The Neuroscience of Time Perception

An in-depth look at our internal clocks as an indicator of our mental health, a modulator for our experience, and a real-life applicable tool for when time seemingly is against us.

You yank the steering wheel to the right and slam the car breaks. An unbearable screeching sound follows that violently shatters the silence of the night like the thousand glittering fragments of the windshield. Images flash across your mind―images of family and friends and clips of your life flashing past like a slideshow―until the blow finally arrives and the sight of mangled metal, broken glass, and the bright lights of oncoming traffic fade into darkness.

Your skin is rough with goosebumps from the sight of the ice bath alone. Your bruised and battered muscles need it, yet that doesn’t stop you from cursing your coach when the breath is knocked from your lungs and the icy water steals every last bit of body heat. You grit your teeth against the frigid cold and pierce the clock above with your eyes―daring the second hand to move any slower.

Your eyes glued to bright colors, familiar icons, and rapidly changing pictures on screen, the weight of reality lightens as the amped up stimulation lures you into a comfortably numbness. You laugh with your friend through your headset and engage in a conversation about your next move. The game has your undivided attention, and it is not until your mom bangs on the door that you realize it is 1 am.

What do all the above examples have in common?

The dilation and contraction of time that alters the speed at which we experience life. Every activity we partake in and brain state we enter controls our time perception: dreams, drugs, dopamine, depression, ADHD (and other neurological disorders), technology, and experiences from novelty to near-death close calls―just to name a few. Reading this may be like watching a pot boil or the fun that makes time fly, but I can guarantee your time perception will not be the same when you finish.

Our subjective sense of time is fundamental to our psychology and understanding of our reality. There is increasing interest in studying how we perceive time because of the integral part it plays in how we make sense of our lives. Time perception frames how we evaluate our past, our present, and our future; and it is even becoming more closely linked with consciousness (i.e., our awareness of subjective time, of self in time, and of the world).

The interesting thing about time is that it is not like a river that runs, but rather like a train laying down its own tracks; time is something our brains have to be actively constructing. Whether time is a reality of the physical world at all or merely an artificial construct of the human mind is a heavily debated topic in philosophy and quantum physics. However, for this article’s sake, we are relying on our subjective experience of time because of the many implications it has on our daily experience.

Regardless of if you are aware of it or not, time perception is likely being used against you. Ever noticed most casinos do not have windows or clocks, but instead have loud, colorful carpets to keep your eyes on the ground and aromatic scents that attempt to ease anxiety? You probably cannot remember the music in the background changing songs because of the track’s consistent tempo and little to no lyrics, all blending seamlessly. Every color, every scent, and every sound in a casino strategically traps consumers in a world where time does not exist. These time distortion tactics are not just applied at casinos, but supermarkets, malls, social media companies, and any marketer who designs products to maximize the time you spend with them, and the money that follows.

If you understand the ‘formula’ for time dilation, then you can manipulate your sense of time. If you do not, it can manipulate you. First, understand that absolute time is the true duration of an interval or the time on a clock, whereas perceived time refers to how long we think any duration would be based on our subjective experience. Time perception is simply absolute time over perceived time, and when these two quantities differ we call it time dilation.

So what causes time dilation and why do our perceived time and absolute time not always match up? Our ‘sense’ of time is unlike our other senses because we do not so much sense it as perceive it. There is no single sensory organ responsible for the encoding of time, and this causes the neuroscience behind the way we process time to be complicated. Essentially, our brains take a bunch of information from our senses and organize it in a way that makes sense to us, before we ever perceive it. As a result, what we think is our sense of time is actually our brains receiving, reorganizing, and presenting information to us in a particular way.

