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Health


OUR BRAINS COMPLETELY DISTORT HOW TIME ACTUALLY HAPPENS — HERE’S HOW TO TAKE
ADVANTAGE OF IT

People often only appreciate time when they have an experience that makes them
realize how limited it is.


by The Conversation and Ruth Ogden
November 19, 2023

Jonathan Tejera / 500px/500px/Getty Images

Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted. We spend our lives
portioning it into work time, family time, and me time. Rarely do we sit and
think about how and why we choreograph our lives through this strange medium. A
lot of people only appreciate a time when they have an experience that makes
them realize how limited it is.

My own interest in time grew from one of those “time is running out”
experiences. Eighteen years ago, while at university, I was driving down a
country lane when another vehicle strayed onto my side of the road and collided
with my car. I can still vividly remember the way in which time slowed down,
grinding to a near halt, in the moments before my car impacted with the oncoming
vehicle. Time literally seemed to stand still. The elasticity of time and its
ability to wax and wane in different situations shone out like never before.
From that moment, I was hooked.



I have spent the last 15 years trying to answer questions such as: Why does time
slow down in near-death situations? Does time really pass more quickly as you
get older? How do our brains process time?

My attempts to answer these questions often involve putting people into extreme
situations to explore how their experience of time is affected. Some of the
participants in my experiments have been given electric shocks to induce pain,
others have traversed 100-metre-high crumbling bridges (albeit in virtual
reality), and some have even spent 12 months in isolation in Antarctica. At the
heart of this work is an attempt to understand how our interaction with our
environment shapes our experience of time.


THINKING TIME

This research has taught me that time flexibility is an inherent part of the way
in which we process it. We are not like clocks, which record seconds and minutes
with perfect accuracy. Instead, our brain appears to be wired to perceive time
in a way that is responsive to the world around us.

The way in which our brain processes time is closely related to the way in which
it processes emotion. This is because some of the brain areas involved in the
regulation of emotional and physiological arousal are also involved in the
processing of time. During heightened emotion, the activation caused by the
brain attempts to maintain stability, which alters its ability to process time.

So, when we experience fear, joy, anxiety, or sadness, emotional processing and
time processing interact. This results in the sensation of time passing more,
speeding up or slowing down. Time really does fly when you’re having fun, and
drag when you’re bored.

Changes in our experience of time are most profound during periods of extreme
emotion. In near-death experiences, like my car crash, for example, time slows
to the point of stopping. We don’t know why our brains distort sensory
information during trauma.


ANCIENT ADAPTATIONS

One possibility is that time distortions are an evolutionary survival
intervention. Our perception of time may be fundamental to our fight-and-flight
response. This insight into time has taught me that in times of crisis,
knee-jerk responses are unlikely to be the best ones. Instead, it would seem
that slowing down helps me succeed.

Being a time nerd, I spend a lot of time thinking about time. Before COVID, I
would have said that I thought about it more than most. However, this changed
during the pandemic.



Think back to those early lockdown days. Time started to slip and slide like
never before. Hours sometimes felt like weeks and days merged into one another.
Newspaper headlines and social media were awash with the idea that COVID had
mangled our sense of time. They were not wrong. COVID time-warps were observed
around the world. One study found that 80% of participants felt like time slowed
down during the second English lockdown.

We no longer had a choice about how and when we spent our time. Home time, work
time, and me time were suddenly rolled into one. This loss of control over our
schedules made us pay attention to time. People now appear less willing to
“waste time” commuting and instead place a greater value on jobs with
flexibility over where and when they work. Governments and employers still
appear unsure of how to grapple with the ever-changing time landscape. What does
seem clear, however, is that COVID-19 permanently altered our relationship with
time.

Unfortunately, one downside to having a greater awareness of time is a greater
realization of just how finite it is. This year, I turned 40, and my eldest
child started high school, and my youngest started primary school. What made
these events so sobering for me was the fact that, in my head, I am still only
23 years old. How can I already be halfway to 80? Is there any way that I can
slow time down?

Knowing that my actions and emotions can have a profound impact on my sense of
time opens the tantalizing possibility that one day, I might be able to control
my own experience of time. I often wonder if we may be able to harness the
brain’s ability to distort time and somehow re-purpose it so that we can control
how we experience it. Then, trips to the dentist could feel like seconds, not
minutes, and holidays would no longer be over in the blink of an eye.

Even though we may be a long way from controlling time, my research has taught
me just how precious time is.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Ruth Ogden at
Liverpool John Moores University. Read the original article here.

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