Can I grow a sense of time?
Can I grow a sense of time?
Arnab Chakravarty tried to do just that, with the help of technology.
Arnab Chakravarty was late for our meeting. I messaged him, and he promptly hurried over.
I wanted to talk with him because I’d read an excellent article he’d written about time, and I knew that he was a member of something called Clock Club, which is basically a bunch of “time nerds” as he said.
I immediately forgave him for being late.
“I have something called time blindness,” he told me. “I have zero perception of how time flows. I have to have everything on my calendar, or written down—my life is regimented through alarms and signals.”
This is not a matter of simply ignoring the clock—it’s more nuanced.
“Some people have a very good sense of time,” he said. “They know when 20 or 30 minutes have passed. And they lose themselves when they’re working or watching a movie. For me it’s the opposite: when I’m in a focused task, my sense of time is incredible. At other times I’m so scattered.”
I knew that Chakravarty knows the science behind this, from reading his article.
“I’m pretty sure it comes from the fact that I was a premature baby, and I was in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for almost a month. NICUs in India at that time kept the lights on all the time. And when a baby is born, its circadian rhythm is established by the lighting-dark cycle.
“Not only that, but there’s a temporal nature to touch. Often you’re being held at specific times. So your brain becomes entrained: darkness equals no touch. A lot of it is still not completely understood, but it’s now emerging that a lot of premature babies have these kinds of disorders. And many NICUs now adjust their lighting.”
Time and touch—this was a new insight to me. There’s more.
“Time blindness often gets conflated with ADHD,” he went on. “They’re adjacent but not the same thing. There’s a whole body of research from the past five to ten years in chronobiology, but we still don’t know a lot about what time blindness means.
“I read a very evocative article a couple months ago about how a lot of people with ADHD are desynchronised—out of time. A lot of ADHD folks use a lot of alarms, like I do. Sometimes they can be as short as two or three minutes.
“Here’s a simple example. When you have tinnitus, basically your ears and your brain signals don’t match. When you have motion sickness, your vestibular system and your brain don’t match.
“Similarly, with time blindness, it’s like a loss of signal in your perception of time. No one understands the mechanisms—it’s a huge laboratory. But essentially there’s a cue missing between the brain and the sensor.”
For conditions like tinnitus and time blindness, he explained how research has shown that if you amplify the signals—sounds, or temporal cues—and make them more apparent, this enables the neuroplasticity of the brain to start to recognise and build patterns.
Talking about senses and sensors, and a sense of time, took on new meaning in this conversation, because Chakravarty is a designer and creative technologist. He got into time and clocks while at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he learned to program and prototype.
He therefore took charge of his condition by creating some technological interventions.
Programming your day
We were sitting upstairs at the Barbican Centre in London, overlooking the terrace. The sunset was reflected in Chakravarty’s Ray Bans, which he wore throughout most of our meeting.
“I realised that in India, I was dependent on the sun a lot,” he remembered. “Then I moved to New York, where in winter the sun might go down at 3 p.m. And I’m like, ‘Is it 3? Is it 5, is it 7, is it 11?’
“So my question was, can I grow a sense of time?”
This started a chain of experimentation.
“I used the artificial lighting in my house to change on cue—adjusting the level and the colour temperature. We now know more about how different colors of like affect us.
“First I experimented with what kind of change I notice when I change the lighting. Twenty minutes turned out to be a sweet spot for me. Any less, and things were changing too fast. I was a student, so my schedule was flexible, and I was home a lot.”
This enabled him to see a rhythm to his day—or at least the general block of time he was in. Most of us make sense of time through our chosen rhythms.
“And I could program what kind of a day I wanted,” he went on. “The lighting could change either very dramatically or very slowly. I might want to wake up, bum around a bit, do some work, have lunch. I still miss lunch a lot, unless I set an alarm. Lunch, stopping working, and going to bed were like hard deadlines; the others were soft.”
This was an interesting enough experiment. But then Covid hit. In lockdown, Chakravarty was able to extend it over a longer period.
“And I was like, ‘This actually works,’” he said. “It wasn’t a scientific study, but I didn’t have the same kind of worries about whether it’s 5 p.m. or 11 p.m. And I still use it.”
TV time
The second experiment was how to identify days of the week. Is it Sunday, Saturday, or what?
“I went back to my childhood,” Chakravarty explained, “when the TV in India was still a fairly new thing. We didn’t have cable TV, just a few channels, and everyone watched them.“
The TV was also a communal experience. “The neighbourhood kids would gather together to watch.
“As a kid, when I was out playing, if I was on my way home, if I heard Who Wants to be a Millionaire? on someone’s TV, I knew I was late!”
Champions League Football meant 1 a.m. Australia-India test matches meant 4:30 a.m.
“So I asked my family and friends to write down a particular TV show for particular days,” he went on. “And I made a very slow-moving TV. I fetched free program stills from the streams and YouTube, and the image changed every 30 seconds.
“It’s not really about looking at TV, just about it being on in the background, and over time your brain would start getting used to it. I call these ‘soft signals’ in your environment that nudge you, to entrain patterns subconsciously.”
Haptic time
Surely AI could play a role here, given its pattern recognition capabilities?
“I had a grand idea of generating it with AI back then,” Chakravarty tells me. “It’s probably possible now. But at the moment I’m exploring whether I can do it with haptics. Because what I can do with light, I can do with vibrations. What is a pleasurable vibration that I could stand for a while?
“But at my job [working on surgical robotics], I discovered something called haptic fatigue. If you bombard someone with a lot of haptic input, after a while they stop registering it.”
I thought of the Durr, a watch without a face that vibrates every five minutes. I tried it for a day—it got annoying pretty quickly. But the idea was an interesting, as an alternative clock.
“I want to build on all that work,” says Chakravarty. “Sometimes I want five minutes, sometimes 30. It’s like programming a metronome for your own body.
“Women are more in touch with their bodies because of their hormonal cycles. But a lot of this connection between time and touch is not well understood. But there’s enough research to show that if you feed a brain a consistent signal, and it will start to make sense of it. I’m curious to see what other senses I can grow!”
So his experiments will continue.
“As a designer I’m in a job with a fairly flexible schedule. If I was a producer or project manager, forget it! I do my best work between midnight and 4 a.m. I thought it was just because was a night owl, but some chronobiologists told me that it’s also the sensory deprivation at those hours actually helps your body calm down and focus.”
Does the idea of time blindness resonate with you? Would you like to see more on time and clock experiments? Get in touch!