A key feature of the flow experience is a distorted sense of time — typically a feeling that time has passed faster than usual. Subsequent research has identified the sheer pursuit of rewards, from experiences to material goods, as an ingredient for temporal illusions. These studies often incorporate the oddball effect — a phenomenon in which encountering novel stimuli inflates perceived durations.
Dartmouth University psychological scientist Peter Ulric Tse and colleagues demonstrated this effect in when they showed research participants repetitive images flashing on a computer screen, followed by a single novel image.
Although all the images stayed on the screen for the same amount of time, participants reported that the oddball image seemed to last longer than the others.
Psychological scientists in the Netherlands recently demonstrated the influence of potential rewards tied to the oddball effect. In a series of lab experiments, Michel Failing and Jan Theeuwes of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam showed participants a series of images, one of which was different from the rest.
The participants indicated whether the oddball image stayed on screen for a longer or shorter period than the rest of the images. When they could earn a reward for a correct answer in the form of a large number of points, they perceived the oddball images as prolonged compared with oddballs that earned them no points. Being presented with the opportunity to earn a reward may make seconds or minutes seem prolonged, but desire may have a rather different effect, according to a study conducted at the University of Alabama.
Relative to neutral states or positive states with low approach motivation, positive states with high approach motivation shortened perceptions of time, they found. The participants then viewed pictures that were neutral geometric shapes , positive and low in approach motivation flowers , or positive and high in approach motivation delicious desserts. For each picture, they had to indicate whether the picture had been displayed for a short or long period of time.
Just as the researchers hypothesized, the participants perceived the enticing pictures of desserts as having been displayed for a shorter amount of time regardless of the actual duration than either the neutral geometric shapes or the pleasing pictures of flowers. The researchers also found that the perceived amount of time for the enticing pictures was related to when participants had eaten that day. Those participants who had eaten recently, which presumably lowered their approach motivation for food, judged the dessert pictures as having been displayed for longer periods of time than did their hungrier peers.
A second study, in which participants reported time as passing faster when they looked at the dessert pictures with the expectation that they would be able to eat those desserts later, confirmed these findings. Gable and Poole propose that states high in approach motivation make us feel as though time is passing quickly because they narrow our memory and attention processes, helping us to shut out irrelevant thoughts and feelings.
The study authors suggest this phenomenon may have a helpful function: If reaching a goal requires waiting or sustained hard work across a period of time, it would be an advantage if that period seems brief. Other positive emotions may have the opposite effect on time perception, studies show.
In , behavioral science researchers from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota published their results from a trio of experiments examining the consequences of awe-filled experiences. The participants in these experiments engaged in activities such as watching awe-inspiring videos of people in everyday situations encountering and interacting with huge animals or watching waterfalls, for example.
Compared with participants who completed less awe-inspiring activities, participants in the awe conditions reported feeling time passing more slowly. Nature itself may slow our sense of time. In a series of studies, psychological researchers at Carleton University in Canada tested whether people perceived time moving more slowly in nature compared with urban settings.
In experiments that included both virtual and actual environments, participants experienced walking through either natural surroundings such as a forest trail or bustling urban locations such as New York City. They estimated the duration of the experiences in minutes and seconds. The first three experiments involved imagery, and researchers found no significant difference in estimates of actual time duration between the nature and urban conditions.
But in all three studies, the participants in the nature condition reported feeling a slower passage of time compared with those in the urban setting. And when the researchers actually took participants for walks in either natural or urban settings, those in the nature condition reported longer objective and subjective perceptions of elapsed time. Individuals in the nature condition also reported feeling more relaxed than those in the urban condition.
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Neuropsychologia 51, — Thones, S. The brain updates its time forecasts, once again anticipating the interval. In addition, "the regions of the brain involved differ depending on the context, particularly if the stimulus only lasts for a very short time, less than milliseconds," says Coull. The visual cortex is activated when we estimate the duration of a visual stimulus.
In the same way, the primary motor cortex comes into play when a timing estimate is associated with an action, whereas the auditory cortex has a part in estimating the length of a sound stimulus.
Above all, the brain's perception of time involves processes linked to memory and attention: witness the impression that time is passing more quickly when we are busy, or doing something amusing or exciting. Time flies even when we are in love. In contrast, a watched pot never boils. Minutes drag by when we are bored. This certainly explains why there are no neurological or psychiatric disorders characterised exclusively by temporal processing deficits," Coull says.
Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter involved in time processing. Dopamine agonists — compounds that activate dopamine receptors — tend to speed up our perception of time, which passes more quickly. This is also the case for certain drugs, such as cocaine, which enhances the effect of dopamine. On the contrary, the neuroleptics used to treat schizophrenia inhibit its effect, creating the impression that time is passing more slowly.
