating slower. When we're thinking about me, so I am doing a lot of motor activity right now. Trying to scramble my thoughts. I can feel my heart. It's, it's pretty fast. So for me, time is moving much faster.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  You're saying because the body and the brain and that interaction is incredibly complex, plus throw in some cardiovascular exertion, or whether you haven't eaten enough this morning to, to fuel your brain. It's, it's really dynamic.

• 22:27Speaker 06

  It is, it is. It's also really subjective and that's why it's, it's really hard to kind of have a general rule. So for example, in an extremely threatening situation, like a car crash, your heart rate may be accelerating through the roof, yet you may perceive everything in slow motion. But remarkably, another person could be in the same exact situation, the same exact heart acceleration, but they may report that everything happened so quick, they couldn't even catch their breath. How we feel the passing of time can be highly malleable.

• 23:07Speaker 06

  When we are bored, in pain, but also when we encounter something novel or extraordinary, time feels to be passing much slower than when we are busy or simply having fun. Do these distortions serve some function? And can we gain some level of control over how we feel time? Time is the ultimate master of our lives. We are all constantly faced with its fleeting nature.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is people feel like time is moving faster. But one of the reasons why I wonder they feel that way is because they're consuming so much information. They're so externally oriented in some ways.

• 24:00Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. So it's really when you're attending to time, when you're kind of mindful and you're being present, that's when time tends to elongate. Whereas when you're engaging in distracting activities, but also when you're doing something really absorbing and fun, you know, like you just, you're distracted from time. It, it seems to move faster. And that's why sometimes it's still good to just stop and reflect and actually attend to time for a second in an intentional way.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Is that why people then say, you know, take a very long, deep breath, try and listen to your body?

• 24:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there's a lot of talk now about how meditation can actually increase our perception and expand time. But what works for me, for example, is to focus on something slow or still, you know, like focusing on something in nature. And sometimes by focusing on something slow, you still kind of have this natural slowing of the heart. So taking a deep breath and slowing down your heart is an easy thing to do. And if it actually has such a strong influence on how we perceive time, then why not take a deep breath and see if that actually slows that time?

• 25:18Speaker 06

  And if that actually improves how much information you can take in.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Irena Arslanova is a cognitive neuroscientist at Royal Holloway, University of London. You can see her full talk at ted.com.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  On the show today, how we experience time. So music is all about keeping time. The beats within a measure, every full, half, quarter note. It's also about the timing of a bass note, the rhythm of the percussion, the pulse of a chord progression as it dances with the melody. And when all of these elements come together, you get a cohesive sound and it can have a transportive effect.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I stand on the podium, conduct a two hour concert. It feels like two minutes.

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  This is Robert Franz, the music director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in Ontario, Canada. Even as a kid, Robert found himself entranced by music. He remembers his teacher giving him a recording of Dvorak's Cello Concerto.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And I used to sit and listen to the first side, A side, first movement, over and over again. And I'd sit on the side of my bed and I'd imagine I was the one playing the concerto. And out my window, we had a birch tree and the leaves would blow in the wind. And it looked like people were applauding for me.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  I love that. You were the star of your own show. That's so great.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  I had the whole thing. I had the audience, I had the concerto, I had everything was done.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  That's great. So not everybody feels as enthralled, shall we say, by classical music. What are some of the things that you hear from people who maybe just don't get it?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Well, it's complicated. It's fancy. It's boring. It's just not something that some people are used to like engaging with. And I think part of it, Manoush, is that when you think about classical music, you think about going to a hall and hearing an orchestra play an hour long symphony, let's say. Well, that's a lot different than a three minute rock tune on the radio that you sort of bang your head with as you're driving down the road. That's a totally different experience.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Robert has spent his career helping people better connect with classical music. And he's developed a listening toolkit for audiences, one that will likely alter the way you experience time and music too. Here's Robert Franz on the TED stage.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  I come from a family of music lovers, but not classically trained musicians. And so whenever we would go to a concert, it would be kind of an exciting event. My dad, my dad Bob, his name is Bob, you know, he's, he's kind of curious. Like, well, what's this going to be like? So we were on a trip one day to a concert. And I said to him, I said, so today the concert is going to feature a world premiere of a brand new symphony, a symphony that lasts about 30 minutes or so. And he's like, oh, 30 minutes. Hmm. What should I listen for? I was like, what a great question. Thank you for engaging with me in that way, right? My dad and I are like having a conversation about how to listen to classical music.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  So I said, okay, dad, I'm going to give you four tools to use while you're listening. I call them Bob's Four Tools.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  So I said, here's how these tools work. They're kind of like screens, screens that you would hold up, you know, on a window, but you hold them up over your ear and you listen using these tools and these screens. And as you listen and adjust, if you find that one of them isn't working, lay it down without judgment and pick up another one and continue to go back and forth between these four tools and these four screens.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Okay, so Bob's Four Tools for engaging with classical music are rhythm, melody, texture, and visuals. Robert, walk us through each one of these, starting with the first one, rhythm.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Sure. So these are basic elements in music. And when a composer writes a rhythm, there are basically two options. The first option is that the composer writes the rhythm that kind of goes along with your heartbeat, that maybe slows your heartbeat down or speeds your heartbeat up, but works in tandem with your heartbeat. And so that's one option. The other option is that a composer can write a rhythm that goes against your heartbeat and makes you feel uncomfortable. And so having those two options, it's not about which you like or don't like. It's just about what is present in front of you. So I said to my dad, I said, listen to the rhythm

