But you can't live every day as if it were your last. 'We know that none of these minutes can be repeated, so we try not to waste them. 'We're obsessed with time, and how fast time passes, because we know it's finite,' she says. Hammond suggests, that underpins our time fixation. Not surprisingly, perhaps, its hunter-gatherer society also functions without clocks or fixed calendars. In fact, the language of at least one Amazonian tribe, the Amondawa, has no word for time, or month, tomorrow or yesterday. But time is – or feels – seamless, so it made sense to tackle the broader subject.'Īlthough an obsession with time is deeply embedded in contemporary Western cultures, it isn't universal. 'I was particularly interested in perceptions about the future and was originally just going to write about that. 'When I was researching that book, I noticed that a lot of our emotions are somehow connected to time,' moments we remember fondly or with embarrassment, or future events we look forward to or dread. Time Warped, she says, grew organically from her first book, Emotional Rollercoaster, published in 2005. Of course, she was right on time for our appointment. 'I have gotten very used to what 30 seconds and what a minute is,' she told a previous interviewer.

And as a BBC broadcaster – she hosts separate programs on psychology and health – she is acutely aware of time's passage.

Time Warped by Claudia Hammond