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under estimated the minute passing, feeling that after 40 seconds it must surelybe over). However it was possible that instead of time speeding up after the dive, their anxiety might have slowed time down before the dive and that this might be the explanation for the discrepancy in the before and after timings. So he relocated his experiment to the warm waters off Cyprus and devised a task where the divers’ body temperatures would barely change, but which was extra stressful, due to the inclusion of the explosions. In the experiment in Cyprus there was hardly any difference in the speed of their counting, before and after the dive, supporting his original idea that it was temperature that was changing the perception of time in the Welsh divers, not anxiety. 16
    Three decades earlier the wife of an American psychologist called Hudson Hoagland was lying in bed with flu. Although her husband was caring for her kindly, she complained that whenever she needed him he seemed to be absent from the room for long periods. In reality he was only away from her for a few minutes at a time. Wondering whether her experience of time was askew, he took the opportunity to conduct an experiment on time perception and body temperature. Her fever was causing extreme fluctuations in her body temperature so every time the thermometer gave a new reading, he asked her to count the seconds passing until she reached one minute, all the while monitoring her accuracy with a stopwatch. And just to be on the safe side, at each temperature he persuaded her to perform the counting task five more times, meaning that in the space of 48 hours his ailing wife took part in 30 trials for the experiment. 17
    He discovered that not only was she a very patient patient, agreeing to his constant requests for her to spend a minute counting without knowing why, but that the higher her temperature, the sooner she thought a minute had passed. When her temperature reached 103 degrees, time had slowed to the extent that she thought a whole minute had passed after just 34 seconds.
    Hoagland must have possessed strong powers of persuasion because for his next experiment he convinced a student to submit to diathermy – that is for his body to be wrapped up tightly and then artificially raised to 38.8 degrees using an electric current. Bearing in mind that a body temperature of 40 degrees would be considered a potentially life-threatening emergency, the student was unsurprisingly rather anxious, which Hoagland remarked rendered his initial time estimations somewhat erratic. Once the student had managed to relax, his perceptions of time were altered in the same way they were for Hoagland’s wife. As his temperature rose, time decelerated. Hoagland tested just two people, but Baddeley’s later work with the divers confirmed that body temperature can warp our experience of time.
    FIVE TIMES A DAY FOR 45 YEARS
    The discovery of the next factor that can slow down time required great dedication, something this field of study does seem to engender. Robert B. Sothern is a biologist who has been taking a series of measurements every single day since 1967. Five times a day he estimates the passage of a minutewithout looking at a clock; measures his blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate; tests his eye-hand co-ordination and rates his mood and vigour. For 19 years he even co-opted his parents to help with the task and for several decades he also recorded data on the strength of his grip and the volume of his urine. It all began after he volunteered to travel from the United States to Germany to take part in an experiment where he lived underground for three weeks without any means of keeping time. This experience gave him the idea of investigating how his rhythms changed as he aged, using that most willing of participants – himself. Where else could you find a subject so motivated and conscientious that they let neither holiday nor illness disrupt the research process?