Beyond 9 to 5: Your Life in Time

by Sarah Norgate

Overview

In Beyond 9 to 5, Sarah Norgate investigates the psychological, social, and cultural influences that affect the way we regard and are affected by time. Using everyday examples from around the world, her intriguing analysis unravels both the mental and biological mysteries of our relationships with time and provides a clear understanding of the links among behavior, brain, and genes.

Norgate begins by musing on the origins of our obsession with punctuality; the conflicting practices of rushing and taking things slow; economy-driven proverbs from highly industrialized nations-Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today-and how they differ from beliefs and attitudes in more rural areas; why some countries like Japan promote a 24/7 lifestyle while others still have trouble allowing businesses to open on Sunday; and which city moves at a faster pace, New York or Dublin? Norgate's examination of global trends yields surprising results.

Norgate then considers the biological effects of irregular hours, night shifts, cram sessions, round-the-clock consumption, and other potentially unhealthy characteristics of modern living. In addition, she looks at how our relationship with time evolves throughout our lives, from birth to old age, tracing the connection between longevity and memory and how such conditions as Parkinson's disease, addiction, sensory impairment, and autism change our perception of time.

Norgate concludes by uniting these threads to better understand the universality of our temporal landscapes. An engaging mix of cultural reference and research, Beyond 9 to 5 is a compelling look at what makes us human.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231140089
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/12/2006
Series:	Maps of the Mind
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sarah Norgate is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Salford, U.K. In 2004 she was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to study the psychosocial practices used in the care of children with eye cancer in Los Angeles, Toronto, and Paris.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
'Sorry, I haven't got time': Time as a pressing cultural issue     7
Time and Rhythms: The Case of Staying Up All Night     37
Two and a Half Billion Heartbeats: Your Life in Time     51
Experiencing Time: The Case of the Twenty-First-Century Mind     73
Time Management by Babies     91
Among the Millisecond Time Zone of Muscles     103
Diversity in Relating to Time     115
Beyond Nine to Five     131
Notes     153
Bibliography     173
Internet Resources     175
Index     177

What People are Saying About This

Rae Silver

Beyond 9 to 5 touches on an imaginative and creative array of topics that bear on the way we think about time, including cultural, neural, and behavioral aspects. It is a well-written and highly readable presentation for the lay reader of why we might care about timing and all the different ways in which it imposes itself on our lives.

— Rae Silver, Kaplan Professor of Natural and Physical Sciences, Barnard College, and professor of psychology, Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

Very readable and intriguing.

Hawke's Bay Today

Thought-provoking.

Los Angeles Times - Susan Salter Reynolds

In Beyond 9 to 5 Sarah Norgate investigates everything from how we perceive time to how long we've got on Earth to enjoy it.... [She] raises some interesting questions.

New Scientist

Fascinating.... The message here is the wise use of time for work, life and sleep.

Times Educational Supplement

This informative first book by Sarah Norgate, a psychologist, looks at how we relate to the fourth dimension, from the millisecond precision of a tennis player returning a serve to the personal narratives we each build.... An agreeable blend of psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and anthropology.

The Independent

In Beyond 9 to 5 Sarah Norgate investigates everything from how we perceive time to how long we've got on Earth to enjoy it.... [She] raises some interesting questions.

New Scientist

Fascinating.... The message here is the wise use of time for work, life and sleep.

Time Magazines Educational Supplement

Thought-provoking.

— Susan Salter Reynolds

Los Angeles Times

How do "clock time cultures" differ from "event time cultures"? What are the psychological and physiological effects of a highly scheduled lifestyle? And given the growing phenomenon of the "24-hour economy" with its "anytime" attitude to work and consumption, how is our changing relationship to time altering our light-dark and activity-rest cycles? Drawing on the latest statistics, Norgate, a lecturer in psychology in the faculty of health and social care at the University of Salford, England, addresses these questions and more as she surveys various cultural attitudes to time and explores the impact of such attitudes on world health and society most disturbingly when surveying the long hours worked by children in certain parts of the developing world. In addition to exploring patterns of daily activity, Norgate examines the significance for our relationship to time of genes and lifestyle, longevity and attitudes to childbearing and life span, comparing how generation gaps across the world differ and analyzing world inequalities in average life expectancy. With a humorous touch, she also explores the notoriously irregular sleep and wake cycles of babies (cycles she traces back to the fetal environment). Rich in intelligently contrasted and contextualized data, Norgate's academic study skillfully captures how world communities differ in their relationship to time. (Dec.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In some cultures, time is determined by the clock; in others, by events. How humans perceive the passage of time varies not just from culture to culture but by such criteria as an individual's age. Even babies' perception of time has been examined by clever experiments. Also of interest is how our muscles coordinate with our perception of time in order to accomplish complex yet incredibly simple acts like turning a page or coughing. Norgate (psychology, faculty of Health & Social Care, Univ. of Salford, U.K.) lucidly writes about all of these topics and more, with examples drawn from societies around the world. She seems, however, to focus everywhere but the United States until the last chapter, for which she needed a good target for a few critical comments. This reviewer also wondered what, exactly, he was learning about time beyond the current research-there wasn't a lot of probing beneath the cultural/societal surface. For these reasons, this easy-to-read book is recommended only for larger collections.-Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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