Do you remember a time in your life when time seemed to stretch infinitely? When a week seems to be four weeks, or an hour seems to last for several days? What were you doing during that time?
Chances are, what you're doing (or a whole bunch of things) is completely new to you and requires your attention. By focusing on what you're doing, you're actually slowing down time (or, anyway, how your brain perceives time).
Neuroscientist David Eagleman uses this great example to explain how time perception works:
What Igman calls "brain time" is inherently subjective. "Try this exercise," he suggested in a recent post. "Put down the book and look in the mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth so that you can see your left eye, then your right eye, then your left eye again. When your eyes move from one position to another, they take time to move and stay in another. But here's the thing: you can never see your eyes moving. "There's no evidence that there's any hole in your perception — there's no dark extension like a blank movie — but much of what you see is clipped out." Your brain has taken up a complex scene, the eyes moving back and forth, and then re-edited into a simple scene: your eyes look straight ahead. Where did those missed moments go?
Before I explain these time-bending abilities that you don't know, let's review how our brains perceive time normally.
<h1>How we perceive time</h1>
Our "sensations" of time are different from our other senses, that is, our "sensations" of time are different from our senses of taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. Over time, we can feel it rather than feel it.
Essentially, our brains take a whole bunch of information from our senses and organize it in a way that makes sense to us, before we perceive it. So we think that our sense of time is actually a bunch of information presented to us in a particular way, determined by our brains:
When our brain receives new information, it doesn't necessarily come in the right order. This information needs to be reorganized and presented to us in a form that we understand. When dealing with familiar information, this doesn't take much time at all. However, new information will be slower, making people feel that time has been stretched out.
What's even stranger is that it's not just one region of the brain that controls our time perception — it's done by a whole bunch of brain regions, unlike the five senses we commonly see, each of which can point to a specific area.
This is how this process affects the length of time we perceive:
When we receive a lot of new information, it takes a while for our brains to process it. The longer this process takes, the longer you feel:
For example, when we are in a life-threatening situation, "we remember longer because we record more experiences." Life-threatening experiences allow us to really focus, but we don't have access to superhuman perception. ”
The same thing happens when we hear pleasant music, because "more attention leads to longer perceptions." ”
Conversely, if your brain doesn't need to process a lot of new information, time seems to go faster, so the same amount of time will actually feel shorter than other times. This happens when you receive a lot of familiar information because you've already dealt with it before. Your brain doesn't need to work very hard, so it processes time faster.
But interestingly, this doesn't mean that doing something repeatedly won't have a major impact on your brain, and in fact, practice can also fundamentally reshape your brain.
Igman describes it this way:
The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "That explains why we think time accelerates as we get older," Igman said. "The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain records and the faster time seems to pass.
Igman said: "Time is a resilient thing. "When you really turn on your brain resources, it stretches out, and when you say, 'Oh, I see, it's all expected,'" it contracts."
The best example of this is the so-called "oddball effect," an optical illusion that Igman showed me in his lab. Most of the time, the same picture is repeated over and over again: an ordinary brown shoe. But sometimes a flower appears. In my opinion, this change is a matter of time and content: this flower stays on the screen for much longer than this shoe. But Eagleman insists all photos appear at the same time. The only difference is how much attention I pay to them. When the shoes appeared for the third or fourth time, they left little impression. The rarer flower, wandering, open, like the summer of childhood.
So if your brain is hit by a lot of new information over the course of the day and receives almost no new information the next day, the first day seems to be much longer than the first, even if they're exactly the same.
New experiences also improve the way we learn and remember information.
<h1>How age affects perception of time</h1>
Of course, we don't usually notice this process happening; all we notice is the strange feeling of a long day passing, even though we know it's only 24 hours.
As we age, this process plays an increasingly useful role, making time seem to pass faster. That's because the older we get, the more often we come into contact with information that our brains have already processed. This familiar information takes a shortcut through our brains, making us feel that time is speeding up and passing us by.
For younger children, it's easy to see how this works in reverse, as much of the information their brains process is entirely new and takes more time to process.
<h1>How to make your day longer</h1>
Learning the brain is always fascinating, but if you can put that learning into practice, it's even better. That's why I love the idea of time so much – we can easily take advantage of it.
According to the study, if we feed the brain more new information, the extra processing time makes us feel like time passes more slowly. Assuming perception is real, we can effectively extend our lifespan. How awesome is that?
Here are five ways you can put it into practice right away.
1. Keep learning
Learning new things is a very obvious way to regularly deliver new information to the brain. If you read regularly, try new activities, or take classes to learn new skills, there will be plenty of "new things" at your fingertips to help you slow down.
2. Visit new places
A new environment can send a lot of information to your brain — smells, sounds, people, colors, textures. Your brain has to explain it all. Regularly exposing your brain to new environments will leave it with a lot of work to do and allow you to enjoy it for longer.
However, this does not necessarily mean traveling the world. Work in a café or new office is fine. Try going to a new restaurant for dinner or visiting a friend's house you haven't been to.
3. Meet new people
We all know how much energy we put into our interactions with others. Unlike objects, people are complex and require more effort to "process" and understand.
Therefore, meeting new people is a good exercise for our brains. This interaction gives us a lot of new information, such as names, sounds, accents, facial features, and body language.
4. Try new activities
Have you ever played dodgeball on a trampoline? Skydiving from an airplane?
Doing something new means you have to focus. Your brain is on high alert, and your senses are on high alert because you're rapidly absorbing new feelings and sensations. As your brain receives and notices every little detail, this time seems to stretch longer and longer in your mind.
5. It is spontaneous
Surprises are like new activities: they keep us focused and enhance our senses. Anyone who hates surprises can attest to that.
If you want to extend your day, this is a good way. Try to let your brain experience something new naturally—the less time you give your brain to prepare, the less familiar it is with the information it receives and the longer it takes to process that time. In fact, overloading your brain is one of the best ways to slow down time.
Can you figure out other ways to send new information to your brain and slow it down?