How many times have you wished for more hours in a day? Though adding time isn’t possible, it is possible to trick your brain into feeling like the day is longer. The team at social sharing app Buffer explains how.
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? Chances are, you were probably doing something—or a whole bunch of somethings—that was brand new to you and demanded your attention.
The funny thing is, by focusing on what you were doing, you actually slowed down time (or how your brain perceived that time, anyway). 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.”
The same thing happens when we hear enjoyable music, because “greater attention leads to perception of a longer period of time.”
Conversely, if your brain doesn’t have to process lots of new information, time seems to move faster, so the same amount of time will actually feel shorter than it would otherwise. This happens when you take in lots of information that’s familiar, because you’ve processed it before. Your brain doesn’t have to work very hard, so it processes time faster.
Interestingly though, that doesn’t mean doing something over and over again, can’t have a significant impact on your brain, in fact practice can fundamentally rewire your brain, too.
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Filed under: Psychology, Science Tagged: BRAIN, BRAIN HACKS, BRAINS, MIND HACKS, neurology, Neuroscience, perception of time, Psychology, SCIENCE, TIME, time perception
