The moment I lost my sense of time
What it's like when your past and future are disrupted
You’re reading The Long View: A Field Guide, a newsletter about long-term thinking. In today’s edition, an end-of-year reflection about a time-disrupting accident, and The Long View appears in ‘best of 2023’ book lists.
As 2023 comes to an end, I find myself reflecting on an event earlier this year that totally disrupted my sense of time – and how lucky I was that it wasn’t worse.
One weekend in mid-April, I went mountain biking with my brother and his friends in a forest a couple of hours from London.
This was only two weeks after The Long View was published, and I was deep into book promotion, with talks planned and a publicity campaign well underway. It was my first book, so it was exciting to finally see it out in the world. I remember the launch at Waterstones, surrounded by friends, family and colleagues, as one of the most enjoyable evenings of my life.
I woke up in the hospital in Gloucestershire, with my wife and brother at my bed. There was a tube through my ribs and a brace around my neck. The conversation went something like this:
“You’ve been in an accident,” Kristina explained. I had fractured two of my vertebrae – thankfully not dangerously – plus I had a punctured lung. “But you’ll be OK.”
I tried to reach for a memory, but there was… nothing. So I asked how it happened.
“No-one saw it,” she said. “You were apparently ahead of the others on your bike, and they found you on the ground. They think you might have hit a tree.”
Realising a tree had been involved, I tried to make light of the situation: “What? I put a tree on the cover of The Long View!” I said. “I’ve done so much for the tree community… how ungrateful!”
My wife laughed, but later in my recovery she told me she’d actually found that response troubling. “You know you said that about the tree a dozen times,” she explained. For a few hours while I was concussed on that hospital bed, I was stuck in loop. I’d find about the accident, make the tree joke, fall asleep, and then the cycle would repeat.
Fortunately, it didn’t last long: a linear chronology gradually returned and I stopped making the stupid tree joke. But the memory of the accident and the hours afterwards never came back; it’s still blank, even now.
Stranger still, as I recovered I realised that my memories approaching the event grew hazier the closer they got to that day.
A few weeks after the accident, I was having a conversation with my brother, and gave him some advice. He listened patiently, but then told me I had repeated pretty much the same words in the car on the way to the mountain biking trip. Another time, embarrassingly, I congratulated a colleague on the news of her pregnancy… only to discover that she’d already told me once, a few days before the accident.
Looking back at this experience now, I find myself thinking about a person I wrote about in The Long View called Kent Cochrane. When he was young, he was in a motorcycle crash that left him with an unusual form of permanent amnesia. Psychologists were fascinated by his case, because it gave them an insight into how memory helps us stitch together both the past and the future.
When they asked Cochrane a fact-based question – like ‘what is a thermostat?’ Or: ‘how do you change a tyre?’ – he would be able to tell them. This is known as semantic memory. But when the psychologists asked him to recall specific events in his life, like the motorcycle accident he was in, or the time a train derailed in his town, he could not bring them to mind. This is episodic memory.
Most intriguingly, Cochrane’s lack of episodic memory prevented him from imagining the future. When we picture tomorrow, we create a theatre in our minds, using memories of events to simulate possible outcomes. So, for example, if I ask you to imagine your commute to work next week, you’ll do so based on your episodic memories of past travel. With no such memories, Cochrane lacked the ability to stage that theatre in his head.
Here’s a brief exchange from one of the interviews he gave in the 1980s with the psychologist Endel Tulving:
Tulving: “What will you be doing tomorrow?”
[15-second pause]
Cochrane: [smiles faintly] “I don’t know.”
Tulving: “Do you remember the question?”
Cochrane: “About what I’ll be doing tomorrow?”
Tulving: “Yes. How would you describe your state of mind when you think about it?”
[5-second pause]
Cochrane: “Blank, I guess.”
At other times, Cochrane was asked to describe this “blankness”. He said it is “like being asleep” or “like being in a room with nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair, and there’s nothing there”. On another occasion he said, “It’s like swimming in the middle of a lake. There’s nothing there to hold you up or do anything with.”
So, writing now, reflecting on the events of a tumultuous year, I am simply glad that I have the ability to do so. On another path, I could have lost my sense of time altogether – or worse. But now at the close of 2023, I can recall the setbacks and difficulties, but also all the moments of joy, achievement, and connection. And I can also look ahead, to all the possibilities of 2024 and beyond. For that, I simply feel gratitude.
The Long View news
Out of more than 1,000 books , The Long View made the top 15 shortlist in the 2023 Non-Obvious/Inc magazine book awards this month. Here’s what the judges said:
“An extraordinarily wide-ranging look at how long-term thinking could transform every part of our lives… This book reads like a combination of a well-researched dissertation and an eye-opening magazine op-ed. Not an easy line to balance, but the author manages it with a writing style that avoids historical digressions that so often veer toward distractions and instead uses those retellings to underscore the fundamental truth of the book – we can reorient our relationship with time, and we must in order for humanity to achieve its real potential millions or perhaps even billions of years into the future.”
The Long View also appeared in History Today’s ‘books of the year’, nominated by the historian Patricia Fara. She wrote:
‘The future is not what it used to be’, quips Richard Fisher in The Long View... His lively manifesto for the Anthropocene Age investigates diverse attitudes towards time and the human tendency to favour short-term rewards. For our world to survive, he insists, we must take action now: tomorrow will be too late.
This month, I visited a cold-and-Christmassy Brussels to speak with an engaged and thoughtful audience at the Full Circle Festival of Ideas. After the talk, I asked people to write on post-its: if you could leave behind one object for subsequent generations in 1,000 years, what would it be? Answers included photos, books, coins, a piano... and even a corkscrew (which I suppose is something that often comes in handy!)
Earlier this year, I published a BBC short film about deep time. This week, my colleague Adam Proctor pointed out that it’s now had almost 800,000 views on the BBC News YouTube channel… this far, far exceeds all expectations we had for a 13-minute-long video about geology. Thank you to everyone who watched it!
**Finally, if you know someone who would appreciate The Long View as a gift this December, I would be incredibly grateful for your support!**
You can find a few links to retailers on my webpage (and it should, hopefully, now be available to buy in the US…but please let me know if not!)
I wish you all the best for the holiday period. If you are reflecting on your own year, I hope it has featured some memorable experiences, and that you are looking forward to all the possibilities of 2024.
best wishes,
Richard