SANDS OF TIME
We know the hours seem to whizz past when we’re having happy and having fun, but how do our other emotions affect the way we watch the ticking of the clock?
How does the way we feel affect how fast time seems to pass?
Due to the pandemic robbing us of the usual markers by which we would normally judge the months marching past, in 2020 we’ve been mired in a time warp of sorts. March seemed 100 days long, but we’ve blinked and somehow it’s now the middle of the year. Where did the time go?
The study of the way humans perceive the passage of time sits at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and cognitive linguistics. Professor David Alais from the University of Sydney School of Psychology says unlocking how our minds interact with time is a challenging scientific puzzle. “A lot of things in the brain are encoded in a particular place. You can say, ‘Well this part of the brain does that process, and this other part does another process.’ We don’t have that with time – what we have is a network of areas that seem to all communicate with each other somehow to represent time and it’s not a simple thing to pin down.”
The answers to these questions lie in how we’re feeling at any given moment. Specifically, our emotions alter how we observe the hours ticking by. It’s somewhat of a cruel irony that when we’re feeling happy and would like to bask in it as long as possible, time gallops away from us, while gloomy occasions drag on seemingly forever. There are moments, however, where time seems to slow down to help us out.
BENDING TIME
Fear, for example, slows down our perception of time, helping us to act fast to divert disaster. When trying to hit a pitch in baseball, fast bowl in cricket or in the seconds before a car crash, we need intense concentration to hit a winning shot or thwart danger. All kinds of sportspeople from tennis players to racing car drivers have reported experiencing this phenomenon, seeing critical moments in slow motion to give them more reaction time to formulate the perfect response. It’s believed some individuals might be better at producing this effect than others, making them better placed to excel in elite sports.
Alais says it’s the laser focus of your mind in these moments that prompts this ‘slowed down’ effect. “Whether you’re focusing on that cricket ball looming up and ready to be hit, or you’re focused suddenly and tragically inwardly over some devastating news, or you’re focusing on a pot waiting for it to boil, if you just focus on one thing, time seems to slow down.
“And when you’re engaged in many things or your attention is free to wander and acknowledge the many things happening around you, you suddenly realise time is going past at its normal rate or perhaps even faster.”
We can emulate this feeling of calm in the face of fast-paced action and danger through turning an intense focus inwards in practising meditation. By shutting out external stimuli, closing our eyes and concentrating on taking deep breaths, we can slow the world down and stave off stress, if only for an extended moment or two. “You can control your perception of time like that if you want,” says Alais. “When you’re captivated by something awe-inspiring, then time definitely can slow down, and you can induce that in a sense yourself by things like mindfulness and mediation.”
On the other side of the equation, when we’re happy and exuberant, we’re noticing what’s happening around us and the world speeds up.
“You can get a thrill when you’re really chasing something, you’ve got an idea and you’re nailing it down and it’s exciting and you’re on this quest to finish it, you can get really excited and focused, and time can speed up,” says Alais. “There’s a rewarding dopamine experience.”
Time tends to fly when you’re having fun, but it turns out the inverse is also true. In a 2009 study at the University of Chicago, participants who were assigned tasks such as reading and listening to music reported enjoying the activity more if artificially given the feeling that time had flown by as a result of being tricked into believing they’d been doing the task for a longer timeframe.
These results led to some intriguing philosophical conclusions, according to Alais. “We’d like to think that mood leads to the impression of time, so when I’m feeling happy then time goes faster. It seems that the link there goes both ways – if you speed up time, we seem to enjoy that more.”
BRAIN TRICKS
With mood and time intertwined in this way, it’s no surprise that mental health conditions and mind-altering substances can impact how fast the hours fly past. Depression, for example, slows down our perception of time, while individuals with schizophrenia experience it erratically rather than as a constant.
Dr Hinze Hogendoorn, from the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, says certain drugs also give the illusion of time expanding and contracting. Obviously, alcohol can cause us to black out and lose nights of our lives we’ll remember
“MENTAL HEALTH CONDITIONS CAN IMPACT HOW FAST THE HOURS FLY PAST.”
and never get back, but drugs with hallucinogenic properties can bend our minds in strange ways.
“A lot of the different kinds of hallucinogenics will affect how we perceive time – LSD famously has things that do that,” says Hogendoorn. “Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has a similar effect where it can either make things speed up or slow down.”
