10 ways you can warp time with your mind.

We've all heard the old, tired cliches about time flying when we're having fun and how time goes faster as we get older. Some folks have apparently done experiments to test these perceptions and find out if the human mind really CAN warp time.

Turns out, it is only our perception of time that gets warped but, not always in the way we expect.

10 Ways Our Minds Warp Time

1. Life-threatening situations

To test this, Stetson et al. (2007) had people staring at a special chronometer while free-falling 50 metres into a net. What they found was that time resolution doesn't increase: we're not able to distinguish shorter periods of time when in danger. What happens is we remember the time as longer because we record more of the experience. Life-threatening experiences make us really pay attention but we don't gain superhuman powers of perception.

2. Time doesn't fly when you're having fun

prepare yourself for a 180 degree about-face—it could all be the other way around. Perhaps you're having fun when time flies. In other words, we assume we've been enjoying ourselves when we notice that time has passed quickly.

There's evidence for this in a recent experiment by Sackett et al. (2010). Participants doing a boring task were tricked into thinking it had lasted half as long as it really had. They thought it was more enjoyable than those who had been doing exactly the same task but who hadn't been tricked about how much time had passed.

3. The stopped clock illusion

What is happening is that when your eyes move from one point to another (a saccade), your perception of time stretches slightly (Yarrow et al., 2001). Weirdly, it stretches backwards. So your brain tells you that you've been looking at the watch for slightly longer than you really have. Hence the illusion that the second-hand is frozen for more than a second.

4. Too tired to tell the time

5. Self-regulation stretches time

6. Altered states of consciousness

7. Does time speed up with age?

8. The emotional experience of time

9. It's getting hot in here

10. What's your tempo?

PSYBlog

Check out the article for the full descriptions and links to the studies where they got their information.

reply to post by FortAnthem


Thanks FA for the link - good stuff.

Drugs are by far the easiset way to distort time, or should I say your perception of time. Have a bad trip and it lasts for eternity. Ha Ha Ha

I was only thinking this morning about how my daughter (3 and 1/2) has difficulty understanding terms like. yesterday, or tomorrow, or next week. Time for her is always just 'now', as I'm sure it is for most kids her age. That's why we've come up with the '2 more sleeps' thing.

Peace Out - Time to go ....

time is an illusion, it was created by man and the concept was designed by man

Time is an interesting human measurement. The cats here have no concept of time ... but; they do seem to have a memory that lasts for 2-3 years after a traumatic event.

I've had time stop (the clock illussion). It was 11:50 for what seemed an eternity! It was aggravating because it was stuck and would not move forward. Finally, it began to creep forward and then returned to normal. It was not depression for sure; but, I think it was an anomolous, emotional-based disturbance.

I was in a terrific auto accident and while time seemed to behave regularly during this long accident event ... the memories afterward (looking back) make it 'seem' long because ... every nth of a second, the mind took a picture flash and burned it into hard memory. There were an almost uncountable number of these snapshots burned into memory. I never mentioned it. Twenty-five years later, my father mentioned an almost identical phenomenon of an accident he had been involved in. It was an "AHA!" moment.

A routine daily schedule will speed time too so, do something new, constructive, educative, interesting and/or experientially different everyday to make your time feel longer.

reply to post by FortAnthem

To test this, Stetson et al. (2007) had people staring at a special chronometer while free-falling 50 metres into a net. What they found was that time resolution doesn't increas

idk about that.. I fell from a tree from a good hight once. Time did slow down. I had all the time in the world to grab any branch on the way down as I fell. It was the event that slowed down. Not my memory of it. I think such things would be hard to replicate in lab conditions.

I think the reason time goes faster when I'm having fun is because all of the negative or boring aspects were continually edited out by my mind. If I let myself remember, I realize that one of my most enjoyable vacations wasn't the paradise that my nostalgia of the year 2009 would have me continue to believe.
Then again, it's not keeping me from wishing I could experience it all a second time.

reply to post by FortAnthem


My workday ends when the factory time clock hits 3:30. But it takes 15 minutes for that stupid clock to go from 3:29 to 3:30!!!