Why does time fly … or not? It’s all in your mind

How many times have you felt the time fly on a busy day or felt it drag when you least wanted it to? Why does time seem to go faster or slower depending on what else is going on?

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?” or, “How long before I can open my Christmas presents?”

“If we’re waiting for something to happen … time can dilate and actually feel it has been a lot longer in duration,” Dr Irish said.

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 20.

So it’s not just external factors, but who we are that influences our perception of time. But how does that work?

Fast v slow: How does our brain sense time?

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.

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.

“Through the feeling of our body over time we sense duration,” he 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.

“In boredom, because we are overly sensing our own bodily feelings, time expands a lot.”

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. The same applies when you’re busy.

“If we are multitasking and we are extremely busy, then we can have this time contraction affect where the day seems to go by extremely quickly and we can’t figure out where all those hours went,” Dr Irish said.

Sometimes running on “autopilot” can make time seem to speed up so much we get stressed, Dr Wittmann said.

He said mindfulness was one way to cope with this.

“Leave the room, go out of the office building, even if it is just five minutes … you then feel yourself again … and suddenly time passes very slowly again.”

生词记录

drag 拖沓，过得很慢

excruciatingly 极其痛苦地，难以忍受地

neuroscientist 神经学家

dilate 扩大，扩张，展开

impulsive 冲动的

restless 坐立不安的，焦躁的，不耐烦的

perception 认识，观念，看法；知觉，感知

consensus 共识，一致的意见

timescale 一段时间，起止时间，时段

fuzzy 模糊的，杂乱的，有干扰的

insular 思想狭隘的，保守的

cortex 皮层，皮质

integrate 结合，使合并

multitask 同时做多件事

contraction 收缩，缩小，缩短

mindfulness 正念认知