The Bullet-Time Illusion
Time seems to slow down in panic situations like car crashes. Subjects estimate a 100-foot plunge into a net lasts 36 percent longer than when they're watching someone else do the falling. But the brain's not speeding up. It's a trick of memory: Emotional experiences are encoded in more detail.
Night Watch
People can estimate the length of a night's sleep fairly accurately. However, they overestimate the passage of time in the early hours of slumber by a factor of two, and they underestimate it in the later hours by about half.
Bang for Your Buck
Time spent watching a movie seems to go by more quickly than time spent bored. But afterward, it's the movie that seemed to take more time. You imagine it was longer because more stuff happened—romances, intrigue, explosions (hopefully).
Eternity in an Hour
Dreams unfold at close to real-life speed, so why do some seem impossibly long? Perhaps your brain constructs a fictional backstory to provide context—false memories, basically—and later you assume that this story, too, played out in the span of the dream.
Who Said That?
Neuroscientist David Eagleman suspects many schizophrenic symptoms involve timing disorders: When a movement or internal monologue seems to happen before you initiate it, your brain credits an outside cause.
The Special-Effects Theory of Relativity
Director John Woo is the Einstein of Hollywood. Watching his slow-motion action sequences distorts your internal physicist so much that events around you seem to happen faster than normal.
Been There, Done That
Why does time slip away more quickly as we age? The brain works harder in the face of novelty, and we reflect back on these periods of boosted brain activity as lasting longer. The neurons slack off when we've seen it all before.
Tags:
action sequences,
backstory,
brain,
brain activity,
bullet time,
car crashes,
david eagleman,
emotional experiences,
false memories,
foot plunge,
internal monologue,
john woo,
night watch,
passage of time,
perception,
physicist,
romances,
schizophrenic symptoms,
slow motion,
speed,
theory of relativity,
time,
timing disorders,
trick of memory