We perceive time in different forms, so it helps to differentiate between them. In studies in which researchers ask participants to judge time, they will usually distinguish between the two paradigms―prospective and retrospective time―and then additionally get a qualitative sense of their subjective experience:

Our retrospective perception of time has a lot to do with the way our memory encodes and stores information. Our memory does not work like video on a strip of film, but rather selectively, with attention and emotion highlighting which experiences have importance or relevance for our survival. This ties into time perception because when familiar information is being processed, it hardly takes much time at all, whereas, new information is slower to be processed and can seem as if time is being elongated. Neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University, David Eagleman, explains how thinking of time in this model can help us understand altering time perception, and “why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing.” He explains that “the more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”

Have you ever turned to people you have been traveling and adventuring with at the end of a day and said “Can you believe we were doing ‘xyz’ just this morning?” and were in disbelief at how long the day has felt? It is likely that because there was more processing involved with the novel environment you were in — with all the unfamiliar smells, sights, and people — the memory felt longer than if you had had, say, a typical day at your work or school. What can be confusing, however, is that in the moment it did not feel slow, and probably was quite the opposite. This is where the ‘in-the-moment’ temporal perspective of the passage of time (that we will talk about next) comes into play. Fun feels fast but is remembered as slow, and what is boring feels slow but is remembered fast.

If emotions impact memory and memory affects our sense of time, then emotions can therefore play a significant role in distorting the way we view reality, and particularly the way we view time. Using the zero-gravity center in Dallas, Stetson et al. found that subjects perceived a longer duration of time when free falling. This is likely because the levels of fear are so intense that we misinterpret the events to span a greater time period. The richer secondary encoding of the memories due to the involvement of the amygdala may lead to dilated duration judgments retrospectively. This also makes sense evolutionarily because fear distorts our experience of time in order to be prepared to act as fast as possible in case of danger.

The processes involved in how you feel the speed of time passing in the moment has a lot to do with attention, which, when modified, can distort the feeling behind time perception. The higher the cognitive load you have, the less you perceive time. Individuals have limited attentional resources to process given information and, as suggested by Hicks et al. (1976), when a subject performs any activity they split attention between the task’s temporal and non-temporal information. Increased attention towards one dimension decreases performance on the other. Thus, if a subject has a high cognitive load and their attentional resources are more directed towards non-temporal contents, there will be a relatively poor performance on temporal processing and time compression.

Let’s face it, it can be difficult to endure the entire 86,400 seconds of every day―whether that be because of chronic pain, depression, a boring job, or just a repetitive and exhaustive schedule; there likely have been moments where you wish there was a fast-forward button on time. Or maybe you are on the other side of the spectrum, where everything around you is moving too fast. The days fly by, you seem to always be under pressure from the clock, your to-do list is an ever-growing mountain, and you wish you could just stop time and breathe for a second.

It turns out that, almost like with a remote, we can control how we feel time passing with our cognitive load. Time compression or that ‘fast-forward button’ happens when we are highly engaged or immersed in an activity, such as playing a video game or engaging with others. Visual reality takes time compression to the next level with one study finding that participants who played the virtual reality version of a game first played for an average of 72.6 seconds longer before feeling that five minutes had passed than students who started on a conventional monitor.

Flow, famously coined by Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University and another variation of the ‘fast-forward button’, describes the experience of being so immersed in an activity that you enter an energized, focused state that shuts out external distractions. Whether this is achieved through athletics, work, or a creative project, a key feature of the flow experience is a distorted sense of time — typically feeling that it is passing faster than usual. We would expect this sort of time contraction in our subjective experience of time perception considering the individual’s heightened focus, attention, and cognitive load.

What about a ‘slow-motion button’ for all of us who feel the world is moving at 100 miles per hour, what elongates our sense of time? In a series of studies at Carleton University in Canada psychology researchers tested whether people perceived time moving slower in nature compared with more urban settings. Participants experienced walking through either natural surroundings, such as a forest trail or buzzing city locations. Those in the nature condition reported longer objective and subjective perceptions of elapsed time, which intuitively makes sense. Many of you have probably had the experience of coding or answering emails on your computers for hours into the night and can understand the stark contrast between the subjective duration perception of that elapsed time compared to how it feels to sit outside in the grass. When using technology the majority of our sensory information is being received through our visual systems which are not a continuous stream of stimuli but falter with blinks. When we are outside, a diverse array of sensory input grounds us in time along with oftentimes feeling a stronger presentness in the moment. For some, sitting still without extra incoming stimulus is being ‘too present’ and they crave the technology that speeds up their perception and engages their mind.