• 30:11Speaker 01

  and decide if the rhythm is with your heartbeat or against your heartbeat. And that will sort of give you an indication of why you're reacting the way you are to the rhythm that you're hearing.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Okay, we're going to play a little bit of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto, number one.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  I find this very energizing. It gives me like, I'm like, let's go.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Okay, so let me tell you why that is, Manoush. The pulse of this is somewhere between 96 and 100 beats per minute. If you relate that to your heart rate, that is a kind of a high heart rate. A resting heart rate is 60 or 70 per minute, right? And so if you're at 96 or 100, it's going, but it's really kind of pumping. It's almost like you're running and that's the pulse.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  And so it's taking your heart rate and it's like replicating it almost.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  That's so great. It makes me want to move. It makes me want to move fast. I'm like ready to take on the world with that.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Sometimes when I'm driving down the road and I'm listening to music on the radio, if the pulse gets higher, my foot will get a little heavier on the gas pedal. And I'll go a little faster, just not knowing it.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Sorry, officer, it was just Bach.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Yeah, Bach.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Okay, so that piece matches your heartbeat. Okay, we're going to listen to now something you suggested that's a little bit different. It's Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which has a different effect.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  This one kind of stops me in my tracks, actually. I'm like, what is going on?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So the rhythm is so disjunct. And it's actually the sacrificial dance from The Right of Spring. So it's really the climax of the entire ballet. And in it, we get a sense of real discord and real uncomfortableness. You can feel it sort of pushing against your own natural body rhythm. And that's what I'm talking about. And so you don't have to say to yourself, oh, I don't like that. Just observe what it is. And then you say, oh, OK, that's why I felt the way I did. That's kind of cool. And I mean, I know many people have seen this and heard The Right of Spring performed live. And yes, it's disjunct and it goes against your heartbeat.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  But it's incredibly exciting because of the chaos.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  In a minute, more of Bob's Tools and how active listening can shape our sense of time. We'll talk about Tchaikovsky's iconic melodies, Debussy's soundscapes, and even hear a little Sinatra. On the show today, how we perceive time. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Back in a sec.

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  This message comes from Rula. World Mental Health Day takes place in October, making it a great time to take that next step in getting support if you need it. Rula makes accessing quality mental health care affordable with sessions costing an average of $15 with insurance. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to rula.com. That's R-U-L-A dot com to find a therapist the easy way.

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• 34:58Speaker 00

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, how we perceive time. And we were just talking to conductor Robert Franz about Bob's Four Tools. This is a set of active listening tools to better understand and enjoy classical music. So we heard about the first tool, rhythm. Robert explains the second tool from the TED stage.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  The second tool is melody. Now, we think of a melody as a tune that you can sing. And that's very much a standard kind of concept of how a melody works. You know, you think about it in a church setting where the alto, the tenor, and the bass parts sing the accompaniment, and the soprano sings the melody along the top line. Well, there was probably nobody in the history of all melody writing who wrote more beautiful melodies than the Russian composer Peter Ilyaschevsky. And in his Fifth Symphony, in the second movement, there is a solo for the French horn that begins this movement and is unbelievably beautiful and really quite singable as a melody.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  It's so beautiful. It's one of the middle instruments. It's incredible. Now, it's so musical, though. It's so tuneful, it's so vocal, that Frank Sinatra borrowed it for one of his big hits, "Moon Love."

