Source: kalnaga/Flickr
Last week I went to a psychology conference at Oxford University. Although the conference wasn’t about time, it made me ponder the different ways in which the human mind experiences time.
It was a large conference, with about 500 delegates, and lasted for four days. I met many old friends and acquaintances and made connections with many new people. I attended so many lectures and workshops that my brain soon felt overloaded with information.
On the last day of the conference, I bumped into a woman I had conversed with on the first day, after sharing a panel with her. It felt like such a long time since I had seen her that I barely recognised her. I told her, “I can’t believe it’s only three days since I saw you! It seems more like three weeks!”
Another phenomenon I noticed was that, although they all lasted an equal 45 minutes, the keynote lectures seemed to pass at different speeds. Some presenters were more charismatic and dynamic than others. Some material was relevant and engrossing, while some was abstract and trivial. As a result, some lectures passed very quickly, while others seemed interminable. (I hope the former was the case with my own keynote lecture!)
The Keys to Time Perception
What determines our experience of time, such as in the above examples? Why does time seem to speed up in some situations and to slow down in others? These questions are at the heart of my new book Time Expansion Experiences, in which I show that time perception is highly flexible and subjective.1
There is a strong link between time perception and information processing. The more information our minds process, the slower time seems to pass. This is why my conference seemed to last for such a long time – because of the large amount of information my mind processed, not just from the lectures and workshops, but also from the people I met, and from the unfamiliar environment of Oxford (which I had never visited before). In contrast, when we remain in our normal environments, repeating the same familiar experiences with the same people, time tends to move quickly.
In a more indirect way, information processing helps to explain why time speeds up in absorption, and slows down when we’re bored. In absorption, we process comparatively little information. We obviously process information from the activity that engages our attention (for example, an entertaining lecture, book or film) but this is quite a small amount compared to other states of mind. We narrow our attention to one small focus and block out all other potential sources of information in our environment. Most significantly, our minds become quiet – largely free of thought – so that we process very little cognitive information.
However, when our attention is diffuse or unfocused – in such states as boredom, impatience or anxiety – a massive amount of cognitive information flows through our minds. As I found during some lectures at the conference, when our finds aren’t focused, they fill with what I call “thought-chatter” – thoughts about the future or past, fragments of conversations or songs, thoughts about politics or celebrities and so on. Hundreds, if not thousands, of such thoughts may pass through our minds in a matter of minutes. And all this cognitive information stretches time.
Why Time Speeds Up as We Get Older
Although it may not seem to directly relate, information processing also helps to explain why time seems to speed up as we get older. In a recent study of 918 adults led by the psychologist Ruth Ogden, 77% of respondents agreed that Christmas seems to arrive more rapidly each year. (14% were neutral on the issue, while only 9% disagreed.) Interestingly, Ogden’s co-researchers asked an Iraqi sample the same question about Ramadan and received a very similar response.2
It’s common for people to report a slow passage of time during childhood. I have a clear memory of finishing primary school (equivalent to elementary school in the US) aged 11, knowing that I would be starting secondary school in six weeks, after the summer vacation. I started to ponder over secondary school, wondering what it would be like and if should worry about it. But then I told myself, “Well, there’s no point thinking about it, as it’s so far ahead in the future.” The six-week period that stretched ahead of me seemed so expansive that it was probably the equivalent of six months of my adult life.
This is mainly because, as children we have so many new experiences, and so process a massive amount of perceptual information. Children also have an unfiltered and intense perception of the world, which makes their surroundings appear more vivid. However, as we get older, we have progressively fewer new experiences. Equally importantly, our perception of the world becomes more automatic. We grow progressively de-sensitized to our surroundings. As a result, we absorb gradually less information, which means that time passes more quickly. Time is less stretched with information.
Resisting the Speeding Up of Time
However, there are certain things we can do to resist the process of time speeding up. The most obvious is to keep introducing newness into our lives – for example, by travelling to new places, learning new hobbies, and meeting new people. Alternately – and perhaps more effectively – we can also slow down time by living mindfully, paying conscious attention to our day-to-day experiences of seeing, hearing, feeling and so on. On a more long term basis, we can cultivate conscious awareness through meditative practices that quieten the chatter of our minds and weaken the power of the conceptual labels that filter out the raw reality of the world. (I examine these methods in more detail in the last chapter of Time Expansion Experiences.)
Both of the above methods increase the amount of information that our minds process, and so expand our perception of time. They show that, although the experience of time speeding up with age is common, it is not inevitable.