Prospective time and making judgements of the passage of time ties in closely with the workings of the nervous system. A couple of neuromodulators (i.e., dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin) govern the size of the ‘bins’ we batch time with, which modulates our perspective of time. Studying this form of time perception is the most objective because researchers can simply raise the levels of each molecule through the administration of a specific drug, and then ask the subject to estimate when a minute or another interval of choice is up. Similar findings concerning dopamine have also been found through giving rats amphetamines, although the ethics of such studies is not as clear-cut.

The former described study found that subjects under increased dopaminergic effects overestimated the passage of time (e.g., They might think one minute had passed at the 50-second mark), whereas those given drugs to increase serotonin such as cannabis underestimated the time passed (e.g., The subject clicking the clicker to signal one minute but at one minute and 10 seconds). Dr. Huberman from Stanford university illustrates the effects of dopamine on our internal clocks as fine slicing of time bins. This, he describes, is like “increasing the frame rate on your camera.” When a video increases its frame rate enough slow motion is achieved and dopamine and norepinephrine increase this frame rate. The opposite is true with serotonin, where the time bins elongate, making the world seem faster than your internal clock, as indicated by the underestimation of how fast time had passed in the study.

Time is rubbery, making it flexible for each occasion and each individual. The way each individual perceives time is a fundamental part of their psychology, making it a great indicator of mental health, a modulator for our experience, and a real-life applicable tool for us to take advantage of. From a clinical perspective, examining the timing abilities of patients with certain psychiatric or behavioral disorders — particularly those whose symptoms tie to temporal organization (e.g., attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD], schizophrenia, depression) — may benefit the understanding of the psychological experience of these disorders and their potential remediation. If tweaks in time perception can help remedy the impulsiveness associated with ADHD and addiction or the dragging and boredom of each minute associated with depression, then symptoms could become that much more manageable.

Another application of time perception is modulating cognitive load and engagement to act like a fast-forward button. This is demonstrated by Deb Shaw, who has suffered three strokes and has been using virtual reality (VR) for therapy exercises over the past four years. “In almost every case, when I put on the headset and sensors then enter the world of VR, time is left behind,” Shaw explains. This is purposeful, as the captivating VR world can be used to contract individuals’ perceived time; time that might be otherwise excruciatingly long, suffering from chronic pain or undergoing laborious treatments such as chemotherapy.

The more we understand time perception, the more control we have. Supposing it is true that perception is reality, we effectively can make our days longer or shorter. It is not quite a time machine, but it is almost as good as one.

Works cited:

This article was written by Emily Moberly, an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley studying cognitive science, and was edited by Oliver Krentzman and Luc LaMontagne, former Publications Leads of Neurotech@Berkeley

This article was originally published in Neurotech@Berkeley’s Fall 2021 Edition of Mind Magazine: Change My Mind. To read more, visit neurotech.berkeley.edu/mind.html

Related posts:

Explore the history of sex technology and how it has evolved over the last 40 years. From personal vibrators to virtual reality experiences, learn about the advancements in the industry and how it has become more inclusive and diverse. Get a glimpse of what the future of sex tech holds and its ethical implications.

Download chapter-wise and complete NCERT books of Class 11 Physics for FREE…. Book <cta> Download <cta> Class 11 Physics I Chapters… NCERT Textbook PDF of Class.. Free download NCERT Book for Class…

Constructing advanced pipelines, or trying to wrap your head around the existing pipelines, in Apache Beam can sometimes be challenging. We have seen some nice visual representations of the pipelines…