Flying Past or Moving Slow? Why Time Feels Weird in Lockdown
On 4/9/21 at 1:31 PM EDT
Newsweek why we feel time and what this might mean for how we remember lockdown.
Phrases such as a watched pot never boils and time flies when you re having fun point to the fact that humans experience similar phenomena in how they observe time.
It is often thought that we experience time as moving faster when we re not focused on it or are otherwise distracted. At the same time, time may feel slower if we re bored or paying too much attention to the clock.
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According to the clock, time proceeds at a constant rate: exactly one hour per hour, as it happens. But to our perceptions, the march of time is anything but uniform.
In this inaugural episode of the Monitor’s six-part podcast series “It’s About Time,” hosts Rebecca Asoulin and Eoin O’Carroll look into temporal illusions, what causes them, and how we can change the way we experience the passage of time.
They interview Peter Tse, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College. He explains that our sense of time changes based on how much information we’re taking in. Shifting our perception of time, he says, is a matter of shifting our attention.