Read Time Warped for Free Online

could ask their clients to estimate the duration of the consultation. I wonder whether you could simply ask them to estimate the passing of a minute. If 40 seconds feel like a minute to them, then time is stretching. The more slowly time is passing for that person, the more severe their condition might be.
    Time also decelerates for the most anxious cancer patients. The psychophysicist Marc Wittman has found that they overestimate time intervals and report that time seems to be slowing down. Contemplation of their mortality has directed their attention to the passage of time with the result that it protracts it. 13 In contrast, for patients experiencing conditions involving a break with reality, such as schizophrenia, time can distort in many different ways – appearing to vary in speed, repeat itself or even stop altogether. The Cotard delusion takes this distortion of time perception to extremes. Named after the French neurologist who first described it in 1882, the Cotard delusion is a rare condition of extreme pessimism, beginning with depression and ending in the denial of everything, including possession of the main organs of the body, having a family, a future or even an existence. Back in 1882 Jules Cotard wrote of one of his patients, ‘Stating that she was no longer anything, the patient begged for her veins to be opened up, so that it could be seen that she had no more blood and that her organs no longer existed.’ 14 In a sense this is the ultimate disorder of time. There is no sense of a past or a future, and three-quarters of the patients in the subsequent case reports of this rare condition even believed that they weredead. 15 It is very rare, but, as we’ll see, problems with the perception of time could also be a root of a far more common condition.
    HYPERACTIVE TIME
    He doesn’t sit still. He fidgets. He can’t concentrate. He moves impatiently from one thing to the next, constantly getting distracted. This might sound like the description of any lively child. But there is a big difference. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, do these things far more than other children of the same age and it has been discovered very recently that faulty timing might be the key. Children with ADHD are rooted in the present. They find it hard to consider the consequences of their actions and they find waiting, even for a short time, excruciating. This might be because what feels like five minutes to the rest of us, feels like an hour to them, so when they are told to sit and wait for five minutes this could be a task they find genuinely challenging. In laboratory experiments children with ADHD find timing tasks very difficult. Their experience of time appears to be different from that of other children. If they are asked to say when three seconds have passed they think they’re over in far less than that; in other words if you have ADHD time passes very slowly. This finding is so common in children with ADHD that Katya Rubia, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, has been able to use time estimation tasks to correctly classify 70 per cent of cases, quite a feat considering there arecurrently no conclusive tests for ADHD; current diagnoses rely on experts watching a child’s behaviour and then making a judgement.
    It seems remarkable that the most common childhood disorder, affecting between 3 and 5 per cent of all children, could be down to timing. It manifests itself in various ways. If I were to ask you whether you’d like £100 now or £200 in a month’s time, most of you would go for doubling your money, but for people with ADHD, delayed gratification is unappealing. If children with ADHD are asked to watch for a red light to come on, wait five seconds and then press the button in order to get a prize, they are so keen to press the button that they can’t resist pressing it straight away. Children with ADHD find it very hard to wait and often act