Can you remember a period in your life when, if you look back on it now, time seemed to stretch on forever? When a week seemed like four, or an hour seemed like it went on for days? What were you doing during that period?
Neuroscientist David Eagleman used
this great example to explain how time perception works:
Yet “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?
Before I explain these time-bending powers you didn’t know you had, let’s back up a bit and look at how our brains perceive time normally.
How we perceive time
Our ‘sense’ of time is
unlike our other senses—i.e. taste, touch, smell,
sight and hearing. With time, we don’t so much
sense it as
perceive it.
Essentially, our brains take a whole bunch of information from our senses and organize it in a way that makes sense to us, before we ever perceive it. So what we think is our sense of time is actually just a whole bunch of information presented to us in a particular way,
as determined by our brains:
When our brains receive new information, it doesn’t necessarily come in the proper order. This information needs to be reorganized and presented to us in a form we understand. When familiar information is processed, this doesn’t take much time at all. New information, however, is a bit slower and makes time feel elongated.
Even stranger, it isn’t just a single area of the brain that controls our time perception—it’s done by
a whole bunch of brain areas, unlike our common five senses, which can each be pinpointed to a single, specific area.
So here’s how that process affects the length of time we perceive:
When we receive lots of new information, it takes our brains a while to process it all. The longer this processing takes,
the longer that period of time feels:
When we’re in life-threatening situations, for instance, “we remember the time as longer because we record more of the experience. Life-threatening experiences make us really pay attention, but we don’t gain superhuman powers of perception.”