Alan Burdick’s treatise on Why time Flies offers no solutions to slowing down or speeding up time, depending on what is preferred, but it does relay a sense of exploration about how we live and a philosophical view on the individual experience of time, combined painlessly with scientific inquiry.

In an interview with Robert Siegel of NPR (National Public Radio), Burdick noted “our brains do a lot of work to kind of hide what you might call reality from us… a possible explanation for the discrepancy and argument over what is true (time).”  He cites experiments with Martian time, references St. Augustine and William James, offers some solutions for jet lag, and throws in a little wry humor and his experience with his preschoolers. His scientific inquiry, however, is grounded in his curiosity – his frame of reference.

Because Burdick explores time through his personal experiences (“walking back to the deli to my office one day after lunch, I glance at a clock that sits on a high pedestal outside the bank…I’m suddenly made aware of the clock’s quiet efforts to orient me…”), the scientific references are tempered and made more palatable.  If you have ever awakened in the middle of the night and refused to check the time on the bedside clock, you will empathize with his rebellion to “ignore this chatter in the middle of the night…and drift alone, for a little while…”

“For well over a century researchers have recognized that we shape time as we move through it; it seems to speed or slow depending on whether you’re happy, sad, angry, or anxious, filled with dread or anticipation, playing music or listening to it; a study in 1923 found that a speech seems to go by more quickly to the person who gives it than to a person who listens to it.  When researchers discuss time perception, typically the time in question is just a handful of seconds or minutes.”

When Burdick fell into describing experiments involving computers and diagrams, I admit I skimmed through, anxious to return to his storytelling.  Overall, the book leaves as many questions unanswered as addressed, but that is the nature of scientific investigation after all.  As he ends the book with sand castles overrun by the tide and a reference to Nietzsche, I wondered how much time I had spent reading the book – and decided it was worth the time.