How we experience time

Hook: Artist Katie Paterson once rigged a live phone line into a melting glacier in Iceland. People from the UK to Iraq dialed in, one at a time, to hear the ancient ice thaw. When the line was busy, callers got a busy signal: the glacier was occupied.

That artwork, Vatnajökull (the sound of), was an attempt to let people listen live to a natural process that once took millennia but is now happening exponentially faster. For Paterson, the glacier is not just a casualty of climate change—it is a clock. Her work repeatedly tries to make deep time a sensory experience, collapsing the distance between human lifespans and the billions of years that stretch before and after us.

This episode of the TED Radio Hour, hosted by Manoush Zamarodi, explores how we experience time. It moves from Paterson’s cosmic art to the neuroscience of heartbeats, the active listening tools of a conductor, and the late psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s framework for how our time orientation shapes our decisions. The through-line is that time is not a fixed, objective flow. It is constructed by the brain, molded by the body, and influenced by how we choose to pay attention.

The Heartbeat as a Timekeeper