Rob McKenzie is a native of Carman, Man., now residing in Abu Dhabi.
When a new month begins I don’t even notice any more – they just bleed into one another. (May? Meh!) Yet somehow, the week still matters to me as an organizing principle in this troubled time.
I work from my Abu Dhabi home as a freelance writer. Things are slow now. I still need structure, though, and find it within the framework of the seven-day week. I avoid working on the weekend but make myself as busy as possible once the first morning of the new work week rolls around.
Why would the week still matter?
Unlike the moon-based month or sun-based year, the “week” is purely a human construct. As explained by the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel in his 1985 book The Seven Day Circle, the concept of the seven-day week first arose in the Middle East. Babylonian astronomers perceived seven “planets” moving across the sky: the sun and moon, along with Saturn, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. They believed this group of bodies influenced human affairs.
Mr. Zerubavel surmises that it was probably in Egypt in the second century BC, amid the melting-pot aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, that elements of astronomy and astrology were fused together to enshrine the seven-day week, with one day assigned to each supposed planet.
Over the centuries, occasional attempts to alter the number of days in the week have failed miserably.
After the 1789 Revolution, France’s ruling assembly imposed a 10-day week that ran from Primidi to a day of rest, called Décadi (each day was comprised of 10 hours each consisting of 100 minutes, which were further divided into 100 seconds.) This way-too-metric idea lasted for about a decade before it was blown apart by Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Soviets under Joseph Stalin attempted a system of five-day or six-day “continuous” work weeks with no fixed weekends. The proletariat received days off according to a colour-coded scheme. This joyless cycle required endless tinkering and was abandoned after 11 years.
My own notion is that the length of the week has something to do with our numerical attention span. We can keep track of only so much at once. Using my own limited brain capacity as a guide, the tank fills up at seven days. A week is something I can map out in my head: It’s a little story with a beginning, a middle and – just in time – an end.
We often organize things into groups of five to seven, and nature tends to play along. We have five senses. Our hand: five fingers. The spectrum: seven colours. The world has six or seven continents, depending on your feelings about Eurasia. Snow White had seven dwarfs; there are seven deadly sins. Grief has five stages, as per the Kubler-Ross model. The pentatonic music scale, used in most of the world, has five notes per octave. A die has six sides; Trivial Pursuit, six categories.
Certainly, there is the risk of cherry picking in this. But science provides some support for the notion that groupings in this range correspond to our brain’s organizational abilities.
For example, consider a 1974 study in which university students in Jerusalem were asked, “What day is today?” The nearer it was to the weekend, the quicker they were to reply correctly. They needed about 1.8 seconds on Tuesday and Wednesday, but only about 1.25 seconds on other days of the week.
So a seven-day week is where we begin to tax our memories, though the tax is not onerous.
In a 1982 study, psychologists in the Netherlands showed their subjects a number of dots that flashed on a screen. They reported that six and seven dots can “be discriminated from each other more than 50 per cent of the time, but not seven and eight. There is confusion between seven and eight more than 50 per cent of the time.”
And in a 2013 experiment, researchers studied how the ability to quickly count a number of dots varies depending on whether they are loosely arranged or shown in “canonical” form, as on a playing die. The researchers found that for such arrangements, people needed about 500 milliseconds to count between one and six dots. But when you add a seventh dot, response time veers up to about 750 milliseconds.
Seven is where we test our limits. It makes sense that we would use it as the number of days in a week; not so many as to be confusing, nor so few as to be useless.
The seven-day week is a structure that suits our brains. Something to think about as a new week begins.
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