The Psychology of Time and The Paradox of How Impulsivity and Self-Control Mediate Our Capacity For Presence

The Psychology of Time and the Paradox of How Impulsivity and Sel...
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The Psychology of Time and the

Paradox of How Impulsivity and
Self-Control Mediate Our Capacity for
Presence
Maria Popova
Reality is never and nowhere more accessible than in the

immediate moment of ones own life, Kafka once told a teenage
friend. Its only there that it can be won or lost. The great Russian
filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky believed that what draws us to film is
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the gift of time time lost or spent or not yet had. From the
moment we are born to the moment we take our last breath, we
battle with reality under the knell of this constant awareness that we
are either winning or losing time. We long for what T.S. Eliot called
the still point of the turning world, but in chasing after it we spin
ourselves into a perpetual restlessness, losing the very thing we
strive to win. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard captured
this perfectly in his superb 1932 meditation on our paradoxical
experience of time: If our heart were large enough to love life in all
its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a
plunderer.
These multiple and contradictory dimensions of time is what
German psychologist Marc Wittmann explores in Felt Time: The
Psychology of How We Perceive Time (public library) a
fascinating inquiry into how our subjective experience of times
passage shapes everything from our emotional memory to our
sense of self. Bridging disciplines as wide-ranging as neuroscience
and philosophy, Wittmann examines questions of consciousness,
identity, happiness, boredom, money, and aging, exposing the
centrality of time in each of them. What emerges is the disorienting
sense that time isnt something which happens to us rather, we
are time.
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Discus chronologicus, a German depiction of time from the early 1720s,

from Cartographies of Time
One of Wittmanns most pause-giving points has to do with how

temporality mediates the mind-body problem. He writes:
Presence means becoming aware of a physical and psychic self
that is temporally extended. To be self-conscious is to recognize
oneself as something that persists through time and is embodied.
In a sense, time is a construction of our consciousness. Two
generations after Hannah Arendt observed in her brilliant
meditation on time that it is the insertion of man with his limited life
span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer
change into time as we know it, Wittmann writes:
Self-consciousness achieving awareness of ones own self
emerges on the basis of temporally enduring perception of bodily
states that are tied to neural activity in the brains insular lobe.
The self and time prove to be especially present in boredom.
They go missing in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, which
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results from the acceleration of social processes. Through

mindfulness and emotional control, the tempo of life that we
experience can be reduced, and we can regain time for ourselves
and others.
Perception necessarily encompasses the individual who is doing
the perceiving. It is I who perceives. This might seem
self-evident. Perception of myself, my ego, occurs naturally when
I consider myself. I feel and think about myself. But who is the
subject if I am the object of my own attention? When I observe
myself, after all, I become the object of observation. Clearly, this
intangibility of the subject as a subject and not an object
poses a philosophical problem: as soon as I observe myself, I
have already become the object of my observation.
With an eye to his compatriot Martin Heidegger, whose philosophy
equated self and time (and who happened to have been Arendts
onetime lover and lifelong friend), Wittmann adds:
As phenomenological philosophy has determined,
self-consciousness is not a mental state that is added on to our
experience, or that is particular; rather, it is a feature inherent in
all experience. My perception contains me.
[]
On the phenomenal level, consciousness and the
self-consciousness deriving from it is distinguished by spatial
and temporal presence. Consciousness is tied to corporeality and
temporality: I experience myself as existing with a body over time.
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Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice in Wonderland
From this intertwining of self and time arises the most pernicious
consequence of our productivity-entranced culture and the chronic
busyness in which it engulfs us. Nearly two centuries after
Kierkegaard lamented our greatest source of unhappiness Of all
ridiculous things, the Danish philosopher wrote, the most
ridiculous seems to me, to be busy. Wittmann observes the
effects of todays social and technological acceleration on our inner
lives:
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If one has no time, one has also lost oneself. Distracted by the
obligations of everyday activities, we are no longer aware of
ourselves Everything is done all at once, faster and faster, yet
no personal balance or meaning can be found. This implies the
loss of contact with ones own self. We also no longer feel at
home with ourselves and find it difficult to persist in any given
activity because we are available at every moment.
But if free will exists at all, this is an instance of its most necessary
application it falls upon us, in our daily choices, to seek an
antidote to this mindless trance of doing in a mindful state of being.
Two millennia after Senecas acutely timely treatise on how to
extend the shortness of life by living wide rather than long,
Wittmann examines the psychology of expanding our experience of
time:
In order to feel that ones life is flowing more slowly and fully
one might seek out new situations over and over to have novel
experiences that, because of their emotional value, are retained
by memory over the long term. Greater variety makes a given
period of life expand in retrospect. Life passes more slowly. If one
challenges oneself consistently, it pays off, over the years, as the
feeling of having lived fully and, most importantly, of having
lived for a long time.
What contributes to this perception of fullness, Wittmann notes, is
the storage of memory the more memories we encode in a given
period of time, the longer and fuller it will appear. But this raises an
intriguing question about what we may be relinquishing as we
increasingly outsource our memory to photographs stored in our
disembodied digital memory. We vacate the moment in order to
document it (and share that record), then end up remembering the
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photograph rather than the experience itself. Four decades before

