In the UK version of the TV show The Traitors , contestants were given five minutes to find as much gold as they could, put it into cages and hoist them before the time ran out. There was a catch though - they weren't given any information about when the five minutes were up.
Author
- Ruth Ogden
Professor of the Psychology of Time, Liverpool John Moores University
Instead, they had to use their internal sense of time to decide when to end the task. Stopping the task too soon meant they collected fewer gold pieces. Stopping the task too late would mean all their gold would be discarded. Accurate timing was therefore the key to success - but interestingly, they chose to end the task after just three minutes.
Why are we so spectacularly bad at judging time? Can you time a minute or an hour perfectly without using a clock? You may be surprised to realise you are not as good at this as you think.
We don't have a clock in our brains that keeps track of time perfectly. As a result, time can often feel like it is passing more quickly or slowly than normal . This is because our experience of time is shaped by our activities and emotions.
Emotional bias
An extreme example of this is what happens when we think we are about to die . If you've ever been in a car accident, you have probably experienced the sensation that time is slowing down, and everything is happening in slow motion.
When we experience extreme threats, flight or fight responses kick in, our heart rate increases and the insula, an area of the brain responsible for emotion processing, becomes activated . This change in our brain activity and bodies also appears to be responsible for distorting our sense of time .
We actually demonstrated this in recent research where we explored how people perceived time when walking across a virtual crumbing ice bridge. Wearing a VR headset, participants were tasked with walking from one end of a mountain ice-bridge to the other.
As they walked, the ice blocks beneath them would crack or give way entirely - causing them to "fall" to the ground. Throughout the task we monitored our participants heart-rate and how much they sweated.
Our results show that people rarely felt like time passed as normal during this task. Instead, they often felt like time was passing more slowly than normal. Critically, those who experienced the biggest change in arousal during the task were the ones who were most likely to report that time was slowing down as they traversed the bridge. Controlling our emotions is therefore key to maintaining a stable and accurate sense of time.
It's not just near-death situation which distort our sense of time. Events during normal daily life govern how quickly we feel like time is passing. Research shows that time really does pass more quickly when we are happy, and it crawls at the pace of a snail when we are bored. These distortions to time are caused by changes in how much attention we pay to time .
Our brains have a limited capacity. We only really attend to time when it is highly relevant to what we are currently doing, or when there is a high degree of uncertainty about time.
When we are having fun and socialising with friends, time is rarely a priority, and as a result we pay less attention to its passing than normal. As a result, these types of positive events tend to feel like they are passing more quickly than normal.
However, when we are dreading a future event, or desperate for a current one to end, we have a tendency to obsess over time. This causes us to pay more attention to time than normal, resulting in the sensation that it is passing slowly.
Uncertainty over time
Being uncertain about time has the same effect. When waiting for a delayed train, for example, our level of temporal uncertainty is high because we don't know precisely when (if ever) our wait will end. Not knowing when an event will occur causes us to focus on time, and this fixation on time is the reason that it drags.
During The Traitors gold searching task, time seemed to fly for the contestants, making them feel like it has been five minutes when it had actually only been three. This is probably because the stress of finding the gold, while running around on uneven terrain, and constantly trying to keep an eye out for someone stabbing you in the back, took most if not all of their thinking capacity. As a result, despite the importance of time to the task, the contestants simply paid too little attention to time to accurately process it. This, coupled with the increased arousal caused by all the running around, and fear of getting the task wrong left them them hopelessly unable to accurately keep track of time. Ultimately changes in their attention and arousal resulted in them ending the task prematurely and missing out on much needed prize money.
Understanding the ways in which attention and emotion affect our sense of time can help us to overcome the sense of time flying and dragging when we don't want it to. If you find yourself in a state of distress, and sense that the world is slowing down around you, the best thing to do is to try to stay calm as reduce your level of arousal. This will help time to speed up.
But when you find yourself clock-watching, perhaps waiting for a shift at work to end, distraction is key to making that time fly. By focusing on things other than time, you can trick yourself into feeling like time is passing more quickly, reducing how long you feel like you are in a state of torment.
Ruth Ogden receives funding from The British Academy, The Wellcome Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council, CHANSE and Horizon 2020. This piece was written as part of the Wellcome Trust Project "After the End" 225238/Z/22/Z and the ESRC project TIMED (ES/X005321/1).
