It can also be a case there's a cognitive delay associated with taking note of the time. The mechanism involved into decision making for muscular movements might be dramatically faster than cortical perception and verbalization of time.
While you are correct that perception of time is subjective, I'm not referencing that phenomenon at all.
I'm talking about measuring reaction time or brain imaging studies.
For top athletes autopilot kicks in and reacts to the situation, then issues commands to our subconscious body control processes, which then issues nerve impulses to begin movement, all before the pilot (prefrontal cortex?) has even perceived the situation, let alone made any decisions. The autopilot knows how to do this via repeated trailing guided by the pilot function.
You can also observe this in brain imaging studies which can show the body reacting before any thought took place. If pressed people will invent a rational justification for their behavior but the brain images prove this is entirely post-hoc most of the time.
My theory is this is due to conscious thought being so much slower, but I don't have any proof.
I agree on both points, actually, but when people mention that study, they tend to use it as a "See! Using the mouse is faster!" handwave-y dismissal, without mentioning the fine print.
I'm not a neurologist, but I wonder how differently the brain's spatial centers and language centers interact with the part(s) that perceive the passage of time.
Yeah I actually don't think the human brain accounts very well for time. Like despite a decade has passed I don't feel as if time has moved very much for me. Despite the fact that people age, it does not seem an inbuilt thing to recognize your age. It just seems to be something that happens to your body.
Thinking a bit more about it I don't think the brain accounts for time in long term memory, it does a better job in short term memory. That's why a musician can use time and we can't use it very well for stuff we stored a week ago.
This is everyone-and-their-pet-dog's theory, and it makes no sense. Why would the amount of time passed have any effect on the brain's time keeping mechanism?
It's probably because the brain gets worse at encoding memories as it ages, so fewer memories/unit time = faster time perception. Also, older people have slower cognitive tempo than younger people.
But even if your brain is measuring time operating at a precision of "around five minutes before," the variance will sometimes cause that to be 3 seconds before.
Being unable to tell is not an argument for time not ticking slower; the whole point of time ticking slower is that everything is consistent for your point of reference and you can't tell, but your point of reference has different time than other points.
Just as if you were inertially moving at 0.9c relative to me, the time frame would be different despite both me and you being 'the same as a point in empty space'.
That's interesting. I thought I had read that older people perceive time more slowly than younger people but I wonder if that can be overcome by keeping our sense of time-telling "calibrated" by periodically checking our accuracy.
Article doesn't give a citation, just says "psychologists have shown".
Also, wouldn't counting the minute faster be the opposite of what you'd predict for someone who was experiencing time as if it was passing faster? Shouldn't they instead be counting in slow motion, as life whizzes by at normal speed? Or are we instead saying that they've noticed the difference and are somehow overcompensating?
Dopamine also plays a role in the perception of time. Basically, high dopamine gives more processing power it means you get higher frame rates so time feels slower.
similarly, low dopamine leads to time flying quickly. Moreover, the speed at which we blink eyes also affects the perception of time.
I don't want to speak for others but that is exactly the way I experience it. I can sink deep into an unimportant but complex analytical problem after lunch and the next time I take note of time passing, it's 3AM and I forgot to drink, eat, go home, exercise, love, and sleep.
The amount of focus I'm capable of is not the problem. The problem is putting it to use where I want to, rather than where it, by pure chance, happens to end up for the day.
It also applies to the small stuff. Someone asks me to bake a cake and I think it's probably best if I know what temperature it should bake at. An hour later they ask me how the cake is coming along and I realise I know a lot about the chemistry of baking but I haven't brought out the flour yet, and I no longer have time to shower, shave, send that important email, and clean up after baking.
I go back and forth between viewing it as an inability to perceive time and an affliction of directing behaviour. Perhaps they're two lenses through which to view the same thing, and I haven't yet discovered their symmetries. (Only vaguely aware of them -- directing behaviour to achieve future goals requires the ability to perceive time acutely.)
I have an early childhood brain injury, and I don't perceive time passing. I never knew time.
I took a medication (abilify) that made me aware of the passage of time. It was excruciating, I had to stop. My brain had no framework for handling the input.
It's probably not a joke. Many people report things like this when talking about time. Our brains are just not that great at accurately thinking about long periods of time.
What I was looking for, but could not find in the article, is some more information about time perception [1].
It amazes me to no end that time seems to be passing faster and faster now that I grow older. In my youth, 10 minutes used to take ages, but now a month passes in a blink.
If any of you startup guys can find a way to slow this down, I'll buy a subscription.
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