‘Without time there will be no memory’

How would you describe your own relationship with time?

I've spent a lot of my career thinking about time, and our personal experience of it. One of my earliest memories is asking my grandma why a car trip to her house seemed to go so fast. She explained that when you are having a good time, things went more quickly. Ever since then, I've been fascinated with time… more memory than time, but that idea that something familiar feels quicker than something else.

Working with people with memory disorders, I've noticed that people with Alzheimer's disease might sit happily in the waiting room, even when there was a massive delay with nothing to do. You'd say 'I'm sorry to keep you waiting', and they would reply 'Oh, was I waiting?' I'm interested in those relationships between time and memory.

I guess like everybody else my age, I just feel life's going too fast. I would do anything to slow everything down, to give myself more time with all the things I want.

You say your interest is more memory than time, but the two are so linked, aren't they? There's all that research around life speeding up as you get older, around the distinction between our experience of time as it passes, and then how we judge it looking back. For me, even now, time goes incredibly slowly. If I think about 10 years ago, it just seems so long ago.

I have to willfully make the world seem like that. Slowing time down is about forgetting. If you look at old photos, and you see some details from 10 years ago, as long as you're tapping into things that you've forgotten or seem less important or seem to have changed, then it will seem a long time ago. But if you're just looking back on your life, without external aids, just seeing what you can remember, then it is as immediate as if it was yesterday – in my mind, anyway.

Forgetting prompts you to think it's a long time ago, because in our subjective experience time and memory are intrinsically linked like that – you know that as time passes, you lose information. So if you've lost information, you judge it to be a long time ago; if you're reminded of something, then it feels more recent. I guess that needs to be tested.

I think there is also research which suggests that if you look back at a time and can remember a lot of things you've done between then and now, that makes you perceive it as further back as well – if you fitted all of that stuff in, it must have been a long period of time, right? So it's a complex relationship, isn't it? You mentioned your grandma. Am I right in thinking the roots of your interest in psychology and memory were in your grandfather and his dementia?

Yes, that was on the other side of my family, and definitely an inspiration to study psychology. But once I started studying Psychology it was it was like I'd always been thinking about things – especially subjectivity, I was obsessed with subjectivity. I loved science fiction where somebody could go into space and be experiencing one day, but back home, they will be experiencing many, many years. I love Buck Rogers because of that idea of being frozen in time and then coming back and things have moved on.

That scene in Interstellar, back on the ship and watching all the video messages from his daughter… that's got to be one of the greatest scenes.

Goosebumps. And Christopher Nolan plays with that a lot in his films… in Inception, the deeper your dream goes, the more time is passing slowly for you. That sense of perspective, where for the person who's experiencing the time, it's slow relative to the person looking in from the outside. I think all those things are beautiful. They make you think about subjectivity, and the core of psychology is people's subjective experience. You can't get much more subjective than the passing of time.

All those time loop films, that's what the vehicle is, it's about people's experiences with their life, and how malleable that might be. With Groundhog Day, it's about somebody needing to make a change in their life, and because they get stuck in a moment, they're forced to reassess and change.

I think of time as a hub for pretty much every other psychological concept. Personality change, but also learning… in Groundhog Day they explore that line between mastery and insanity.

I remember Pat Rabbitt saying that in cognitive psychology, you can measure errors, and you can measure time, and there is nothing else. Think about how much of what we know about thought processes is based on reaction time. And I'm no expert on neuroscience, but there's that research around the impossibility of certain information arriving at a certain place in the brain before a certain time. You can do a lot of elegant reasoning about how the brain and thought are organised by the order of events and how long things take.

Benjamin Libet and whether we truly have 'free will', I guess. The more you think about it, the more time seems like that invisible thread… so omnipresent, we've just taken it for granted. Does it get discussed enough as a psychological underpinning?

I'll share my bias and say I've always thought memory was that thing. But even memory is subservient to time – without time there will be no memory. I don't know any science fiction dealing with that concept – if everything is encountered in the present, nothing would need to be stored.

I suppose Memento is the other way round – with no ability to lay down new memories, Guy Pierce's character is always dislocated in time.

All my students say 'You must watch Memento', but I haven't.  

You'll have to watch the remake. They're even talking about remaking Groundhog Day.

Even in director Harold Ramis' lifetime, they wanted to remake it. As far as I'm concerned they did, as an action film: Edge of Tomorrow.

For around 15 years, I've had a bit about Groundhog Day in my lectures on memory at masters level. These days, I spend less time talking about memory mechanisms, and more about Hollywood concepts of romance. It hasn't aged well. It's a very male view of the world – 50 First Dates is the same. She's got amnesia, she lives the same day over and over again, a male character can use that to his advantage in a romantic conquest. The central theme is getting a bit dated, and I'm increasingly uneasy with it.

