It would be a massive understatement to say that we live in stressful times today. Every day heralds a flurry of new headlines, tectonic shifts, and upheavals in politics, culture and lifestyle the world over.

A kind of cognitive exhaustion prevails, a sense of mental defeat, compounded by the senseless and seemingly endless carnage in Palestine and Ukraine, broadcast to our devices in real-time. But if we dig deeper, we realise it goes far beyond just events — there is a palpable sense of things speeding up around us.

An obvious example is the media. Movies today are shorter, faster, to the point — just so much quicker. Those of us who grew up in the eighties recall that movies had an entirely different energy back then. Older movies were replete with meaningful silences, with nuances in facial expressions, body language and vocal delivery. Modern movies can feel like they’re ticking boxes on a checklist.

There is some data to back this up: a 2011 study found that the average length of camera shots in movies had dramatically shortened, from about 12 seconds in the year 1930, to about 2.5 seconds in 2010.

This study from Cornell University looked at 160 popular, high-grossing English-language films released between 1935 and 2010, and found that visual activity on screen — motion, movement and optical change per shot — had also significantly increased. This trend is especially pronounced in action movies — consider films in the Jason Bourne, Taken and Mad Max series, where cuts routinely average every one to two seconds. Adrenaline dominates.

Life has certainly gotten faster over the years, with technology a key reason for the acceleration. But is this desire for speed, from brisk walking to speed listening, resulting in overstimulation… and cognitive exhaustion?

EXCESSIVE GRATIFICATON

A similar trend pervades children’s content. In one experiment, researchers from the University of Virginia showed four-year-olds the popular fast-paced SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon and found negative effects on “executive function”, ie attention, problem-solving and willpower.

Dr Marshall Korenblum, a child psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, commented on the study, “It’s as if watching a nine-minute TV show that’s very fast-paced created temporary ADD [attention deficit disorder] in these four-year-olds.”

Nickelodeon, the makers of SpongeBob were unfazed — they responded that the show was targeted at six-to-11-year-olds.

But parents have also complained about shows like CoComelon for being “overstimulating.” Some suggest alternatives such as Bluey, Daniel Tiger and Puffin Rock, known for their soothing pace and thoughtful storytelling.

We are internalising this sense of speed too. In 2007, researchers filmed pedestrians in 35 cities and discovered that people now actually walk faster. Compared to back in the 1990s, our speed has gone up by up to 10 percent. Is this a big deal? It depends.

Brisk walking can be great exercise, with significant health benefits. But it could indicate general haste, a phenomenon dubbed “hurry sickness” in the research literature, referring to a “harrying sense of time urgency.” Hurry sickness translates to stress, poor diet, lack of exercise and socialising, and correlates closely with heart disease.

THE X FACTOR

And people talk faster now. Research from Wichita State University in Kansas, USA, shows that in the early 2000s, the average rate of human speech in a sample was around 145 words per minute. Around 2011, it had reached 160-180 words per minute.

The ideal rate for the human brain to comprehend speech is 124-130 words per minute — anything more causes difficulty in comprehension. And with age, the central nervous system slows down and it becomes even harder to understand fast speech.

We are certainly listening faster too. Voice notes and vlogs are commonly played at accelerated speed. Netflix now allows viewers to play movies at 1.5x speed. Spotify and Audible users could play audio content at a max rate of 3x — this has now been increased to 3.5x.

It’s called “speed-listening,” an experience very reminiscent of the shrill, high-pitched vocals from the Chipmunks cartoons. “This struck me as such a Silicon Valley thing to do,” comments journalist and biographer Ashley Vance. “Hook your brain to the machine and download at the best transfer rate available.”

TRAPPINGS OF TECHNOLOGY

This analogy might be on to something. Technology is, of course, the obvious suspect here. Research in 2015 found that technology tends to speed up people’s very perception of time.

Heavy smartphone and computer users are likely to perceive that a whole hour has lapsed, whereas it may have been only 50 minutes.

“It’s almost as though we’re trying to emulate the technology and be speedier and more efficient,” says researcher Aoife McLoughlin from John Cook University. “It seems like there’s something about technology itself that primes us to increase that pacemaker inside of us that measures the passing of time,” says the researcher.

An even more surprising finding is that one does not have to actually use technology for this time-warp effect to manifest. People who simply read about technology — like an advertisement or a brochure for an iPad — feel time moving faster, compared to those who peruse a non-technology text.

And reading itself, the serious reading of books, is now a lost art, for which we no longer have the patience or stamina. Book summary mobile applications, or apps such as Blinkist, Shortform, and Reedz, have collectively raised tens of millions of dollars in investor funding and boast millions of users. We even have sites like Uptime and Four Minute Books, which give readers summaries of book summaries.

COGNITIVE EXHAUSTION

One cannot help but wonder, since we’re doing everything so much faster now, what are we doing with all this time we seem to be saving? Are we richer now? Wiser? Happier? More content?

Almost a hundred years ago, in 1930, famed economist John Maynard Keynes had famously predicted that technology and economics would solve humankind’s perennial problems and birth a golden age, where his grandchildren could devote themselves almost entirely to leisure. Instead, here we are today, scrambling about frantically, just to keep up with the world around us. Why are we subjecting ourselves to this?

And where is this cult of speed taking us?

We get some hints from a seminal 2019 study in Nature Commu­nications, where researchers report multiple indicators of an undeniable acceleration at a societal and cultural level. We see it on X (formerly Twitter), our digital town square.

In 2013, the lifespan of a top trend on X was 17.5 hours on average. By 2016, this had dropped to 11.9 hours. Similar accelerating patterns were observed in Google Trends, Reddit, Wikipedia articles and multiple other datasets, characterised by “a development towards overall steeper slopes and more extreme changes in collective attention for individual cultural items.” And this acceleration goes back decades.

As a society we are consuming more and more cultural content at an increasing pace — but can we digest all this? Our cognitive capacity is limited — the human brain can only process a certain amount of information before it is overloaded. This may have significant consequences.

At the very end of their paper, the researchers express hope that their study stimulates deeper inquiry into the “interplay between social acceleration and the fragmentation of public discourse and its potentially negative consequences.”

In the typically understated language of science, our warped sense of time may very well be linked to the rising social animosity, anger and discontent we witness all around us today, the breakdown of our political processes and social norms.

And this makes intuitive sense: our cult of speed gives us no time for sustained reflection and contemplation, to perceive deeper realities behind the scenes, to seek out the wisdom and humility we need to solve our most pressing problems.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” wrote American naturalist, philosopher and sage Henry David Thoreau in his masterwork, Walden, back in 1854. “I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It’s thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

The writer teaches at the NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Islamabad.
He can be reached at taha.ali@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 6th, 2024