Tempus fugit: time flies. If it ever feels like your days are hurtling by in a blur of meetings, phone notifications and caffeine stops, know that you’re not alone. That Latin phrase has its roots in the writings of Roman poet Virgil, a couple of millennia ago, after all.
More recently, a survey last year found that six in ten people feel like they don’t have enough time in the day to get everything done. ‘Flies’ doesn’t quite cut it; time can feel like it’s gone supersonic.
But new research from George Mason University in the US gives a hint of a much-needed deceleration. Neuroscientists there are studying time dilation, a phenomenon where your perception of time seems to stretch and slow down.
In their latest study, they’re looking at whether certain images, experiences or scenarios are more likely to dilate time, and found that memorable images can play a kind of mind trick on you. The more memorable an image, the more likely you are to think you’ve been looking at it for longer than you actually have.
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In the lab we’re talking seconds, says Prof Martin Wiener, who led the research. “What it means is a moment appears longer to the observer than in reality,” he says.
“Maybe we dilate time to get more information. It’s a way in which the brain says, ‘I’m seeing something and it’s really important so I’d better dilate time to gather as much information as I can in this moment’.”
That raises an intriguing prospect: can we mentally slow down time, learn to live more in the moment and stretch the good times out?
We know that the subjective perception of time is malleable. Common sense and age-old clichés tell us that much: time flies when you’re having fun and slams the brakes on when you’re clock-watching or waiting for a kettle to boil.
“The problem is, when we do feel like we have more time, it’s often not a good thing,” Wiener says. “Generally, when time drags on, those are moments that are upsetting or boring – time working against us.”
Other factors can influence our perception of time, too. Loud experiences usually feel longer-lasting than quiet ones, while emotional or frightening images give the sense that you’ve looked at them for longer than more passive ones.
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If you’re an impulsive person or have ADHD, time might appear to pass more quickly than it does for other people. Then there’s ‘flow’; a state of mind usually described as being ‘in the zone’, when you’re fully immersed in something you’re also enjoying.
“Flow is an experience where time does seem to slow down a bit in the moment, but it’s pleasant,” says Wiener. “Meditation is an example. That’s one of the cases where time does seem to dilate.”
Wiener points out there’s a difference between time in the moment and time as we remember it. “Time flies by in the moment, but when we look back on our memories, they seem to have lasted longer. If you go on vacation for a week to somewhere you’ve never been, when you look back on it, you might think, ‘Wow, I did all this stuff?!’”
In our minds, a holiday feels like it lasts longer than a typical week, where our everyday routine flies by. Possibly our brains don’t stop to absorb that information as much. “When we’re experiencing the same old thing, experiences lack memorability,” Wiener says. “And they lack time.”
So how can we bend time to our will and give ourselves more of it – even just an artificial sense of slow-motion living? Wiener’s research suggests that “seeking out interesting information, new and different, exciting and stimulating things is useful because it does dilate our sense of time, but it also improves our memory for those situations,” he says.
It’s about new hobbies, seeing new places, throwing yourself into new subjects or meeting new people. In other words, if you want to experience more time, then you need to make more of the time that you’ve got.
About our expert
Prof Martin Wiener is an Associate Professor at George Mason University whose lab aims to study how the brain perceives time and space. His work has been published in Human Brain Mapping, NeuroImage, and Journal of Neuroscience.
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