• 36:39Speaker 00

  I never made that connection until I saw your TED Talk. I was like, oh, yeah, they do sound the same.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  They're exactly the same.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  Will this be moon love? Nothing but moon love.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  What a good melody does is it takes you from the beginning. It captures you, and then it moves you through time. I mean, think about it this way. Music is architecture in time, not in space, but in time. A composer like Beethoven, for instance, who would, in an angsty way, spend days and days and days deciding what the next note should be. Finally, he'd land on the note that would propel the melody forward.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  So what are the qualities that you're listening for when you are dissecting a melody?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  So the first and most important thing is that a melody has to have a beginning, and a middle, and an end. There has to be kind of an arc to the melody. Tchaikovsky was one of those composers that could write melodies that people would remember forever. People were just smitten with whatever the newest Tchaikovsky melody was. So people would come here, like, say, the world premiere of his Fifth Symphony, and would think, OK, what's the big melody going to be? I can't wait to hear what it is. And of course, it was just arresting to the audience the very first time.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  OK, now we're going to something slightly more abstract. If melody was clear and really holding your hand, texture is the third, right?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. In the music world, we think of this as harmony. But if you think about it in a more sort of visual way, each instrument plays a note. That note has a certain timbre or color. When those colors blend together, they form a different color. As those notes change, those colors change. So it becomes a vibrant tapestry that is actually almost alive and is constantly changing. It's kind of like when you're a kid and you take one of those big parachutes and you are all waving it and the colors keep changing. It's that exact same concept.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  OK, so let's put Bob's third tool to use with the second movement of Debussy's "The Sea," "Play of the Waves."

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Would it be too simplistic to say, Robert, that Debussy is creating kind of a vibe, as the kids would say?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Not at all. In fact, what I call it is a soundscape, which isn't actually a real word. But it sort of describes the idea of a world that is created through sound. A composer is, instead of like focusing on melody or rhythm, they're really just trying to create a sound world for you to be in, one that sort of changes. Now, Debussy was an impressionistic composer. Much like an impressionistic painter, he would write music that took little sort of dots of sound. And he would stitch them together and form these sort of larger color palettes.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  I will tell you that if you look at the score to "La Mer" or "The Sea" by Debussy, this piece, if you look at the score, it's really quite complex on the page. But when you back away from it and you get away from all those details, all of a sudden, the big shapes become enormously clear. That's why this piece is so popular with audiences, because they can see and, almost in their imagination, smell and feel the sea air against their face.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  So for the last of the tools that you've concocted for your dad, Bob, you recommended that he watch the orchestra. Obviously, we can't do that right now. But what should people look for when they're at a concert?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  So I'll tell you a story that exemplifies this.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  OK.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  I did not grow up watching or playing hockey, which is incredibly sacrilegious now that I live in Canada. But I remember my first professional hockey game as an adult. I was incredibly taken with the nonverbal communication that I saw going on between the players on the ice, how they sort of moved back and forth and were aware, completely aware of where the puck was and where each other was and what the other was doing. I was mesmerized for hours as I watched this intense sort of back and forth. That's the same kind of feeling that I get when I sit and watch an orchestra perform in a hall. You're looking at 80 or 90 people onstage,

• 42:22Speaker 01

  incredibly talented, creative people, who all have their own opinions about how the music should go, but they're up there working as this enormous team. So for instance, the string family, you know, they, all their bows are moving in the same direction at the same time.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Well, that is preplanned, and it's preplanned to create a sense of unification in the sound. But that really is something that they are paying attention to. What part of the bow are they using? How fast or slow is the bow as they use it?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Percussion family is another interesting group of people onstage because they have so many different instruments, and the way they coordinate from one side to the other is really pretty extraordinary.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  There's so much nonverbal communication going on between the musicians and between the musicians and the conductor. And I think all of those elements are really important components to experiencing orchestral music live.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  We wanted to have you here because this whole episode is about how we perceive time. And I guess with that framing, how does what you just told me sort of play into it? Because it's very powerful.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  What I can tell you is that, at the end of the concert, my dad came backstage. And I said to him, hey, what'd you think? He goes, it was good. It was really good. I said, OK, did you like the piece? He goes, yeah, the only problem was it was too short. I said, well, Dad, it was, it was a 30-minute piece. He said, yeah, but I just worked through all four of your tools, and the piece was over.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  My dad was so engaged with his active listening to classical music that he didn't even pay attention to the amount of time that had taken place. He was more curious about what actually was happening on the stage. Now, take for a second this idea and imagine what would happen if we all spent more time listening than speaking and engaging with what we heard and really noticing our soundscape and our world around us. Active listening is the key to so many great, great challenges that we face. But most importantly, when you go into that concert hall and hear that orchestra play, bring a sense of curiosity and those active listening skills,

• 45:02Speaker 01

  and boom, away you'll go.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  That was Robert Franz. A few months after taping this conversation with me, Robert passed away. He had served as the music director and maestro of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in Ontario, Canada. You can see his full talk at ted.com. Today on the show, how we perceive time. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo was a pioneer in the field of human behavior and how society and our relationships shape our morals. You might remember him as the creator of the now infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. Testing 123. Prison study, August 18. It became one of the most significant