I expect a remake might have him with a different kind of personality change required. But in terms of the memory side of it, did you start including it in lectures because of your own research on déjà vu?

I hadn't watched Groundhog Day. I was describing a patient I was working with, to my ex-PhD supervisor Tim Hollins. The patient described himself as having the same day over and over again. Nothing he did in his life seemed novel. He woke up every day, the newspaper was delivered, and he felt he had already read it. Tim said, 'Oh, that sounds like Groundhog Day'. Next time I was at his house, we watched it on VHS. It was a formative moment for me, and I've loved the film ever since.

But interestingly, those patients I've worked with who have that intense feeling of déjà vu, their carers and their doctors describe it as déjà vu but they don't have that sense that they're trapped in a time loop. The patients that have something like chronic déjà vu who are younger and are aware of their deja vu, they don't talk about Groundhog Day at all.

The film that spontaneously came out in describing their experiences was Donnie Darko. That is, I think, a very unsettling film, using the time loop to question the concept of reality. And the people who have intense feelings of déjà vu, they struggle to know what's real, what's repetition, what's something that they've encountered for the first time… they are really in distress, a bit like in Donnie Darko.

Does explaining things reduce that distress, as they come to understand their condition more?

No. They're quite aware that they have this problem, and when you point to memory tests which show that they have abnormal experiences, it doesn't diminish what their subjective experience of repetition is.

They really do feel like they're stuck in a time loop in a horrible way. So I think they're reassured to know that other people have had the same thing, but these feelings of familiarity and repetition are then difficult to resist. One guy said his major challenge was to resist having religious and supernatural interpretations of what he was going through – the easiest conclusion to jump to is that if everything feels like it's repeating that is a magical, weird experience and there must be something he can do to harness it. Of course in daily life that's not really possible… it is just a glitch in the memory system.

In all the films, you're blessed with some kind of different power, you find something to do with it. In Donnie Darko – spoiler alert – he saves the life of his girlfriend at the expense of being himself crushed by the engine falling off an aeroplane. So it leads somewhere… but for these people experiencing chronic déjà vu, it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't mean anything.

Is deja vu more distressing for patients than other forms, like jamais vu (never seen) and presque vu (almost seen)?

With presque vu there are a few different definitions out there… we tend to say it's like that 'Aha!' moment, but a false one. Feeling that you've worked everything out, or had a profound insight. I've had it a few times, I don't know if you have?

Maybe on waking… 'that thing I just dreamed is really significant', and then it's really not.

It's very common in sleep and in waking up, but it can also happen in daily life. I remember looking at a billboard and having this amazing realisation that the whole world is just about advertising of one type or another. You think you've had this profound insight, and you've understood something about the world, but you haven't.

It turns out you've just watched John Carpenter's They Live.

Not seen that one! So then jamais vu is a loss of meaning for something that you know to be familiar. I've had it for my father's face: like I was looking at him with fresh eyes. That's pretty weird. But none of those things have the same aspect of time that déjà vu has.

People often tell me there's 'something wrong with time'… they write to me and say that déjà vu really is a glitch in in the space-time continuum. I once did a public science thing with a quantum physicist…

I thought 'this is too good to be true, when everybody writes to me and says, 'It's theoretically possible, through quantum states and entanglement'. He just said, 'Why refer to quantum physics to explain déjà vu when you can perfectly well explain it by an overactive familiarity circuit in the temporal lobe?'

The funny thing is, people who write to me often have a very mysterious view of what quantum physics is. It shouldn't lead you to paranormal phenomena. But people want there to be all kinds of ways of cheating death, the universal consciousness of the universe, all that stuff.

William James always said it's good to be credulous, to believe things, but people want things to be unbelievable. To be mysterious. I do nothing to take away from what an amazing experience deja vu is. I just think there's a reasonable explanation based on memory mechanisms. And me explaining what deja vu is makes people cross.

Is that explanation around people forgetting that they have a memory, and then being reminded of it?

No, it's really just the sensation of familiarity that comes on for something that you know, not to be true, to be possible. I think the best evidence is that deja vu is less common as you get older. I rarely have it now. I think that's because I can no longer generate the certainty that I haven't encountered something familiar before.

When you're young, you're very able to say, 'No, I've never been to New York before, I've never done anything like this before'. At my age, you travel around and think, 'well, this is very familiar. I wonder if I saw it on a film, or read about it'… you've always got a different interpretation of your feeling.

So you could say life gets less magical with the passing of time… as you get older, you have less force, less cognitive resources, to say 'that's not possible!' How weird is that?

