Our experience of time is non-linear. Sometimes hours can race by like minutes, while other times a minute can seem like an hour.
I wonder whether anyone has done a systematic study of what happens inside the human brain to create the illusion that time is going faster or slower. Are there measurable processes in the brain that correspond to these temporal illusions?
If anybody knows of such studies, I would love to find out!
This site proposes that in sleep it’s more our memory of an experience than the actual visualization itself that warps the perception of time, but I don’t understand how that’s possible. If I understand correctly, the claim is that REM-sleep experiences run in realtime, but the purpose of the dream is to act as a response to our thoughts and beliefs. So I guess if a person has read about certain stories or histories, they can very quickly reference and attach those “memories” posteriori?
http://www.worlddreambank.com/G/GUILOTIN.HTM
I read the book Felt Time by Marc Wittmann recently. It is all about subjective time perception, and there are some good studies referenced in there. I don’t recall anything in there corresponding exactly to what you’re looking for, but you might find it interesting. And it’s a fairly quick read. One section that stuck out to me was about people’s “temporal resolution,” or the length of time that someone can tell the difference between two stimuli (e.g., how many milliseconds pass between two lights blinking before you can tell it is blinking instead of emitting a continuous light). It turns out that the average person’s temporal resolution is 30 ms. Wittmann references a study David Eagleman (I think) did where he checked people’s temporal resolution at rest and at an exciting time, when time tends to stretch out in our retrospective perception. He found no significant difference there, suggesting that fine-grained temporal resolution might not be the thing that gives us different perceptions of time.
There is also a section in there on the human body’s sense of time, and the feeling of being “present.” We can be present for three seconds at a time, so to speak. This three seconds is like a sliding window that includes things that just happened, are happening *now*, and that you anticipate happening in the near future. Our time perception might be related to how many events we perceive and process during present moments, and how we process them. Three seconds is also the average length of a breath. I’m rambling a bit, but this stuff is just so interesting. Especially thinking about how VR research often discusses “presence”…Maybe there could be some time perception measure in our studies of VR presence.