Fever, for instance, makes you experience time faster, and cold makes you experience time slower, and when these physiological clocks start to slow down in old age it appears as if clock time seems to speed up.”Draaisma’s book also examines the curious fact that we remember almost nothing before the age of three. The psychologist believes part of the explanation is to do with the maturing of the brain. Up until the age of three the brain is still changing rapidly, which makes it difficult to form memories. “Another explanation would be that part of the way our memory works is by telling ourselves stories and retelling them.

After a very busy day you will sit quietly and think of the day and that’s the way of telling yourself a story. But it depends on having language and when you are one, two or three you don’t have a language in which you tell yourself a story of what happened to you. So it makes it very difficult to repeat your experiences [in your mind]. And perhaps once we are used to using language memory it’s difficult to have access to earlier memories because they are outside the format of language, so to speak.”Memory has an important role to play in d? vu, the sensation that you have lived a particular moment before.

“Traditionally, there were a lot of explanations of earlier lives and former lives,” says Draaisma. However, the psychologist believes in a more scientific explanation, as not everyone experiences d? vu “It could have to do with concentration,” he suggests. “It may be that because of a lack of concentration, something that you experience comes in twice. At first, due to lack of concentration you don’t notice something, and then when you raise your concentration you see exactly what happened. It is as if you are experiencing this faint echo of the earlier experience that is still there.”Draaisma also studies the research into why people’s lives appear to flash before them during near-death experiences. “It may be that alterations to the brain, such as lack of oxygen, may cause some cells in the brain to fire more or less randomly.”When they are from the area in the brain where you have stored your early memories, it may be that you begin to see all kinds of childhood memories that are very vivid.”Ask someone what they were doing, what they were wearing and what the weather was like on 3 May 2000, the odds are that they will have no idea. However, ask them the same questions about 31 August 31 1997 – the day on which they would have heard that Diana, Princess of Wales, had died – and they will probably give you a detailed description of the room they were standing in at the moment they heard.

Memories of the report of a significant event, and also of the setting you were in when you heard, are known as “flashbulb memories”. One hypothesis is that the sudden emotion causes a rush of adrenaline in the brain, which, for a short time, makes people notice things visually. Another is that flashbulb memories are often about things that people would like to share with others, and because they tell the story so often, the repetition commits it to memory.”On the other hand,” counters Draaisma. In practice, this often means that people who are critically unwell and have not been given a definitive diagnosis nor started on treatment are moved, by management, away from a safe, monitored environment into a random bed or chair, where they can wait many hours without further medical intervention. Priorities in A&E, in my opinion, are moving dangerously away from treating patients and towards management “paper” targets, sometimes with fatal consequences.Performance targets like this one are too narrow, and demonstrate a poor understanding of the nature of the challenge health professionals face. It is those who are most sick and most in need of care and attention who are short-changed by this target, although it is a good deal for the “worried well”.Ill people who need to be admitted are moved to “cheat wards” around the corner from A&E, where they are technically no longer in the department and are therefore no longer a threat to performance data.

The most unwell and most needy people tend to belong to groups less likely to vote: the elderly and infirm, the demented, the mentally ill, the homeless, alcoholics and drug addicts, people who don’t speak English, young men who get shot and stabbed – in effect, the disenfranchised. With a general election looming, the Government has provided a clearly measurable outcome, which most voters can identify with, and which seems sensible.But the constituency we, as doctors, are most concerned with is markedly different. There used to be four porters at night, but now there’s only one.And on it goes. It is the doctors and nurses – the only people who have actual responsibility for the patient – who have to compensate for this growing shortfall.Third, because we have a duty of care, and because of the fear of legal action, everybody who attends A&E, no matter how trivial their complaint, has to have a thorough medical assessment, and that takes time – time that could have been spent seeing people who actually are unwell.But there is a more worrying question, which is perhaps only obvious to people who work in A&E: does meeting the target reflect good patient care? It is certainly a good political target. It’s no longer the lab’s responsibility that the blood samples didn’t arrive in the chute, because the chute is the responsibility of a separate company. The printer is broken, but there is no one on site to fix it, although you can leave a message on the company’s answerphone and someone might get back to you during office hours.