Recent research by neuro-physiologists and chemists working on time processing is beginning to show how emotions may speed up or slow down our perception of time. In Professor Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil, a lecturer on cognition and learning at Poitiers University, France , published a study of how changes in the emotional state of subjects caused by watching films affected their sense of time. A third category of "neutral" footage weather forecasts or stock market updates was also shown.
They then asked students to estimate the duration of a visual stimulus. Fear prompted a state of arousal that speeded up the rate of the internal clock. This state also involved dilated pupils, higher pulse rate, increased blood pressure and muscular contraction.
It reflects a defensive mechanism triggered by a threatening situation, as the body prepares to act either by attacking or running away. However, if you're going to a meeting in Japan, you'd better hurry up. In his book " A Geography of Time ", Robert Levine explains how attitudes to time vary across countries and cultures.
Western Europeans and Japanese value punctuality, while Brazilians seem to have infinite tolerance when deciding what counts as being late for an event. In Germany, you're expected to arrive early, and in Mexico everyone counts on you coming late—because that's exactly what they will do.
The languages we speak and write clearly reflect those differences. People who use a right-to-left writing system map events on a timeline in the direction of their writing , placing the most recent events on the left side. Levine mentions that tribes and ethnic groups from rural parts of the world measure time by events from their surroundings. Instead of at 7 AM, they meet "when the cows come out to graze". Another example is Shambala, an East African language without words for past or future—the speakers describe time as "today" and "not today".
You don't need to step outside the English language to find proof of this. We ask how far the closest Starbucks is, and our friend says it's a five-minute drive.
Many people in the US and Western European countries use time to express distance. One of the reasons is that they assign a high economic value to time, and tend to filter everything through it.
When "time is money" people don't want to waste it, which increases the general pace of life. Every culture has its notion of "social time" which comes with a set of behaviors and expectations. It's important to recognize this when working in a multicultural environment, and respect other cultures' attitudes to time. In other words, if you're in Spain and everything closes down for the midday break, don't fight it.
Of course, living in a particular culture doesn't automatically make you synchronized with all its people. We know that perception and experience of time are highly individual, and everyone has their own natural schedule.
However, if your internal time the relationship between your sleep cycles and energy levels doesn't align with the social time of your current location, you might have trouble staying productive.
For example, you might feel social pressure to be a "morning person", even though you produce your best work later in the day. Maybe you simply need more sleep than others. Maybe your workplace favors the monochronic approach and expects you to perform tasks one at a time, but you're a polychron—someone who functions better when multitasking. Seemingly innocent things like working with clients from different time-zones or living in a country that enforces daylight saving can also unsettle your perception of time.
This is related to the competing notions of "clock time" and "event time" which operate on a higher level. Most modern workplaces follow the "clock time"; a system where all activities are strictly scheduled, and tasks must be completed within a specific period. In clock time, there is no room for unpredictable obstacles that can derail our plans and cause us to miss a deadline. However, we often have to adhere to both systems in order to accomplish all that is expected from us.
Add to this the demands imposed by social time and our internal time, and it's no wonder we fail to keep in sync with our surroundings. Technology is a blessing and a curse when it comes to our relationship with time.
Clocks, calendars, and their digital counterparts help us make sense of our workdays, but they inevitably influence the way we perceive time. A simple instrument such as a digital clock affects your perception of time differently than an analogue one. The latter represents time as a process, with visual cues as to what has passed and what comes next. A digital clock just shows the time in this moment.
Unsurprisingly, more complex devices have a more profound effect. Many of us reach for the phone whenever we are bored or waiting for something. Using our phones makes time seem to pass faster, creating an illusion of control. We browse social media to fill in the "empty" waiting time and convince ourselves it's better than "doing nothing".
In this way, social media can blur the line between leisure and work time, between productive activity and distraction. And yet, we're not the only ones who practice deception. It's no secret that designers use certain colors to influence emotion and perception.
Using blue and green for progress bars makes people think their files are downloading faster. Some interfaces trick us with animations and lazy loading to make waiting time seem shorter.
Many websites provide their own estimates of how long it takes to consume the content. If a promised 3-minute read turns out to take longer, don't worry. You can always bookmark it in one of the countless apps that strengthen the illusion that you will somehow have more time later. The effects of our distorted perception of time spread like a chain reaction.
We become prone to biases and time illusions. Those biases then influence our decision-making and time estimates. Since our productivity is directly related to both, it's easy to see how a distorted perception of time can negatively affect our performance. We make many time estimates every day; without them, it would be difficult to plan anything. The problem is that they are often inaccurate. A study on time management showed that, in general, people are better at estimating time in passing than predicting the duration of future events.
A well-known bias that illustrates this is the planning fallacy, a phenomenon where we underestimate the time required to complete the task despite our previous experience. However, if we're motivated to complete the task early so that we can begin working on the next one, we're more likely to make a safe estimation and say the task will take longer.
Another thing that impacts our estimations is divided attention, which Paul Fraisse highlights in his review of time perception research. When we have multiple tasks going on, it's harder for us to estimate duration than when we have a single task.
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