smartphones and Instagram, Italo Calvino captured this with
brilliant poignancy in contemplating photography and the art of
presence: The life that you live in order to photograph it is already,
at the outset, a commemoration of itself. This compulsive
commemoration consumes a great deal of our lives today and
sustains entire business models.
And yet we need not lose heart. Wittmann points to one mediating
factor that can help us better inhabit our own memories the
cultivation of emotional attentiveness to the moment:
Events are subject to more frequent and more detailed
recollection when they are connected with feelings. In general,
we can say that events are stored because they are charged with
a certain level of affect. Alternatively, the episodes in our lives
that we remember depend on the feelings we associate with
them. The greater the store of lived experience that is, the
more emotional coloration and variety ones life has the longer
ones lifetime seems, subjectively.
Radiating from this is one of the greatest perplexities of how we
experience time the paradox of self-control and impulsivity,
mediated by our temporal myopia. Although self-restraint in the
service of a future payoff is one of the hallmarks of our species
lizards, say, dont plan for the future and learning to wait is
central to how children develop self-reliance, none of this comes
easily to us. In fact, the very duration of waiting diminishes our
perceived satisfaction of the payoff a phenomenon known as
temporal discounting.
Wittmann cites one study that offers tangible substantiation for the
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time is money adage: Participants are asked whether they would

rather receive a small amount of money right now or a greater sum
at some point in the future; their choice is determined by the
variation in waiting time. Those offered $1 today or $50 next week
tend to choose the latter, since the time is short enough and the
monetary difference substantial enough to justify the wait; those
offered $45 today or $50 next week tend to choose the former,
since the $5 difference is hardly worth the wait.
By varying these differences, psychologists were able to discern the
tipping point past which people arent willing to wait around $20.
That is, amounts over $20 triggered participants preference for
instant gratification. But this is where psychological differences
come in. For impulsive people, that barrier of instant gratification
tends to be lower theyll settle for a lesser amount if they can
have the money right now. Wittmann writes:
Impulsive people will accept lesser sums of money, whatever the
waiting time involved, so they do not have to wait. With more
impulsive subjects, the value of $50 decreases more sharply
because of the waiting period. One may affirm that more
impulsive peoples experience of time that is, the way they
imagine it is subjectively longer; that is why they opt for
immediate payment, even when sums are lower. Such behavior
exemplifies one definition of impulsivity: immediate, positive gain
is valued more highly, despite the long-term consequences. This
understanding of impulsivity also matches behavior displayed by
children and adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD). This group, like impulsive people in general, shows a
greater tendency not to value deferred gratification; such
individuals content themselves with lesser sums so they do not
need to wait. Thus, impulsive people display greater temporal
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myopia.
These tendencies, Wittmann points out, are a function of our

individual temporal orientation each of us weighs the past,
present, and future differently, and makes decisions accordingly.
(On how one orients himself to the moment, Henry Miller wrote in
contemplating the art of living, depends the failure or fruitfulness of
it.) Wittman writes:
Studies have demonstrated the ways that a persons temporal
orientation affects everyday behavior. People who are
unambiguously present-oriented, for example, stand out insofar
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as they live relatively dangerously: they tend to take more drugs,

get more speeding tickets, have more unprotected sex, and so
on. It sounds like the motto of rock stars in the sixties: Live fast,
love hard, die young. The attitude toward life expressed in these
words is surely to be understood as a reaction to the futureorientation that otherwise prevailed at the time, as a perceived
lack of spontaneity and lust for life. Sensation-seeking
pursuing distraction and new experiences is related to both
impulsiveness and present-orientedness, even if it is not quite the
same thing as either. That said, orientation in the present proves
essential for achieving a positive quality of life This perspective
acquires a negative quality only when it becomes too pronounced
and the individual in question loses the capacity to act freely
inasmuch as she or he cannot break out of the present moment
and plan for the future.
Indeed, lest we forget, all polarities are inherently limiting a
balanced life, Wittmann notes, requires both impulsivity and
self-control. The great French artist Eugne Delacroix intuited this
when he wrote in his diary two centuries ago: I must never put off
for a better day something that I could enjoy doing now. Wittmann
offers a psychological substantiation:
People who meticulously pay attention to every entry in their
calendars and are largely trapped by the future perspective
those who are always working toward a goal forgo
opportunities for experience. Time that is felt and lived, that is, a
life rich in positive experiences, is made up of moments of
fulfillment, often in the company of good friends or a beloved
partner. Therefore, whether one lives out the moment or pursues
gain over the long term is a matter of emotionally intelligent
conduct and weighing decisions. Someone who is free and full of
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life does not always choose to delay gratification; rather, she or

he is smart about when to seek enjoyment and when to wait.
In the remainder of the immensely insightful Felt Time, translated
by Erik Butler, Wittmann goes on to explore the temporal dimension
of emotional control, the crucial difference between our prospective
and retrospective judgments of time, and how we can use the
psychology of time to our advantage in extending and expanding
our experience of life. Complement it with Virginia Woolf on the
elasticity of time, Rebecca Goldstein on how Einstein and Gdel
shaped our experience of it, and Sarah Manguso on the
ongoingness of life.
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The Psychology of Time and the Paradox of How Impulsivity and Sel...

The Psychology of Time and the

Reality is never and nowhere more accessible than in the

Discus chronologicus, a German depiction of time from the early 1720s,

One of Wittmanns most pause-giving points has to do with how

results from the acceleration of social processes. Through

Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice in Wonderland

photograph rather than the experience itself. Four decades before

time is money adage: Participants are asked whether they would

These tendencies, Wittmann points out, are a function of our

as they live relatively dangerously: they tend to take more drugs,

life does not always choose to delay gratification; rather, she or

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