WHY TIME ‘SPEEDS UP’
As we get older, individual days can seem longer, while years accelerate and zoom past. According to Alais, this happens for a couple of reasons. Firstly, a week to a child seems like an aeon because it’s a larger proportion of the life on Earth they’ve experienced so far. As the years go by, we’re also encountering fewer events that captivate our attention and make enough of an impression to stay in our memories. “When you are young, you are constantly encountering new, interesting, novel situations. Everything is exciting and you’re curiously discovering everything, so there’s a whole lot of salient events happening. That happens less when you’re older.”
Seasoned clock-watchers will know how slowly the second hand drags towards home time from school or work when you’re fixating on it. Feeling completely unmoored from time, however, can be an equally unpleasant experience, if not many times worse.
As a transient and ephemeral entity, time can’t be detected by our brains using a sense or bodily organ. You can’t smell it or taste it, or even see it directly – the best the brain can do is make educated guesses based on what it observes through the senses. Remove these external indicators, such as the clock on the wall or the sound of a song playing on the radio, and we lose our markers of whether we’ve spent hours or mere minutes in limbo.
A flotation tank, in which a person lies suspended in a super-buoyant bath enclosed in a dark capsule, aims to put the individual in a relaxed, meditative state by the removal of sensory information. It can feel like you’re floating forever, as pretty much all external indicators for the minutes ticking by have been removed. Advocates claim the tanks can help alleviate stress, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and inflammatory conditions such as fibromyalgia.
But there can be a fine line between unshackling yourself from the world and all that goes on in it and a damaging experience that destroys peace of mind. Our brains do not cope well without boundaries and certainty. People have reported having hallucinations and out-of-body experiences in flotation tanks.
Similarly, solitary confinement in prison is considered by some to be cruel and unusual punishment partly because the prisoners’ freedom is so restricted and the realm that they inhabit so small that all their existence is reduced to is time passing with barely anything to break it up.
There are a number of temporal illusions giving us clues about how the brain incorporates various pieces of information to calculate how much time has elapsed from moment to moment. The Oddball Effect, for example, shows that if flashes of images appear at regular intervals in front of us, any unusual, unfamiliar image thrown into the mix is perceived to last longer.
An impression that captures our attention and evokes an emotion in us triggers the brain to react by apparently slowing time down so we can dwell on what we’ve seen, says Hogendoorn. “Things that are more interesting or you pay attention to more deeply, you will process more deeply and engage with more deeply. That will make time in the moment dilate and therefore the duration of the events seems to last longer. That’s the Oddball Effect.”
The Kappa Effect illustrates the link between space and time in our minds. If someone is shown two flashes of light in the same spot and a third after the same time interval but in a different location, we perceive the third flash as having taken longer to appear.
Chronostasis is the lag effect you may have noticed when you first glance at a clock. For the first instant, the second hand seems to freeze before resuming ticking at the usual rate. This is caused by the brain effectively shutting down our vision and rendering us blind for a brief instant while our eyes move between two objects. To partly cover up this break in transmission, it will cut in some footage to prolong the time spent looking at the new object. This is why our vision seems to pause slightly and then carry on as normal.
“What the brain actually does is takes the information that it gets once your eyes land and uses it to backfill the gap,” says Hogendoorn. “It seems like you’re actually seeing that second hand in that position for longer because, for your brain, it feels like it’s been looking at that ever since your eyes left their old position.”
Hogendoorn advises there’s a simple trick you can try to see this effect in action.
“Stand in front of a mirror and look at one of your own eyes, then look back and forth between your two eyes in the mirror and you’ll notice you can’t actually ever see your eyes moving, because while your eyes are moving, you’re blind,” he says. “If you stand opposite someone else and have them look at your eyes back and forth, you’ll easily be able to see their eyes moving.”
So it’s not that your eyes move too quickly, but that our brains perform a sleight of hand to cover up the blurring of our vision that would otherwise occur during the motion.
In the absence of time machines, we’re short of ways to manipulate time beyond these few simple tricks. Shutting down our senses and turning inwards will give us a calm feeling of time decelerating, and keeping busy with new and interesting input for our brains will make the time fly past.
The important factor is to enjoy ourselves along the way.