Professor Philip Zimbardo on The Secret Powers of Time

May 2010

American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, well known for conducting the Stanford Prison Study, gives a talk on The Secret Powers of Time that is brought to life through RSA animate. He first identifies the six main time perspectives in which people live; two focus on the past, two on the present and two on the future. If a number of people share a certain time perspective it can come to characterise a nation; Zimbardo talks of his native Italy and the popularity of the separatist Lega party that reflects the future-orientated time perspective of the North and the present-orientated South. The average American male will have clocked up 10,000 hours playing video games by the age of twenty-one and, according to Zimbardo, this causes a digital rewiring of the brain. Children of today operate in digital fields that they have active control over but in the traditional, analogue classroom they have a passive role and therefore struggle to engage in learning.