Jean Paul Zogby - The Power of Time Perception: Control the Speed of Time to Slow Down Aging, Live a Long Life, and Make Every Second Count

It was late spring and the last day of school was finally upon us. I was probably around eight years old and, like any school boy at that age, I eagerly awaited the start of the summer holiday. That school year, like every other, seemed like it would never end. Those last few minutes of the last class seemed to take an eternity. The slow crawling clock hanging on the wall had surely been placed there just to taunt us! Time always seemed to drag when I was waiting for something nice to happen. But then the bell of salvation finally rang and summer break began. Three months of sunny days, fun, and adventures.

Do you remember how your childhood summers never seemed to end? For me, it was like an eternity. I grew up in a house situated at the edge of a village in the beautiful Mount Lebanon, overlooking a dense forest of very tall pine and oak trees. We would spend the summers playing in flowery fields, climbing rocks and trees, creeping inside foxhole caves, and following nearby creeks before their streams dried out in the blazing summer sun. The days adventures would start in early morning and go on until sunset, interrupted only by my mother's call for lunch. By the end of each day, morning seemed like a distant memory. And so the summer days extended on and on so that by the time we were back at school we practically had to learn how to read and write all over again!

Fast-forward 40 years to the present day and I am, again, eagerly awaiting my summer break. This year, like most recent years, flew by, and I am hoping for a nice long vacation. But two weeks on a beach resort are over in a flash. I return to work, to my daily and weekly routine. The days are spent in the office, a couple of evenings at the gym, a night out with some friends, and another for a family dinner. Before I know it, the week is over and it is time to start all over again. The weeks and months fly by, with each year feeling shorter.

Our perception of the speed of time has always intrigued me. Physics tell us that time progresses at the same rate, but that is not how it feels. Time seems to speed up as we grow older. We find ourselves saying things like: How is it nearly Christmas again? Has it really been already four years since the last Football World Cup? There are, of course, many things other than age that affect our perception of time. Why does time fly when we are having fun and why does it drag when we are bored? Why does time seem to stand still during a car crash?

For a long time, the nagging question in my mind has been: is there a way to slow time to the speed it ran at when we were young? This book is about the psychology of time and how we subjectively perceive time, rather than how it is defined by physicists. It is about what seems to speed it up or slow it down, and the things we can do to extend a moment of bliss or shorten a moment of pain. It is about making a vacation last longer, or looking back at a week or year and being satisfied that it was time well spent. It is also about the limited time we spend on this rock that is floating in space. It is about the few decades that make up our life, and how limited and precious they are. The ultimate purpose of this book is to make you aware of your own time, so you can live longer.

I was driven to write this book in my early 20s, following the passing of my father to a long fight with cancer. With a family history of cancer, I thought my turn might come sooner rather than later. Having grown up during the 16-year Lebanese Civil War, I was all the more mindful of death. I was among the fortunate ones, but I experienced the horror of seeing some of our closest friends perish. I felt an urge to do something with the limited time I have.

I knew that medical science had advanced life expectancy at phenomenal speedsthe average life span for the cavemen was around 26 years; in 1850, life expectancy was around 44 years; it is currently 71 years, and is projected to jump to 150 years by 2100! But obviously I cannot wait for thatI want to slow down time now . As the great professor Richard Dawkins writes, After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades, we must close our eyes again. Isnt it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

I have spent the last six years researching the subject of time perception and interviewing neuroscientists in order to understand how we perceive time and what we can do to slow it down. I have found some fascinating and bizarre experiments that scientists have undertaken to understand time and how we perceive it. These range from putting rats on cocaine, heating the brain to unbearable temperatures, pushing students from high platforms, and confronting them with scary spiders! Through this book, you will explore ways to control your perception of how time flows, ways to use it more efficiently, and how to avoid a sense of frustration or doom that it is running out.

It is natural to feel threatened by or helpless towards that which we cannot control. But if we learn how to control our sense of time, it will no longer be our enemy. My hope is that by the end of this book, you will have the knowledge to, in the words of the great poet Rudyard Kipling, fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run. After all, we only live once and the least we can do is attempt to make every second count.