Most of us will be familiar with the experience of time passing excruciatingly slowly when we're waiting for something to happen. Studies have shown this is especially the case when we are looking forward to something, said cognitive neuroscientist Muireann Irish from the University of Sydney. Think about a child who repeatedly asks, "Are we there yet? And time can appear to drag even more slowly if you're the impulsive type, who gets restless or even angry when you don't get what you want immediately.
In a study by German psychologist Marc Wittmann, people forced to sit in a room without doing anything for seven-and-a-half minutes felt the time passed differently, depending on who they were. Some said the duration was just two-and-a-half minutes, while for the most impulsive it felt like So it's not just external factors, but who we are that influences our perception of time. But how does that work? There's no real consensus on where and how in the brain time is processed, said Dr Wittman, who is from the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg.
But, he said evidence suggest our brain's motor regions are important at timescales relevant to activities like talking, playing music, driving or playing sport — a matter of a few seconds at most. This article contains content that is no longer available. When it comes to durations longer than five seconds, Dr Wittmann's experiments indicate our judgments are not that accurate.
At this "fuzzy" level of sensing time, a different part of the brain is involved. In another set of experiments carried out by Dr Wittman, people in an fMRI scanner were asked to judge the duration of intervals lasting up to 18 seconds. He found more accurate judgements of duration were made by those who had more activity in a part of the brain called the insular cortex. This is responsible for integrating signals from all over the body, and enables us to "sense our self" — and the passing of time, Dr Wittmann said.
When we're not doing anything, we're less distracted and are more sensitive to how we feel and to the passing of time. While time sometimes can drag — it can also fly, and when you least want it to. Like when you're having fun. This is because we only have a finite amount of attention to give the world, Dr Irish said. So, if we are focusing on something fun then we pay less attention to the passing of time, and it appears to move more quickly. In her native Turkey, she says, they veer from one extreme to the other: lunches are long, drawn out affairs, but once back in the office everything accelerates.
Gamze believes that because of their looser attitude to time, particularly at lunchtimes, Turkish people are more likely, at other times, to feel that time is flying by than the more time-clenched British.
Zoologist Andrew Jackson has studied how time might be perceived by animals and insects. He devised experiments to measure the flicker fusion rate of different creatures. This is their ability to detect separate flashes of a fast, flickering light. The flicker fusion rate for the average human is around 50 to 60 flashes per second.
Kit Yates from the University of Bath believes the phenomenon of time speeding up as we age can be explained by mathematics. For a two-year-old, a year is half of their life, which is why the time between birthdays seems to take an age for young people. Ruth Ogden believes memory is crucial for calculating how quickly time has passed.
And memory playing its tricks explains why time speeds up when we age, says David Eagleman. Adrian Bejan says sleep is key. An alert, rested brain will click faster, slowing down time. Philosopher Christoph Hoerl thinks we would benefit from adjusting our entire understanding of how time travels.
It could relieve the strain of time dragging or flying. David Eagleman believes the secret is in novel experiences. In his new study, Bejan examines time as we experience it through the lens of this theory, using previously published research from other experts to back him up. Why do we tend to focus on the unusual, not on the ever-present? To answer these questions, he examined the building blocks of our experience of time. He reasons that time is represented by changes in stimuli, like visual images, and that our minds perceive reality by processing these images, one after the other.
Scientists have established that we take in the world as a seamless stream of ongoing perceptions. And we sense that time changes when the images we perceive change too. This misalignment, Bejan argues, is strengthened as we age because we experience a slowdown in image processing speeds.
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