Jo Marchant

The more accurately we try and measure time, the more efficiently we try and use our time, the more we're trying to pack in, the less time people feel they have.

So this is why it's called time famine.

So we're living longer than ever, and yet people feel like they haven't got enough time.

They're always rushed.

For me, now is where we meet the world.

It's our meeting with the world.

And what's so intriguing about it to me is that from a scientific, a purely objective scientific point of view, there isn't really any now that we can pin down.

So physicists, since Einstein was with his theory of relativity, would say there is no cosmic now.

There is no universal moment of happening throughout the universe that two events could be happening at the same time or not, depending on the observer.

So now it's more like a perspective, if you like.

It's something that's within us.

And then if you look at it from a neuroscience perspective as well, even if there was a now perspective,

Stuff happening right now out there in the world.

By the time we experience that, it takes a certain fraction of a second for that information to reach us for those events.

So you're experiencing everything with a slight delay.

It feels like now, but it isn't the same now as for the person that was speaking and different moments.

senses as well work at different speeds sight and sound travel at different speeds through the air and our brain then processes them at different speeds so you've got all this information coming in and it's delayed it's out of sync and yet we can still experience what's happening around us as this unified now so again i think that's telling us that now is something that we create within us rather than something that's just simply given to us from the outside world

Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it?

Because there's a lot of research showing that your sense of time, that the way that we bring our different time scales and our past, present and future into a moment.

So all of everything you've learned through your life, all of your experiences, all of your memories and everything that you're expecting to the future, all of that is being brought into each moment.