![\"\"](\"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Time-Wizard-NEW-Header-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we\u2019ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in August 2014.<\/em><\/p>\n As we now approach the sunset of the summer season, take a look back on the last few months. Does it seem like your summer lasted forever, that it slowly floated along in a hot haze? Or did these last few months seem to go by in a blink?<\/p>\n Your answer to that question will likely depend on your age. If you\u2019re a young buck, you\u2019ll probably feel like you fit six months into the last three. If you\u2019re longer in the tooth, chances are your summer seems to have gone by in a quick blur \u2013 much like the rest of your year.<\/p>\n Why does time seem to slow down when you\u2019re young, and speed up as you get older?<\/strong> You may have heard it said that this phenomenon can be chalked up to the fact that when you\u2019re younger, each year comprises a larger percentage of your total lifespan and thus feels more sizeable; one year is 1\/14 of your life when you\u2019re fourteen, but only 1\/40 when you\u2019re 40.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a fun theory, but there\u2019s an actual neurological reason for how our perception of time changes as we age. And once you understand it, you can become something of a time wizard — quickening or slowing the way time feels, and even making your life seem longer than it really is.<\/p>\n Time is a fixed dimension. \u201cClock time\u201d can be broken into minutes, seconds, and nanoseconds, and can be objectively measured. Even without an external chronometer to aid us, our internal clocks often do an excellent job of tracking time; if I asked you to guess the time right now, you\u2019d probably be pretty close.<\/p>\n Yet how we perceive<\/em> time is not always so accurate. Depending on our circumstances, time may seem to contract or expand, speed up or slow down. Dr. David Eagleman<\/a>, neuroscientist and foremost researcher on time perception<\/a>, calls this phenomenon \u201cbrain time,\u201d and unlike clock time, its measurements are very subjective.<\/p>\n In contrast to our other senses like touch and taste, which are located in specific parts of our brains, our sense of time is woven throughout our neural matter. As Eagleman puts it<\/a>, time is \u201cmetasensory\u201d and \u201crides on top of all the others.\u201d Because our perception of time is intricately tied up with our emotions and memories, the information we take in about how our hours are spent isn\u2019t raw data. Instead, Eagleman explains<\/a>, our minds filter the info before presenting it to us:<\/p>\n the brain goes through a lot of trouble to edit and present this story to you of what’s going on out there and how fast or slowly it happens. What your brain’s telling you [that] you see is not always what’s out there. It’s trying to put together the best, most useful story of what’s happening out there in the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Time then, Eagleman argues, is ultimately \u201ca construction of the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n To understand when, how, and why your brain edits your perception of time, it\u2019s useful to begin with what happens to your \u201cbrain time\u201d when faced with a life-threatening situation. If you\u2019ve ever felt close to death \u2013 gotten into a car wreck, engaged in a firefight, fell off a roof \u2013 you likely felt that time expanded during those fraught moments, and that everything happened in slow motion, \u00e0 la The Matrix<\/em>. In the aftermath, you probably remembered the experience in vivid detail.<\/p>\n Dr. Eagleman wanted to find out if people\u2019s brains were really slowing down their perception of the world during these life-threatening situations, or if something else was going on. So he took a group of participants to one of the scariest \u201camusement\u201d rides in the world: the SCAD<\/a>. Riders are dropped, on their backs, into a 100-foot freefall. Those who try it typically find the experience utterly terrifying. Eagleman had his participants wear a wristwatch and asked them to look at it during their freefall. The watch would flash a digital read-out of a number a split-second too fast for the human eye to register under normal conditions. If fear slows down our perception of reality, Eagleman reasoned, the participants would be able to see the number as they dropped. Yet none were able to do so.<\/p>\n After their experience on the SCAD, Eagleman asked the participants to imagine their fall and how long it had taken. Though they had been able to accurately guess the time of others\u2019 falls, when it came to estimating their own drop, they invariably felt it had taken 30% longer than it actually had.<\/p>\n From these results, Eagleman posited that time doesn\u2019t actually slow down when we\u2019re fearing for our lives. Instead, scary situations send our amygdala \u2013 a part of the brain connected with memory and emotion \u2013 into overdrive, spurring the brain to record much more detail than normal. Because the brain lays down such rich, dense memories of those moments, when you later look back on the experience, there\u2019s a lot more \u201cfootage\u201d than normal to run through, making the experience seem<\/em> like it lasted longer than it actually did.<\/p>\n Time will not only seem to expand during life-threatening situations, but also whenever we encounter something novel or do something new.<\/p>\n In another experiment, Eagleman had participants sit in front of a computer screen that continuously flashed the same image of a shoe. Every once in awhile, the monotony was broken with a picture of a flower. The participants believed that the flower stayed on the screen longer, when in fact it cycled through just as quickly as the shoes.