Time Warped by Claudia Hammond

Author:Claudia Hammond [Hammond, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857863454
Publisher: Canongate Books

EVERYTHING SHOOK

On the morning of Friday, 31 January 1986 a woman was shopping at a mall in Mentor, Ohio. At 11.48 a.m. she was wondering what to buy. Everything seemed normal. But one minute later nothing seemed normal at all. Goods were falling off the shelves, the clothes racks were swaying and the whole place seemed to shudder. She didn’t understand what was going on. People began rushing for the nearest exit and just as she started to move she felt something smack on her head. Putting her hand up to her face she felt blood and as soon as she saw the ceiling tile that had hit her on the head, she knew what this was – an earthquake.

The rumours soon began – people had been killed; houses were wrecked. In fact there were no fatalities and no one’s home was destroyed. The earthquake was relatively mild – only 4.96 on the Richter scale. Some 15 people were treated for anxiety or for the effects of the cold; a little girl had stitches after she was cut by a broken window; and doctors were soon able to deal with the bleeding head-wound of the woman who had been out shopping. In earthquake terms this wasn’t serious, but for thousands of people this did become a day that was in a small way unique. They might have been one of the dozens who phoned the local geological society; one of the hundreds evacuated from the nearby nuclear power station; one of those who noticed that the water in their local well had changed colour; or Betty, the school bus driver who told the local paper, The Spokesman, that she’d lived through tornadoes and floods, but had never seen anything like this; or the Mayor of the town of Sharon, who watched his staff flee as a four-foot crack appeared in the wall of the municipal building.

There is a long history of psychologists grabbing unusual opportunities to study situations they could never recreate in an artificial experiment. There was the eminent expert in visual perception, Richard Gregory, who was reading the newspaper one day back in 1958 and discovered that surgeons had restored the sight of a man who had been blind for 50 years. Here was the perfect chance for him to study whether eyesight automatically lets you watch and comprehend the world or whether the brain has to spend many years learning to make sense of the input from the eyes. He filled his car with the instruments needed for the assessments he wanted to carry out and drove to the hospital to find the man, known in the literature as S.B. The resulting case study became world-famous (answer: for full vision we do need to learn to see). More recently there was Barbara Frederickson, who happened to have tested the psychological resilience of a group of students several months before 9/11. She found herself with a unique opportunity to explore how a shocking episode affected levels of optimism

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