Twixmas

The space in between, quality over quantity, and thinking of the future.

It is the space between Christmas and New Year where time, at least whatever concept of time you have, is weird.

In psychological terms it makes sense that the way we perceive the calendar weeks gets distorted over the festive period as routines shift and change, the things that anchor the start and end of our weeks, the ebb and flow are muddled up or not happening at all.

There’s also something about the countdown, or advent to Christmas that builds up anticipation, only to be followed by a waiting period before the universal fresh start of the New Year that might be distorting our thinking. This space in-between always makes me think the lull in a rollercoaster ride, but research shows that how you perceive time, and how I perceive time are likely to be quite different.

The most obvious way we start to perceive time is through physical and cultural constructs, if you live in a western culture then you’ll be used to calendars, watches and electronic timekeeping, the Monday to Friday working week or weekend activities (swimming lessons or parkrun), that influence the way you think about time. How we visualise future time is intriguing though, I always assumed that everyone had a big, long virtual timeline in their head. My timeline is about to curve back on itself as we start a new year, and I can ‘see’ the months ahead on a linear timeline punctuated by some memorable dates that appear like road signs; Valentines in February, a 10k race we have planned in March, and a family holiday in July.

Perhaps you have mental imagery that is more circular, or like a calendar grid? there are cases of calendar synaesthesia that have been researched by neuroscientists, some people who experience synaesthesia report seeing words and sounds as specific colours or tastes too, and their calendars are as vivid as looking at the real thing hanging on a wall. I suspect that my logical brain, and twenty years of managing complex projects has contributed to the way I form a timeline in my head, although I think I have always ‘seen’ time in this way. So (much to their bewilderment) I asked my mum and sister (via a very scientific WhatsApp message) how they thought of time, to see what our individual differences were.

‘Days I think of like my wall calendar and months are numbers to me. So, September is 9’ [Mum]

‘Probably an outlook calendar’ [Sister]

Then I asked a few more people, most, think about a calendar grid, or a week at a time, but not many have this perpetual long snaking timeline in their head like I’d imagined.

Our ability to visualise the future is thought to be linked to our ability to remember the past, and this is influenced by our autobiographical memory which stores key episodes in our life, learning to ride a bike, a first kiss, or a family holiday are all examples of episodes that might be stickier than everyday events. It’s thought that as we get older, we experience fewer novel experiences, and there’s an interesting phenomenon linked to this called the reminiscence bump! because we experience a larger proportion of novel or first-time experiences before the age of 40, we are more likely to reminisce about experience during our adolescence or early adulthood. Its why I am convinced that music was better in the 1990’s my nostalgic memories of listening to Oasis and Blur with my now husband are etched into my autobiographical memory. There’s also a theory that reminiscence helps us to remember more details of an event too, delays and breaks in remembering might be helpful in more accurate retrieval of memories, many exam revision techniques have this idea baked in!

However, there are individual differences and environmental factors in the way we remember (a process psychologists call consolidation), and forget (the decay of memories), and different theories around the order in which these things happen and why some events and not others end up in our long term memory. When I had to memorise an essay on cognition for my psychology qualification, I decided to pick out some amusing research on drunk people in the (scientific) hope that it would be fun to rehearse and stick in my head long enough to recall it during a stressful examination period. It’s important for us to understand how credible memory is after consuming alcohol for the purposes of witness testimony, in the UK, police procedures do not encourage the formal interviewing of witnesses who are visibly drunk, they are not routinely breathalysed either, yet when asked, jurors and judges support the view that ‘under the influence’ testimony is less credible than a sober witness despite laboratory studies consistently showing that memory recall is unaffected by level of intoxication (these studies are usually at the UK drink driving level threshold 0.08% Blood Alcohol Concentration BAC).

It’s not an unfounded bias to distrust the testimony from people who were drunk at the time, we know that drugs (in general) impair the way that episodic memories are stored, but interestingly a body of research suggests that it is the quantity rather than the quality of memories that is impacted when drunk, at least up to a point. Intoxicated witnesses are more selective of the memories they report over sober witnesses, one explanation is that intoxicated witnesses will hold back vague details, reporting less than a sober person in subsequent reporting, alcohol also dampens anxiety which can result in less details being remembered too as the person is not in a high alert stressed state.

It makes sense that the scientific facts are ‘blurry’ around the impact of alcohol on memory, after all, it’s tricky to conduct experiments on drunk people because they don’t always follow instructions well, and there’s the question of what is an ethically ‘safe level of intoxication’, , how this relates to real world alcohol levels, and how suggestible intoxicated people could be manipulated by researchers. For this reason, there are relatively few ‘in the field’, or pub psychology experiments that look at the experience of being drunk on memory recall. However, an interesting study conducted by psychologists at the Maastricht University in the Netherlands where they had recruited people who were drinking to take part in an experiment is one, researchers gave them misleading information and then some were asked on the night to recall information and some were not, all were followed up on the memory recall a week later. The results suggested that immediate recall would be better for accuracy, which has implications for waiting for the practice of waiting for someone to sober up!

There are many reasons to be dubious about research that happens in pubs but it is interesting nonetheless to think about the way in which life events and episodes need time to percolate, and be recalled being remembered, or forgotten. Our memories are not formed in equal ways, stress, alcohol, and drugs all play a part in the quantity and quality of memories that we have.

Why am I telling you all of this? This liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s is a natural reflection and reminiscence point for humans, and it leads into a big collective fresh start of the New Year where we are encouraged and motivated to set new goals and try new things.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Writing down goals and visualising outcomes are popular and effective ways of using our memory to anticipate the future, some people have highly superior autobiographical memories (HSAM) which is thought to help with the imagination and visualisation of future scenarios, whilst others don’t or can’t visualise time or future events at all, or have different time perspectives, more often associated with Autism and ADHD which alters the way they think about and approach events.

The research in these areas is fascinating, we are just scratching the surface, and I predict that it will change the way we set goals and resolutions and think about motivation and visual cues over the next decade, for example, we are only just starting to understand the differences between those who do, and don’t see images in their minds eye and appreciate that imagination is more than a visual construct, research published this year provided the first biological evidence of this by measuring pupil dilation . My hope is that we see more research that explores divergent ways of processing information.

If you are thinking about what you’d like to achieve in the future it’s worth reflecting on the type of techniques that will work with the way you experience time, and visualise the future, perhaps mood boards excite your vivid visual memory, timelines thrill your logical brain, or you need to hear or read something that sits with a narrative in your head?

Do you have a big goal for 2023?

Last year I wrote about the layering effect for goals and looking to the recent past for inspiration (avoiding the reminiscence bump!), and I always recommend Psychologist Katy Milkman and her research around fresh starts (when they do and don’t work) and habits for change.

Have a happy New Year!