<\/p>\n It may be that the flower seemed to linger because its novelty spurred the participants to pay greater attention to it (more attention=more memory laid down=perception of longer duration). But it\u2019s equally possible that the flower seemed to stay longer because the pictures of the shoes became compressed<\/em>. Through a cognitive phenomenon called \u201crepetition suppression,\u201d once the brain has been exposed repeatedly to the same stimuli, it doesn\u2019t have to expend as much time and energy recognizing it. The first time the brain encounters something, it utilizes a high amount of cognitive resources in order to make sense of it. The novelty of the stimulus spurs the mind to capture a lot of detail, which makes the encounter seem longer. With each exposure to the same stimuli, the energy required to identify it goes down, as does how long your encounter with it seems to last; the brain develops little neural shortcuts, allowing it to recognize the stimulus much more efficiently. Thus for the participants in the study, the shoe images would have appeared to stay on the screen for a shorter duration than they actually did, making the flash of an occasional flower seem longer in contrast.<\/p>\n \u201cRepetition suppression\u201d is also in effect when we encounter predictable patterns. The brain knows what\u2019s coming and doesn\u2019t have to work very hard to prepare for what\u2019s around the bend. For example, when you see \u201c1, 2, 3, 4\u2026\u201d your brain\u2019s energy expenditure rises on #1, and then greatly falls off once it recognizes the familiar pattern.<\/p>\n What may be puzzling about Eagleman\u2019s research is that it seems to contradict popular maxims like \u201cTime flies when you\u2019re having fun,\u201d and \u201cThe watched pot never boils.\u201d Don\u2019t exciting and novel experiences speed up time rather than slow it down?<\/p>\n I posed this question to Dr. Eagleman, who explained to me that there are two types of time perception: prospective and retrospective. Prospective time occurs when you\u2019re in the moment, and your brain is anticipating what will happen next. When you\u2019re busy and a lot is happening, \u201cyour mind is no longer attending to time at that moment — you\u2019re not checking your watch or clock — so it seems like time is going by fast.\u201d If you\u2019ve ever been a waiter on a busy night, you know your shift can fly by — your mind is super focused on serving customers and what your next task is rather than on the clock.<\/p>\n The flip side of prospective time occurs in situations that lack stimuli to engage your brain. If you\u2019re in a boring meeting, or on a long flight, \u201cyour mind is deeply attuned to time because you\u2019re always checking your watch every 10 minutes or so.\u201d You have little else to do besides watch the minutes tick by, which makes time seem to slow way down.<\/p>\n Once your mind reflects on what you\u2019ve been doing (which happens pretty immediately), you transition into retrospective time. If you\u2019ve been doing something boring and bereft of stimuli, your brain won\u2019t have recorded much \u201cfootage\u201d from the experience, and it will seem like a quick episode \u2013 a waft of cerebral nothingness \u2013 in your memory. If you look back on that boring meeting or long flight, it barely registers as a happening in your brain.<\/p>\n But when you reflect on a dangerous or novel experience, your mind\u2019s got plenty of detailed footage for you to peruse. Your brain interprets this fact thusly: \u201cThat must have taken a long time because I don\u2019t normally retain that much detail about events.\u201d<\/p>\n Hence, time does fly when you\u2019re having fun, but then stretches out in your memory.<\/p>\n As you\u2019ve been reading along, you\u2019ve probably already been thinking about how this research applies to your own life, and at last you know the answer to the question we posed at the start: why does time seem to slow down when you\u2019re young, and speed up as you get older?<\/p>\n When you\u2019re young, everything is new \u2013 you\u2019re constantly figuring out how the world works and learning the rules that govern nature and society. And you\u2019re regularly engaging in \u201cfirsts\u201d: first day of school, first time driving, first real job, and so on. With all this novelty, your brain is regularly laying down the kind of rich, dense memories that stretch out your perception of time.<\/p>\n In contrast, when you\u2019re an adult, you\u2019ve pretty much been there and done that. You\u2019ve discovered the patterns of life, and your day-to-day doings are likely much more routine and predictable. Your brain doesn\u2019t have any reason to expend energy on capturing your repetitious and predictable morning commute, ceremonial eating of a ham sandwich at your desk at work, and nightly watching of Game of Thrones<\/em>. \u201cNothing to see here,\u201d your brain says, and its camera clicks off. Thus, when you look back on each week, month, and year, there\u2019s very little footage to read out, and your life seems to have passed in a fleeting blur.<\/p>\n Those who live a mundane, repetitious life are actually hit with a double whammy: in the midst of their boring day-to-day lives (prospective time), time seems to drag interminably on. Yet when they reflect on their lives (retrospective time), it seems to have sped by!<\/p>\n Yet such a fate is not inevitable. The very cool thing about this research is that it shows us how easily time can be manipulated \u2013 how \u201crubbery\u201d it is, as Eagleman puts it. You have it in your power to slow down (or speed up) your perception of time. You can\u2019t literally make your life longer, but you can make it seem<\/em> longer. All you need to do is regularly inject a little novelty into it. Think about the last time you went on a great, action-packed vacation. Dimes to donuts, at the end of the trip, you said something like, \u201cWe were only here a week, but I feel like we\u2019ve been gone forever<\/em>.\u201d All that new adventure slowed down your perception of time. Even as we get older, we can still seek out new horizons and new \u201cfirsts.\u201d<\/p>\n You don\u2019t have to do big things like traveling in order to stretch out time either. Eagleman says that even very small changes that \u201cshake up your neural circuits\u201d will do the trick. He recommends<\/a> trying things like:<\/p>\nLiving on Brain Time<\/h3>\n
Does \u201cMatrix\u201d Time Exist?<\/h3>\n
Novelty and Our Sense of Time<\/h3>\n
But Doesn\u2019t Time Fly When You\u2019re Having Fun?<\/h3>\n
How to Become a Time Wizard and Slow or Quicken Your Perception of Time<\/h3>\n
![\"Young](\"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Time-Wizard-1-550.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Time-Wizard-2-550.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Man](\"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Time-Wizard-3-550.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n