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prematurely, without considering the consequences. While many of us strive to live more in the present, these children live too much in the present.
    If ADHD is a disorder of time perception, could you somehow change a child’s relationship with time and in turn reduce the symptoms of ADHD? At the moment therapeutic intervention tends to focus on inhibition and helping children to think before they act, but Katya Rubia plans to develop a form of cognitive behavioural therapy where children are taught how to wait and how to delay. This is something I’ll come back to in Chapter Five. The difficulty is this: if a child experiences the passage of time in an unusual way, teaching them to wait won’t eliminate the fundamental problem. They might learn to tolerate the aching slowness of time, but if a five-minute delay feels likean hour, then it always will. They might be able to learn not to behave impatiently, but to them wouldn’t it still feel like an agony of time? Here Katya is optimistic that the brain’s plasticity is such that if she can teach them to behave differently, then this could eventually have an impact on the brain and on time perception itself. She has already demonstrated that Ritalin, the drug commonly used to treat the symptoms of ADHD, does improve time perception and the estimation of milliseconds. Perhaps learning to wait would give children the opportunity to learn to judge a time interval more accurately. As Katya told me, ‘If you never wait, you probably don’t learn to estimate a time interval properly.’
    To sum up: so far it is clear that ADHD, extreme fear, rejection, boredom and depression can all lead to the sensation that time is slowing down. The next situation which can dilate time is altogether more surprising.
    DIVING FOR TIME
    There were fourteen scuba divers in all – six amateurs and eight Royal Engineers. It was a hot August day in Famagusta Bay in Cyprus in the mid-1960s. The resort was fast becoming the place to be seen. New hotels were appearing; ready to accommodate the rich and famous on holiday. Archaeological excavations in the long arc of sand were slowly revealing a perfect oblong of pillars outlining the site where an old gymnasium stood, until, according to legend, in the fourth century BC the king burned down his Palace of Salamis rather than submit to the Egyptians.But the 14 scuba divers were not here to admire the archaeological sites, nor even the grouper fish and Spanish lobsters under the water. They were here to take part in a study on time. At the start of the experiment, each diver sat with a thermometer in his mouth while his pulse was taken. Then, without counting, he had to guess when a minute had elapsed. Next a Royal Engineer handed him a one-ounce charge of gun cotton and lit the fuse. The diver’s job was to take the fuse, swim down 15 feet to place it on one of the many shipwrecks submerged beneath the waters of Famagusta Bay and then return to the surface to wait for the explosion. Then the initial routine of sitting on the deck while his pulse and temperature were taken and estimating the passing of a minute was repeated. But here was the catch. The divers were instructed that if the charge did not explode within a few minutes they were to dive back down to the shipwreck to retrieve the gun cotton. These explosions were genuine, so not surprisingly this injected an element of anxiety into the experiment. It was conducted by Alan Baddeley, who was later to become one of Britain’s most eminent researchers in the field of memory. He was in Cyprus to follow up an experiment he had conducted one March day in the cold waters off the coast of Wales. He had discovered (no surprises here) that the divers were colder after their dive, and that the colder they were, the longer they estimated one minute to be. In other words for them time felt as though it were going fast (if this sounds strange to you, remember that if time had felt slow, they would have