• 45:51Speaker 00

  and controversial psychological studies of the 20th century, bringing together 24 college students. I randomly assigned them. Half is going to be guards, half are going to be prisoners. The ones who are going to be prisoners are going to live there 24/7. The guards are going to work eight-hour shifts. They locked me in there in this degrading little outfit. I wanted the authorities to take away their freedom. So then, once you're in my prison, only the authorities give it back to you. And the key was, the guards then said, these are dangerous prisoners.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  We have to show them who is in control. When student guards began showing cruel behavior, and several students had mental breakdowns, Zimbardo ended the experiment early. But he became renowned for the study in what he called the Lucifer Effect, how people's surroundings and power can warp their actions.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  More recently, there were doubts over the data and Zimbardo's role in the experiment. Psychologists over the past decade have called the study biased and incomplete. Nonetheless, Zimbardo remains one of the biggest names in psychology, and, over his decades-long career, raised big questions that people still ask about just how malleable the human mind is. That's what makes the study of human nature so fascinating. We are blessed with this incredible brain, which gives rise to this even more dynamic mind, which gives us the possibility to do the most wonderful, kind things and the most awful cruel things, to be caring or indifferent.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  For Zimbardo, morality was not fixed, and neither was time. He argued that our experience of time depends on where we put our energy, whether it's in the past, present, or future. What kind of person are you? Here is the late psychologist Philip Zimbardo from the TED stage in 2009.

• 47:59Speaker 07

  I want to share with you some ideas about the secret power of time in a very short time. So what is time perspective? Time perspective is the study of how individuals, all of us, divide the flow of your human experience into time zones or time categories. And you do it automatically and unconsciously. They vary between cultures, between nations, between individuals, between social classes, between educational levels. And the problem is they become biased because you learn to overuse some of them and underuse the others. What determines any decision you make? You make a decision on which you're going to base an action, OK? For some people, it's only about what's in the immediate situation, the immediate stimulation, what other people are doing, what you're feeling. And those people, when they make their decisions in that, on that format, we're going to call them present-oriented

• 48:44Speaker 07

  because their focus is what is now. For others, the present is irrelevant. It's always about, what is this situation like that I've experienced in the past? So their decisions are based on past memories. And we're going to call those people past-oriented because they focus on what was. For others, it's not the past, it's not the present, it's only about the future. Their focus is always about anticipated consequences, cost-benefit analysis. And we're going to call them future-oriented. Their focus is on what will be. So time paradox, I want to argue, the paradox of time perspective is something that influences every decision you make you're totally unaware of, namely, the extent to which you have one of these biased time perspectives. Well, there are actually six of them. There's two ways to be present-oriented, two ways to be past-oriented, two ways to be future.

• 49:29Speaker 07

  You can focus on past-positive or past-negative. You can be present-heatonistic, namely, you focus on the joys of life or present fatalist. Doesn't matter, your life is controlled. You can be future-oriented, setting goals. Or you can be transcendental future, namely, life begins after death. Developing the mental flexibility to shift time perspective fluidly depending on the demands of the situation, that's what you've got to learn to do. So very quickly, what's the optimal time profile? High on past-positive, moderately high on future, and moderate on present-heatonism, and always low on past-negative and present fatalism.

• 50:06Speaker 07

  So the optimal temporal mix is what you get from the past. Past-positive is your roots. You connect the family, identity, and yourself. What you get from the future is wings to sort of new destinations, new challenges. What you get from the present-heatonism is the energy, the energy to explore yourself, places, people, sensuality. Any time perspective in excess has more negatives than positives. So what if futures sacrifice for success? They sacrifice family time, they sacrifice friend time, they sacrifice fun time, they sacrifice personal indulgence, they sacrifice hobbies, and they sacrifice sleep. So it affects their health. And they live for work, achievement, and control. I'm sure that resonates with some of the testers.

• 50:51Speaker 07

  And it resonated for me. I grew up as a poor kid in South Bronx ghetto, a Sicilian family. Everybody lived in the past and present. I'm here as a future-oriented person who went over the top, who did all these sacrifices because teachers intervened and made me future-oriented. Told me, don't eat that marshmallow because if you wait, you're going to get two of them. Until I learned to balance out. So I stopped. I've added present-heatonism. I've added a focus on the past-positive. And so at 76 years old, I am more energetic than ever, more productive, and I'm happier than I have ever been. I just want to say, we're applying this to many world problems, changing dropout rates of schoolkids, combating addictions, enhancing teen health, curing vets PTSD with time metaphors,

• 51:34Speaker 07

  getting miracle cures, promoting sustainability and conservation, reducing physical rehabilitation with a 50% dropout rate, altering appeals to suicidal terrorists, and modifying family conflicts as time zone clashes. So I want to end by saying, many of life's puzzles can be solved by understanding your time perspective and that of others. And the idea is so simple, so obvious, but I think the consequences are really profound. Thank you so much.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  That was psychologist Philip Zimbardo. You can see all of his talks at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Monteleone, Kai McNamee, and Fiona Guerin. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkempur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussaye, Harsha Nahada, and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray, Kwasi Lee, and Tiffany Vera Castro. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balorazo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi,

• 52:45Speaker 00

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