I have often used this example: I don't know if I've flown in a helicopter, at an age when I would be expected to remember it. I'm 99 per cent sure I haven't, but not 100 per cent. I did a Twitter poll once, and that suggests that 15 per cent of people are wandering about not knowing for sure whether or not they've flown in a helicopter.

That's a beautiful example. And I know very well that as you get older, you can watch two hours of a film before you realise you've seen the end.

Have you seen Two Distant Strangers? It does something with the time loop idea which I find powerful. The writer/director has said 'let's be honest — it is not a stretch to see the constant images of Black men killed by police as the same terrible day repeated without end'.

In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors can learn everything, he's got all the time in the world. In Two Distant Strangers, the lead character really does try everything to avoid being killed at the end, and whatever happens, is killed by police brutality. There's nothing he can do to subvert it, which really emphasises the injustice of it all. 

Another Netflix film, See You Yesterday, has a similar theme. I love pretty much any time loop film. Looper, The Endless, Palm Springs.

There was a really good Star Trek: Discovery time loop episode. They played more on memory… time loop things come back to amnesia, you do see people with memory impairment stuck in the same day. Routine becomes important, novelty has less value, sadly, and certainly in extreme cases – my people with recollective confabulation who feel like everything's being repeated – they don't find any novelty in anything they do, apart from, ironically, things that they've already done that they remember doing.

When we first found that out, it was too freaky for me… I just didn't understand that. These people would refuse to watch the news, or a new film that they'd never seen, but they would happily read a book that they'd read before, or watch a film again. They would say, 'Well, I've forgotten what happened'. For them, there wasn't the same conflict. There wasn't the same nasty feeling of repetition.

There was just a warmer, one would imagine, feeling of 'Yes, I know I've read this before. So it's okay that I'm finding it familiar'. Whereas if they're confronted with a film they've never seen before, it feels familiar, but it's unsettling, they don't like it, they won't watch the same thing.

I sat and watched Neighbours with a woman who suffered from this, and her daughter. She kept turning to us saying 'There you go, look, it's repeating!' She had tears of frustration in her eyes, because of this sensation. But her daughter was also buying up DVDs of films she knew she had already seen which she watched happily.

So amnesia is a really useful tool in fiction, because it allows characters to discover their own identities, and for you as a viewer to discover the character in the film at the same time as they do. It's also a 'get out of jail free' card for plot holes – see the latest Spiderman film! And that's why memory is so central to time loop plots; but also to other films that aren't actually time loops.

When being stuck in a moment or forgetting means that you're prone to make the same mistakes all over again – like the theme in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's about repetition, and how you always come back to what you know, where you started, or who you are destined to have a relationship with.

Brings tears to my eyes just thinking about that film. In terms of finding novelty in the every day, are you still managing that in academia? Time in academia is quite an interesting concept…

I'd like to think so. You work with problems that you never completely solve, so you are prone to repeat yourself. I've had the experience now of thinking I've had a good idea only to find I already had the idea and even wrote it in one of my papers. But finding novelty is easier if you are driven by your students: if you respond to what they find interesting, their challenges, it helps bring a bit of novelty to your daily life.

I would say though that I'm particularly prone to feeling stuck in a rut… that's probably why I moved to France, and challenge myself by teaching in French and all that sort of thing. 

Time does seem pretty central to your life… you're sat there in an 18th-century house that you've presumably picked for a reason, you collect old postcards…

I would agree. I'm obsessed with secondhand stuff. But again, is that memory, or is that time?

I think the next place to go is collective forgetting. Everybody's getting very excited about collective memory again – psychologists, sociologists, historians, philosophers – but what about collective forgetting? I think there's been a lot of forgetting of what's in the environment all around us.

And we had experts come and look at the house to see what might be notable from an architectural point of view. The guy was explaining that the bannisters were particularly impressive and that this sort of woodturning died out after the First World War, just because pretty much all the people who were expert in it got killed. That blew my mind, I hadn't thought about it before.

The transmission of knowledge between generations is somewhat less reliant on individuals now, because of the internet, but I've heard there's one last guy in France who knows how to make every aspect of a clockwork clock from scratch. He's desperately working on recording what he does so that it's not lost when he goes.

I think of collective memory for generational things. People say 'oh, do you remember lockdown?', and I think 'well yeah, it was only three years ago!' … but arguably we're being encouraged to collectively forget a lot of things.

There was a beautiful paper, published in Nature Communications, about areas where there's flooding, how long it took successive generations to move back to where the flooding was. It's really quite quick. The grandparents all lived in this village, they all moved up the hill because of flooding, and little by little people forget what it's like and are prone to repeat the same thing.

Successive generations move back down and then move back up. The core mechanism behind that must be psychological – the feeling of time and the forgetting of things. There are lots of phenomena like that, that exist between generations, in nature and in society. But psychology rarely taps into them.