How Your Brain Makes Time Pass Fast or Slow

Hey smart people , Joe here.

Every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds, our planet makes one rotation on its axis. Time

is always passing… for all of us, all the…time, at a constant rate of one second per second,

in this constantly evolving instant called “now”, between a past that we can remember

and a future which we can not.

But if time is this unchanging thing, flowing constantly in one direction

then why does it feel like time is happening SO… SLOW sometimes?! Like

come on already. And other times, WHOOSH… time passes out

of our grasp so fast. Hey now! Whoa! What's happening here?

How can the same sum total of solar orbits, lunar phases, terrestrial rotations, or transitions

of a cesium-133 atom remain constant, but feel so different in our minds?

I mean, these days people are having a hard time just remembering what

day it is.

If you're not at work today, or you're working from home, you maybe be wondering, what day is it?

It's Monday.

What is it about COVID-19 that makes March feel like it was

approximately 4.7 years ago?! What makes time feel fast and slow?

[OPEN]

This is a stopwatch. And when you hear a bell, it's going to start. I want you to close

your eyes, count off 7 seconds in your head, NOW…

DING! Open your eyes. How close were you? Some of

you probably cheated and didn't do it, but those of you who DID, you… you probably

weren't that far off… WHICH IS AMAZING!!

Unlike touch, taste, or smell, our bodies don't have a sensory organ for

time.

We DO have an internal biological clock. But your body's timekeeping is tuned to the

broad patterns of day and night, – circadian rhythms. And like other animals, we also rely

on astronomical cues and biological hormones to notice the passage of months, seasons,

and years. But you have no internal timekeeping device that can accurately sense the passage

of seconds, minutes, or hours.

Which still doesn't explain the constant, ever-present ticking sound… which I'm

sure is a totally nOrMaL THING, right?! Heh. Hehe.you hear that too right?

Although there is no actual clock inside your brain, we now know that how we perceive the

speed of time passing really can be stretched or slowed. And scientists once tested

this by dropping people off a 15 story building. Let me explain…

Have you ever heard someone say that a car accident, or some other life or death situation

felt like it happened in slow motion? It makes you wonder if our brains are able to suddenly

reach in and stretch out a second, to give us conscious access to smaller windows or

slices of time, like milliseconds, when we're super freaked out?

Experiencing bullet time like in The Matrix when we're scared might let us react better

or stay safe…

So, to test this, scientists dropped people from 150 feet up. They had harnesses.

And a safety net. Doesn't seem very realistic to me but gotta be “safe” I guess.

During the freefall, each person was asked to look at a display with flashing numbers.

Only, these numbers were flashing by too quickly to be read under normal circumstances. If

a state of fright actually altered their time perception, they should be able to read the

numbers while falling.

So what happened when they were dropped? No one could read the numbers.

In scary times, our brains do not literally stretch time itself and allow us to perceive

smaller moments. But still, the study subjects reported that their own fall lasted longer

than when they simply observed others falling. Their memory of the fall was slowed down.

So, why does this happen? One theory suggests it has something to do with a specific region

of our brain. During stressful or negative situations, this region kicks into high gear,

and some scientists think this causes more of the brain's resources to be directed

at making memories of that moment. These memories are richer in detail, and when they are replayed

in our minds, give us the sensation that they lasted longer than other low-resolution memories.

This is even true in cases like PTSD, where people would rather the memories aren't

so strong.

Our emotions can also influence our perception of time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people

who said they felt nervous or stressed reported that time seemed to pass more slowly in any

given moment, while those who felt happy… … tended to experience moments passing more

quickly.

So yeah, that vacation really did go by fast – at least in your mind. (what is a vacation

again?)

But something interesting happens when we look back on these memories later. “How

is it September already? March feels like yesterday.” We've all experienced that

in some way, right? Even though time feels like it's passing more slowly in the moment,

day after day of routines, where nothing new is happening, our memory of that time period

seems to fly by.

We can see this in action, with something called the Oddball Effect.

When you're exposed to the same image over and over and over, a new or different image

seems to last longer, even though it's displayed for the same period of time.

This might also explain why time seems to pass slower when we're young. When we're

kids, everything is new. Creating memories of this never-before-seen information makes

our brain work harder and makes time seem slower. But as we age, we have more routines,

and fewer new experiences filling our days. So time seems to flow by more quickly. It's

almost like memories are the landmarks along the river of time, and the fewer we have,

the faster it feels like we are going.

So what's the conclusion? Thanks to COVID, many of us are bored, forced into routines

where we experience less newness. AND we're stressed, unhappy, or even frightened. So

time is going by really slow in the moment, and really fast in the long run.

These emotional connections to the perception of time seems to be universal among humans,

but the way we think about our physical place in time is not.

We all experience time and space together…

"I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson" "As you travel faster, or if you find yourself

in the vicinity of a higher source of gravity, time ticks more slowly for you than it does

for other peop…"

Not now, Neil deGrasse Tyson!

We all live on Earth, and none of us are near a black hole, or approaching the speed of

light so I'm not talking about the effects of relativity on whether time actually passes

fast or slow sometimes… ok?

Thank you. Now where was I?

Take your finger and point to the past. If you're from a culture anything like mine,

you pointed back there. Or did you point somewhere else? All human cultures seem to interpret

time through spatial metaphors. As if there is a you, “standing” in a physical location

in time, with you either moving through it, or it flowing past you. But have you ever

really thought about how your daily perception of time is influenced by things like culture,

history, and language?

For me, a person who lives in the United States and grew up speaking English, the past is

behind me. That's why we say things like “closing a door to the past,” or “the

week flew by me” or “knowing something ahead of time”

And when I think about the timeline, the literal line of time, it goes this way.

How would you arrange these images? Speakers of languages written left to right will order

them like this, while speakers of languages written right to left, like Hebrew, often

arrange chronological events in space like this.

And people who speak Mandarin, typically written top to bottom, often refer to the past as

above, and the future as below.

In Vietnamese and some South American cultures, the past – the “before time” which is

known to us and seen clearly in our memories – is in front of, not behind us. And the

future – obscured and unknown – is what is behind. The Yupno people of Papua New Guinea

orient their place in time with the contours of the land. The future is uphill, and the

past, downhill. Other cultures align time with cardinal directions, mimicking the path

of the sun.

Look at these dots. (flash three). The length of time between the flashes is actually the

same, but this larger space makes it seem like the third dot takes more time to show

up.

No matter how we do it, or even if we realize it, we all make some sort of link between space and

time, and that can vary based on where we're from.

There's still a lot we don't know about how and why this connection between time passing

in the physical world and time passing in the brain. But we are all living through a

massive, global human experiment right now, in this pandemic, about how our perception

of time can change based on how we experience the world.

In the eyes of physics, the difference between the past, present, and future might just be an illusion. But for us, a conscious

animal with a mind, this journey through the past, the present, and the future is remembered

and experienced in ways that even Einstein would find mysterious.

Stay curious.