TED Radio Hour - How we experience time

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

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, music director Robert Franz and the late-psychologist Philip Zimbardo. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted See 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

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From TED and NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. 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 Pattern, Anderson had in 2007 while she was living in Iceland. Yeah, so I made an artwork where I put a microphone deep inside a melting glacier in Iceland,

Vatna Yuckel. Vatna Yuckel is the largest glacier in Iceland. It covers around 10% of the country, and it is ancient. 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. And Katie wanted people to be able to hear it. 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 in 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. I have to ask, how the heck did you get the microphone inside the glacier? 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. 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? 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. The glacier was busy. 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. And 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. Through glaciers, stars, the universe. Much of Katie Patterson's artwork explores deep time. 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.

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 Patterson's artwork often encourages us to think more broadly about the thousands and millions of years that came before we were born and how space and time interact, as she did with a project called Earth Moon Earth. 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 or Moon bounce.

And it's a really, you know, 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, this is real? This is crazy. But I love the idea of beaming,

and using the moon as this kind of transmitter 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. 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 the AECGs and, you know, the different tones and even the treble clefts

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

and not all of the notes came back what you hear now is the sonata 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 depth of space and time 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.

It's really beautiful. Thank you. Let's turn to a newer piece of yours. There lay the days between. Tell us about this one. 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.

Two trillion. 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 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. How many spaces did you leave

then? Yeah, it's got another several trillion spaces left. 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. Yeah, it is. It's like a flipping alarm clock, but it's telling you the kind of cosmic time of the Earth history and at sunrise every day, wherever the artwork is, it goes up one number according to that day, that day's sunrise. So you have this kind of rattling of the flip numbers turning and then stopping at one more sunrise. I found it disturbing. I was like, that's it? Just two trillion? It was something very weird to see it in numbers. 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 expanse of time, it's still got its own lifespan that has a beginning and it has a posited end. 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. Yeah, I mean, I pivot between finding it like wondrous, you know, that we live in this huge, 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. sort of one second on the huge cosmic clock. But I find that quite comforting. I kind of find it gives me some rootedness to feel like here we are part of this, you know, enormous expanse of time and how incredible to be part of that. 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. This idea of connecting to sort of the deep core of our being is something we don't usually make time for. 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 looking up to the sky or even looking at leaf in detail and I'm 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 can really help us connect to something much larger and that's a really good feeling. That's artist Katie Patterson. You can see her TED Talk at TED.com. On the show today, how we experience time. I'm Manus Zamarote and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi. 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. A lot of people have experienced a state of flow, you know, where time just disappears. This is cognitive neuroscientist Irena Arslanoba. 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. 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? 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. From the heart, but also from the God 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. 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. 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 interreception and the sense of time. Here's Irena Arsla. Here's Irana, Arsla 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 interception. And one example of interception is the perception of our own heart. Yes, the heart. 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. Irrena 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. 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 become 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.

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

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. These could be sounds, images of simple shapes, images of people showing different emotions. Some were flashed on the heartbeat. Others were flashed in between heartbeats. And what we found was that stimuli that occurred during heart's contraction were perceived to last shorter than stimuli that occurred between the beat. when the heart was relaxed.

What this means is that the momentary state of the cart caused time to contract and expand within each heartbeat. 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. Why am I so excited about this finding? 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. I'm just thinking about like when I'm about to go into an important meeting and maybe I get a little tense. My heart rate definitely goes up and therefore you have found that time seems to move faster. Did I get that right? 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 pretty fast. So for me, time is moving much faster. 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 fuel your brain. It's really dynamic. It is. It is. It's also really subjective. And that's why 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. 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 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 are so externally oriented in some ways. So it's really when you're attending to time, when you're

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 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. Is that why people then say, you know, take a very long, deep breath, try and listen to your body? 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 and if that actually improves how much information you can take in. Irena Arslanova is a cognitive neuroscientist at Royal Holloway University of London. You can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, how we experience time. So music is all about keeping time. The beats within a measure every five. 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. I stand on the podium, conduct a two-hour concert. It feels like two minutes. 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 Dvorjec's cello concerto. 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. I love that. You were the star of your own show. That's so great. I had the whole thing. I had the audience.

I had the concerto. I had everything was done. 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? Well, it's complicated. It's fancy. It's boring.

It's just not something. Yet some people are used to, like, engaging with. And I think part of it, Manus, 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.

So I said, here's how these tools work. They're kind of like screens, screens that you would hold up 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.

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. 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 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. Okay, we're going to play a little bit of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto number one. I find this very energizing.

