Time, fast and slow — Lauren Chronicles (2024)

FAQs

Why does time go slow when you look at the clock? ›

Kielan Yarrow, reader in psychology at the University of London, explains that the key ingredient in the stopped clock illusion—and chronostasis generally—is a rapid movement of eyes from one object to another. Such movements are called “saccades.” Yarrow explains that they can present problems for our brains.

Answer: Time feels slow when at school and fast at home because, at home, you can spend time as you wish by doing whatever you want to do. But in school, you have to abide by the rules, attend one class after another, and work on various assignments.

The sentiment behind this saying, is that taking the time to slow down and think through a task can help to prevent mistakes. The saying encourages soldiers to be methodical and deliberate in their actions, rather than rushing and risking errors.

Our perception of time, how we experience (and remember) time, is dictated by how much information our brains need to process. When we feed the brain more information and expose it to more stimuli, the moment (the day, the summer) seems to last longer. We perceive it as passing more slowly.

In fact, academics mention several reasons: We're focusing too much on time — as research by professor Ian Phillips suggests, if we attend to time at the present moment (e.g., by looking at the clock), it seems to slow down. Conversely, if we don't pay attention to time, we become less aware of it, so it passes faster.

In these situations, the fact we are paying more attention to where we're going, so we can (hopefully) remember it later, makes time pass slower. On the way back, it feels like a shorter trip because you already have some familiarity with the route.

As adults, “the brain receives fewer images than it was trained to receive when young,” Bejan said. Therefore, we feel like time went by more quickly. In other words, there are physiological factors at play that influence our perception of time ― namely, the older we get, the faster it feels.

“Children's working memory, attention, and executive function are all undergoing development at the neural circuit level,” neuroscientist Dr. Patricia Costello says. “Their neural transmission is in effect physically slower compared to adults. This in turn affects how they perceive the passage of time.”

It's part of the nature of life for time to accelerate as we age. This acceleration is almost imperceptible each year, but the result is that each decade that you live through goes by faster than the one before.

Slowing Down Now to Speed Up Later

So why should we believe otherwise? The Navy SEALs consistently use the phrase “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” as part of the work they do, which often entails complex operations, incredible planning, and high-stress situations.

What is the concept of fast and slow? ›

An object which takes longer time to cover a certain distance is called slow whereas another object which takes shorter time to cover the same distance is called fast.

Although we feel sluggish and tired when we're bored, at a physiological level it's actually a 'high arousal' state (as measured by a faster heart rate). In turn, it's well-established that greater arousal speeds up our brain's 'internal clock', so that we feel that more time has passed than actually has.

Objectively, Earth is spinning faster. 1.59 milliseconds faster. Last year on June 29th scientists recorded the shortest day ever since 1960. And apparently, it has been speeding up for a few years.

Overall, chronostasis occurs as a result of a disconnection in the communication between visual sensation and perception. Sensation, information collected from our eyes, is usually directly interpreted to create our perception.

Our experience of time is flexible; it depends on attention, motivation, the emotions and more. The effort of trying to either suppress or enhance our emotional reactions seems to change our perception of time. Psychologists have found that when people are trying to regulate their emotions, time seems to drag on.

For now, the most intuitive explanation for why our brain slows time is that it is increasing the amount of information it can take in at once. Here, limited resources to process information may act as a sort of bottleneck.

Special relativity indicates that, for an observer in an inertial frame of reference, a clock that is moving relative to the observer will be measured to tick more slowly than a clock at rest in the observer's frame of reference. This is sometimes called special relativistic time dilation.