Human conceptualizations of time are essentially metaphoric. In many languages, words and constructions describing location or motion in space are also used to describe relations in time. For example, English has expressions like:
(1) The deadline is approaching.
(2) It’s going to rain tomorrow.
These constructions are licensed by the conceptual metaphor time is space. The prevalence of such constructions cross-linguistically suggests that there may be universal cognitive processes motivating uses of the time is space conceptual metaphor. Lakoff (1993) goes so far as to argue for a biologically determined account of the tendency to understand time in terms of space:
In our visual systems, we have detectors for motion and detectors for objects/locations. We do not have detectors for time (whatever that could mean). Thus, it makes good biological sense that time should be understood in terms of things and motion.
Our ability to understand and express temporal relations is interwoven with our ability to understand and express spatial relations. The time is space metaphor allows us to imagine the abstract nature of time as if it had the concrete properties of space. So what happens when everyone is supposed to stop moving through space?
Lockdown, quarantine, social distancing, remote work, unemployment, and travel restrictions have dramatically changed how we relate spatially. Covid-19 spatial norms inaugurate a new anti-sociality complete with new temporalities and time senses, the full consequences of which are yet unknown. A brief analysis suggests that limitations on spatial mobility and social gatherings may be the catalyst for a set of degenerative social and cognitive processes.
Not going places makes it difficult to segment continuous sensory experience into discrete episodic events for storage in long-term memory. Further, as the monotonous predictability of lockdown home life is punctuated by news of preventable death, rising levels of risk, and economic decline, it becomes difficult to project a coherent future-self identity. Even as we enter 2021 it may be difficult to formulate goals and explain what we’ve been doing during 2020.
Our collective affect—some measure of distress, disengagement, and depression—is not simply the result of a highly contagious virus or a future that has become increasingly complex and unpredictable. In fact, our affect is the result of the viral spread of a contextually impoverished time sense. Those experiencing it are not going places. Rather they live in an extended present—an increasingly thick slice of the now.
People frequently think of and describe the body as a machine complete with an ‘internal clock.’ Despite the conceptual centrality of time as that constant which can be consistently and accurately measured by a clock, human senses of time are multiple, flexible, and overlapping. The clock as a technological apparatus unsuccessfully represents our embodied senses of time.
We understand that any objectively measured duration of time may be lengthened or shortened in subjective experience depending on factors like our level of awareness and the amount or density of information processed. Time passes quite slowly during dangerous and stressful events when heightened levels of awareness are typically paired with large amounts of new and contextually rich information. Routinization, on the other hand, usually speeds the subjective passage of time with lowered levels of awareness and smaller amounts of predictable information.
Covid-19 temporality is the result of an irregular combination or mismatch of these factors. In Covid-19 time, heightened levels of awareness are paired with highly local, individual, and routinized activity. Meanwhile, we process increasingly large amounts of low density, contextually deficient, repetitive information. Fear, boredom, and scrolling. This mismatch produces conflicting pressures on our perception of time with potentially significant consequences for memory formation and our ability to imagine the future.
Many experimental studies in cognitive psychology have confirmed the important role that spatial boundaries play in event segmentation and memory formation. In short, the architecture of the environment interacts with the ‘architecture’ of cognition. Contextual information is integrated into memory—changes in spatial context influence memory encoding and its effectiveness (Radvansky & Copeland 2006).
For example, Radvansky et. al (2010) tested the effect of moving through a doorway on memory formation for simple objects. Participants were presented with a series of common objects and then asked to recall the objects and the order of presentation. Members of the control group were tested in the same room where the encoding event took place while members of the experimental group were tested in a different room (i.e., after moving through a doorway). Participants performed significantly better when the spatial context was not changed.
This result and others show how our minds associate temporal boundaries with spatial boundaries—the location updating effect for event segmentation. A new event representation is constructed each time we move into a new spatial context and information from the previous event/space becomes less directly accessible.
It’s easy to understand how days, weeks, months, or even years of not going anywhere could come to be represented as a single undifferentiated event. Our notions of personal development and identity are challenged without the justification that event boundaries provide. It’s much easier to answer the question “What did you do today?” when you left your house that day.
With this view of the direct effect that spatial mobility restrictions have on our ability to segment time and assemble the past in memory, we can now turn to their effect on our ability to imagine the future.
Intuitive understanding and clinical evidence suggest that personal identity or a sense of self is dependent on memory and a subjective feeling of agency concerning behavior in imagined future situations. The sense of self is disturbed when individuals can no longer recall personal experiences that helped shape their identity (e.g., patients with Alzheimer’s disease) and when perceptions of personal agency are severely limited.