It gives me like, I'm like, let's go. Okay, so let me tell you why that is, Manu. 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.

D-d-d-d-d-d-d-dim-pump-d-d-ba-ba. And so it's taking your heart rate and it's like replicating it almost. 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. 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.

Sorry, officer, it was just Bach. That's exactly right. Yeah, Bach did it. Okay, so that piece matches your heartbeat. Okay, we're going to listen to now something you suggested that's a little bit different. And it's Stravinsky's right of spring, which has a different effect. Kind of stops me in my tracks, actually. I'm like, what is going on?

That's exactly right. So the rhythm is so disjunct, and it's actually a 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, okay, that's why I felt the way I did. That's kind of cool. And I mean, I know many people have seen this right and heard the right of spring performed live. And yes, it's disjunct and it goes against your heartbeat, but it's incredibly exciting because of the chaos. In a minute, more of Bob's tools and how active listening can shape our sense of time. We'll talk about Chikovsky's iconic melodies, Debussy's, soundscapes, and even hear a little Sinatra. On the show today, how we perceive time. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Back in a sec. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Shomerodi.

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. The second tool is melody. Now, we think of a melody as a tune that you can sing, and that's very, very, very important. very much a standard kind of concept of how a melody works.

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 Ilius Chikovsky. 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. 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. I never made that connection until I saw your TED Talk. I was like, oh, yeah, they do sound the same. They're exactly the same. Will this be moon?

Love, nothing but moon love. 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, would in an angstful 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. So what are the qualities that you're listening for when you are dissecting a melody? 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. Chikovsky was one of those composers that could write melodies that people would remember forever. People were just smitten. with whatever the newest Chikovsky melody was. So people would come here, like say, the world premiere of his fifth symphony and would think, okay, 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. Okay.

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

Okay, so let's put Bob's third tool to use with the second movement of Debussy's The Sea, Play of the Waves. Would it be too simplistic to say, Robert, that Debussy is creating kind of a vibe, as the kids would say? 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. I will tell you that if you look at the score to La Mere or the C by WC, 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. So for the last of the tools that you concocted for your dad, Bob, you recommended that he watch the orchestra. Obviously, we can't do that right now. But what should people? people look for when they're at a concert? So I'll tell you a story that exemplifies this. Okay.

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 we're aware completely 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 on stage, 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. Well, that is preplanned and it's preplans 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. Percussion family is another interesting group of people on stage because they have so many different instruments and the way they coordinate from one side to the other is really pretty extraordinary. 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. 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 you, me sort of play into it because it's very powerful. What I can tell you is that at the end of the concert, my dad came back stitch and I said to him, hey, what did you think? He goes, it was good. It was really good. I said, okay, did you like the piece? He goes, yeah, the only problem was it was too short. I said, well, dad, it was a 30-minute piece. He said, yeah, but I just worked through all four-year tools and the piece was, the piece was over. 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, and boom, away you'll go. That was Robert Frans. He is the music director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in Ontario. You can see his full talk at TED.

We want to close our show with a look back at a TED speaker who recently passed away. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo died in October. He 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 one, two, three, prison study, August 18. It became one of the most significant and. controversial psychological studies of the 20th century, bringing together 24 college students. I randomly assigned them. Half is going to be guards, have it 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. 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 and what he called the Lucifer effect, how people's surroundings and power can warp their actions. 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 a possibility to do the most wonderful, kind things, and the most awful, cruel things to be caring or indifferent. 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 psychologist Philip Zimbardo on the TED stage in 2009. 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 non-consciously.

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. 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 format, we're going to call them present-oriented 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 presence, 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. You can focus on past positive or past negative. You can be present hedonistic, namely you're focused 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 in future, and moderate on present hedonism, and always low on past negative and present fatalism. 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 hedonism is that the present hedonism is that you connect to the

is the energy. The energy to explore yourself, places, people, sensuality. Any time perspective in excess has more negatives than positives. So what a future 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. It affects their health. And they live for work, achievement, and control. I'm sure that resonates to some of their testers 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 hedonism, I've added a focus on the past positive. 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 school kids, combating addictions, enhancing teen health, curing vets PTSD with time metaphors, 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.

The idea is so simple, so obvious, but I think consequences are really profound. Thank you so much. 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 Falckel. Nair White, Katie Montalione, Kai McNamee, and Fiona Giron.

It was edited by Sanaz Meshkampur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahousie, Harsha Nahada, and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray, Quasi Lee, and Tiffany Vera Castro. Our theme music was written by Romteen Ara Bluey. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Highlash, Alejandra Salazar, and Danielle Ballerzzo. I'm Manusse Zamorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.