December 7, 2010
When Time Won’t Fly
How we perceive time passing depends on our mood (courtesy of flickr user stevendepolo)
My fellow blogger Amanda tweeted this yesterday morning during her commute:
If cold makes matter contract, why did the sidewalk between me and the metro seem twice as long this morning?
She was mostly right in her assumption that cold makes things contract (though thermal expansion isn’t uniform, and there are substances, like water, that expand when they freeze), but that wasn’t really the issue. Hers was one of perception. Time and distance in this situation hadn’t changed, but emotions probably had.
Last year, two researchers from the Paris School of Economics, writing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, promoted a new theory about how we perceive time. “Instead of considering an ‘internal timer’ that gives rise to differences in time perception,” they wrote, “we adopt the idea that individuals ‘experience’ time.” A big part of that experience is emotions, and the researchers theorize that the more positive an anticipated emotion, the slower that time will pass.
If a person is waiting for something pleasant to occur, say, opening presents on Christmas morning or entering a warm Metro station after a long, chilly walk, she will experience positive emotions like joy that will improve the situation. Time will seem to expand, and she will experience impatience.
But if a person is awaiting a negative experience, like a trip to the dentist or having to make that chilly walk, she will experience experience negative emotions such as grief or frustration. Time will seem to pass more quickly, but she will undergo anxiety.
“Time is not absolute,” the researchers write, “but can rather have a certain ‘elasticity’ or the person, which will depend on the kind of emotions she experiences.”
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I have found the perception of time passage to be very fluid.
When I was recently told that my office was closing and my job was going away, time seemed to stop. It eventually seemed to get going again but the past few weeks have seemed to crawl by.
Even before this, if I was asked about an event or about when I last received a particular thing in the mail, I really couldn’t say if it was one month ago, two months ago, etc, like I couldn’t tell from my memory and had to consult a calendar to be sure. Perhaps this is normal for someone in their early 50s?
We dont experience TIME per se…only a perception of time as such…but that too what if we dont have an idea of time as an objective idea?…its a moot point…our experience is subjective…anticipation of pleasant events would kickstart our hormones…suddenly our perception of time slows down…though the objective clock would not faithfully reflect that temporal expansion…it becomes more complex if one attempts to understand the perception of time without an external objective reference…is it possible to do so?…fluidity of time – whether in an accelerating or decelerating sense – is dependent on an objective idea of time…time per se is neither an object nor it is could be verified as objective!