Where did the time go? A quick look at how we perceive time

Do you feel like you don’t know where the days go? Wake up, and it’s time for bed again; make a few calls, and it’s 5 pm. Begin the week, and in a blink, it’s ended.

Is it the pandemic? Is it the extended hours we spend online?

There are two predominant theories for why it can feel like time has sped up. One has to do with age; the other with how one uses one’s hours.

The first theory comes to us from Adrian Bejan, professor of thermodynamics at Duke University. In a report published in the journal European Review in 2019, he argued that the endless days of childhood felt so languid and long because the rate at which we were processing visual information was higher.

Think of it like a newer processor in a newer computer vs an older processor in a device with highly fragmented drives.

As we age, the networks in our brains grow more complex, and each signal to the brain takes a tiny bit longer to process. Because we are processing less visual information in a given span of time, hours seem to be used up more quickly, this theory goes.

It’s a theory that does correlate well with the idea that how we experience time is shaped by what we do with it.

Take a simple example. Numerous studies have shown — and anyone who has been in a fender bender can attest to this — that when one is in an accident, the event appears to unfold in slow motion. This is because the brain is now on high alert, studies say, and as a result, it is processing a lot more information per second.

Peter Tse studies the perception of time as a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College. In a paper published in the journal Perception & Psychophysics in 2004, he noted that the subjective expansion of time is linked to attention levels, and the effect of those levels on the amount of information processed.

So, at one extreme is the red-alert situation of a car crash. Nearing the other end is the act of scrolling through Instagram while not actually processing most of the information on display. Somewhere in-between is the daily grind of relatively passive repetitions of the same routine. In these less attentive periods, Tse’s theory goes, the perception of time is altered in the opposite direction. It speeds past, with little recollection of the details.

In years to come, it is possible that studies will find that the lack of external stimuli, the sameness and relative featurelessness of each day, in the pandemic, account for why more than two years seemed to speed by within its grasp.

For now, to repair that sense of lost hours in one’s normal routine, researchers suggest you pay active attention to tasks and activities, and mix up the routine where possible. The effect of novelty on our perception of time is that it “slows it down”, Tse’s report states.

One thing to not do is refer to this sense of speeded-up time as time blindness. That’s a phrase popping up sporadically on social media. Time blindness is a condition associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is a lifelong symptom that can affect the execution of everyday tasks.

Among people with ADHD, “the differences in the perception of time point to possible differences in communication between different parts of the brain, including the hippocampus,” a study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and published in the journal Medical Science Monitor in 2019, stated.

Unless you have been diagnosed with ADHD, that’s not what you are experiencing.