The science of perfect timing
Fascinating read explores nature of timing, how our internal clock has an effect on behaviour
Anyone scheduled to have elective surgery might be well advised to read Daniel H. Pink’s fascinating new book on the “scientific secrets of perfect timing.”
It’s titled When, and it strikes me at first blush as a helpful guide about when to make or not make “fateful decisions.”
Word to the wise: avoid going under the scalpel in July in Canada. That’s when young interns flood into hospitals in their first days as full-fledged docs and, let’s just say, the empirical evidence suggests they’re prone to making little mistakes: fatal medication errors, for instance, spike 10 per cent. That’s likely why it’s known as the “killing season” in England.
But avoiding neophyte medics doesn’t really address the nut of what’s truly revelatory about Pink’s book. The essence of his argument is that the behaviour of most species — human beings included — is regulated by an internal clock over which we have little control.
That insight was first gleaned in 1729 after a French scientist, Jean-Jacques de Mairan, discovered that the opening and closing of the leaves of mimosa plants had nothing to do with their exposure to light. Rather it’s because of the exigencies of their internal biological clocks.
“Since then, scientists have established that all living things have (such) clocks . . . which govern what are called circadian rhythms,” Pink writes.
Among his more intriguing reveals is that our moods and performance oscillate each day because of them.
“For most of us, mood follows a common pattern: a peak, a trough and a recov- ery.” But not all of us experience this pattern in the same way, he posits, as we’re all different “chromotypes.” About a quarter of us are “larks” that excel in the morning; others are “owls” that hit their peak in the wee hours, and still others — between 60 to 80 per cent of us — are “third birds,” somewhere in between. Knowing your chromotype is critical to avoid making dangerous mistakes or becoming the victim of other people’s time-sensitive errors.
Most of us seem to peak in the morning, trough at midday and recover in the later afternoon. Owls experience this process in reverse. But whenever it happens, the trough can be particularly treacherous; it’s the “ground zero” for bad timing.
After reviewing 90,000 surgeries, a Duke University study discovered an adverse event was four times more probable at 3 p.m. than at 9 a.m.
And an oft-cited colonoscopy study revealed that doctors are less likely to discover polyps as the day progresses: every hour after the morning peak results in a 5-per-cent reduction in polyp detection. Perhaps not surprisingly, Pink himself only accepts colonoscopy appointments before noon. Pink also offers numerous helpful tips to mitigate against the pitfalls of bad timing: vigilance breaks, restorative breaks, etc.
But one finishes his book with the feeling we’re all occasionally victims of timerelated events beyond our control. Graduating in a high-unemployment year means a decade-and-a-half later, you’ll still be making 2.5-per-cent less than colleagues who graduated in a low-unemployment year.
Bad timing, it seems, is an inescapable fact of life. Robert Collison is a writer and editor.