When I am boiling something on the stove for, say, ten minutes, sometimes I will make the mistake of looking at the clock. As I am sure you know, when you wait for something by looking at the clock, each minute seems to a very long time.
I also find time going more slowly when I am in a contemplative or meditative mood, except in this case the sensation is more pleasurable. In contrast, when I am deep into programming something, also a pleasurable activity, the time just flies by. Those same ten minutes on the clock can feel like very little time at all.
All of this is consistent with Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind and similar theories. The part of my brain that is engaged when I am staring at a clock or meditating about something is very different from the part that is engaged when I am explicitly performing a task. I suspect that if one were to do a PET scan of my brain activity at those various moments, very different regions would be lighting up.
In a few years we will very likely have the option to wear augmented reality glasses that give us all sorts of information about the world around us, and we will simply take this power for granted. One thing we might be able to do with those Smart Glasses is to train a machine learning algorithm to give us a customized sense of our own particular “subjective time”. This measurement will vary quite a bit based on various factors, including our current activity, objects in our field of view, and gaze direction.
I wonder whether having this information explicitly available will cause us to make different choices. Will we opt for activities that make time race by, or will we instead become drawn to more contemplative modes of being. Such meditative activities might slow down our subjective clock, and therefore in some sense allow us to live a longer life.