Our Changing Perception of Time

Tuesday - January 2 2024, 15:50 UTC - 10 months ago

Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted, but by studying its elasticity, we can understand the way our brains process time and its relationship to emotion. Research can reveal how time distorts during extreme emotion, which helps explain why it slows down in near-death experiences. It may also give insight to why slowing down is beneficial in times of crisis.

Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted. We spend our lives portioning it into work-time, family-time, and me-time. Rarely do we sit and think about how and why we choreograph our lives through this strange medium. A lot of people only appreciate time when they have an experience that makes them realize how limited it is.

My own interest in time grew from one of those "time is running out" experiences. Eighteen years ago, while at university, I was driving down a country lane when another vehicle strayed onto my side of the road and collided with my car. I can still vividly remember the way in which time slowed down, grinding to a near halt, in the moments before my car impacted with the oncoming vehicle. Time literally seemed to stand still. The elasticity of time and its ability to wax and wane in different situations shone out like never before. From that moment I was hooked.

I have spent the last 15 years trying to answer questions such as: Why does time slow down in near-death situations? Does time really pass more quickly as you get older? How do our brains process time? .

My attempts to answer these questions often involve putting people into extreme situations to explore how their experience of time is affected. Some of the participants in my experiments have been given electric shocks to induce pain, others have traversed 100-meter-high crumbling bridges (albeit in virtual reality), some have even spent 12 months in isolation on Antarctica. At the heart of this work is an attempt to understand how our interaction with our environment shapes our experience of time.

Thinking Time .

This research has taught me that time’s flexibility is an inherent part of the way in which we process it. We are not like clocks which record seconds and minutes with perfect accuracy. Instead, our brain appears to be wired to perceive time in a way which is responsive to the world around us.

The way in which our brain processes time is closely related to the way in which it processes emotion. This is because some of the brain areas involved in the regulation of emotional and physiological arousal are also involved in the processing of time. During heightened emotion, the activation caused by the brain attempts to maintain stability, which alters its ability to process time.

So, when we experience fear, joy, anxiety, or sadness, emotional processing and time processing interact. This results in the sensation of time speeding up or slowing down. Time really does fly when you’re having fun and drag when you’re bored.

Changes in our experience of time are most profound during periods of extreme emotion. In near-death experiences, like my car crash for example, time slows to the point of stopping. We don’t know why our brains distort sensory information during trauma.

Ancient Adaptations .

One possibility is that time distortions are an evolutionary survival intervention. Our perception of time may be fundamental to our fight and flight response. This insight into time has taught me that in times of crisis, knee-jerk responses are unlikely to be the best ones. Instead, it would seem that slowing down help us to understand our situations better and act accordingly, which is likely to increase our chances of survival.