On the NPR TED Radio Hour, Sunday 25th October at 6.05pm, Newstalk FM

'Shifting Time'

We live our lives by the calendar and the clock, but time is also an abstraction, even an illusion. In this hour, TED speakers explore how our sense of time changes depending on who and where we are.

Director Cesar Kuriyama shoots one second of video every day as part of an ongoing project to  remember the special moments of his life.

Poet Rives explores why four-in-the-morning has become popular shorthand for the  strangest hour of the day. He says four in the morning is ‘the modern day dark and stormy night and for most people 'it’s a foreign land’

Dan Gilbert shares research on what he calls the "end of history illusion," where we think the person we are right now is the person we'll be for the rest of time. Hint: that's not the case.

He also explores why as we get older, do we think that time goes that much faster. Do we become more extroverted as we grow older?

'We all know we will change but we fundamentally think that the people we have become will remain relatively stable in the future and in that - we are wrong’

‘The pace of change does indeed slow as we age’

Psychologist Laura Carstensen says that as people get older, they usually become less stressed and more content.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll tackles a deceptively simple question: Why does time exist at all?

The potential answers point to a surprising view of the nature of the universe, and our place in it.  Carroll also explores whether time existed before the ‘Big Bang’.

The TED Radio Hour, Sunday's from 6pm on Newstalk 106-108 FM. 

Listen back to The Ted Radio Hour 'Shifting Time' here