Semantic Dementia (SD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by a progressive loss of the ability to access the meaning of words, perceptions, and concepts. Hsiao et. al (2013) report on a patient with SD and depression, arguing that his suicidal ideation and attempts were not the direct result of SD but rather the indirect result of his inability to imagine himself doing familiar activities in the future.
[The patient] complained of a decreased sense of being human, because he could not imagine doing things in the future that he had done in the past. The patient could return to the past and visualize himself in familiar scenarios, but he could not visualize himself even passively in these scenarios in the future.
The patient’s asymmetrical time sense and its negative psychological side-effects are startlingly relatable today. The asymmetry of his cognitive abilities concerning existent models is visible in the level of specificity of his drawings of animals when he was provided an image to copy relative to the non-specific drawing he produced when he was prompted to draw whatever animal he wanted. (See below).
Although he was able to copy images of particular animals at a typical level of specificity, he was cognitively unable to draw any animal without a model because he was unable to imagine himself doing so. Interestingly, he continued to report suicidal ideation after his depression subsided due to the loss of his ability to imagine himself in the future.
Clearly relevant to individual memory and identity formation, time senses also interact with notions of work and leisure at collective scales. Thompson (1967) emphasizes this point, describing how educational and religious ideologies, the division and supervision of labor, bells and clocks, fines and incentives, and the suppression of traditional community events including feasts, harvests, fairs, and sporting events contributed to the formation of new labor habits and a new sense of industrial time-discipline in Western Europe and elsewhere from the 14th century onwards. He concludes:
If men are to meet both the demands of a highly-synchronized automated industry, and of greatly enlarged areas of “free time”, they must somehow combine in a new synthesis elements of the old and of the new, finding an imagery based neither upon the seasons nor upon the market but upon human occasions.
In other words, we can adapt to the layering of Earthly rhythms, clock time, and other emergent time senses only when they are grounded in human, social occasions. We seem to be moving further and further from Thompson’s imagined synthesis as it is no longer considered safe or healthy to share social space.
We might learn from the gradual spread of industrial time discipline during the industrial revolution what to expect now as this spatially deficient time sense spreads. One significant feature of both is that they appeal to scientific rationalism, claiming to represent the only reasonable next step in the inevitable advancement of technology, consciousness, and economic growth.
Clocks and watches remain highly symbolic of such supposed advancements. Sombart (1930) shows how the clock became a symbol of capitalist efficiency and regularity and a justification for the existence of God. God as the necessary clockmaker, God as the scientific inventor of time, God as the technological entrepreneur.
If modern economic rationalism is like the mechanism of a clock, someone must be there to wind it up.
New spatial norms have brought the inconsistency between embodied perceptions of time and what the clock says into sharp relief. There is no better moment to challenge the clock’s symbolic value, thereby calling into question the principles of capitalist extraction and accumulation that have been with us since the industrial revolution. Only in this way can our understanding of time be accurately polyvocal with organic, mechanic, and digital senses of time existing in a dynamic, layered, and overlapping conceptual assemblage.
Koestler (1968) describes the complexity of biological organisms as a function of their sensitivity to the conditions of their material, spatial environment.
All living organisms…are ‘open systems’; that is to say, they maintain their complex forms and functions through continuous exchanges of energies and materials with their environment. Instead of ‘running down’ like a mechanical clock that dissipates its energy through friction, the living organism is constantly ‘building up’ more complex substances from the substances it feeds on, more complex forms of energy from the energies it absorbs, and more complex patterns of information…perceptions, feelings, thoughts…from the input of its receptor organs.
It may seem trite to point out that it takes time to move through space. Less obvious and more difficult to capture gracefully in description is the reverse—it takes space to move through time.
Bibliography
Hsiao, J.J., Kaiser, N., Fong, S.S., Mendez, M.F., (2013). Suicidal behavior and loss of the future self in semantic dementia. Cogn. Behav. Neurol. 26, 85–92.
Koestler, A. (1968). The Ghost in the Machine. Macmillan.
Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (2nd ed., p. 202-250). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Radvansky, G. A., & Copeland, D. E. (2006). Walking through doorways causes forgetting. Memory & Cognition, 34, 1150–1156.
Radvansky, G. A., Tamplin, A. K., & Krawietz, S. A. (2010). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Environmental integration. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 900–904.
Sombart, W. (1930). Capitalism, Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (New York, 1953 ed.), vol. iii, p. 205.
Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, Work discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, Past and Present 38: 56-9