Distortions in the experience of time
It’s said that all travel is fundamentally travel in time, but actual time travel has always stood for me as the ultimate trip. Although that may seem a bit unrealistic at the moment, at least there is some recent research in how we subjectively experience the passage of time. As anyone who has waited for a bus knows, the experience and the objective measure is not always the same (as it rarely is in anything). Comparable, time flies when one’s having fun, but then again, a good one week vacation may stand out as the only memory from an otherwise eventless year.
And, time seems to stand still during danger. Stetson, Fiesta and Eagleman performed a notorious experiment to examine the nature of this experience. They equipped university students with visual perception measurement devices and threw them into a 31m free fall (don’t worry, they got university credit points), trying to disentangle whether their brains would actually perceive more information in a dangerous situation. However, while not an improbable suggestion, this seemed not to take place, and the measured perception of the students did not appear to increase. They did, however, estimate the time of their own fall to 36% longer than their fellow student
One recent experiment by Virginie van Wassenhove and colleagues at California Institute of Technology pinpoints one subjective distortion that arises across senses. First, they flashed participants five grey discs in a row coupled with a simultaneous tone. Then, they manipulated either one disc to expand while being shown (at the same speed), or the tone to increase in pitch (which creates the perception of the sound lasting longer), and showed the sequence to the participants again. In these conditions the participants experienced the non-changed sound as lasting longer when the disc expanded, but not the disc as being shown longer when the sound was altered. This, accordingly, shows how the visual perception of time dominates the auditory. The report is published in the open journal PLoS One, and also mentioned in Sciam Mind.
Both experiments are suggested to be a result of emotional events being encoded in memory with more detail - and this gives the experience in hindsight that the event took more time (In the latter experiment the emotional value is from the disc appearing as moving towards you, if that’s not clear…). This makes sense: Think through your last day or year, perhaps write down all details that comes to mind in a timeline, and the distribution of experiences will most likely be heavily distorted according to emotion. If thinking through a year, I am willing to hypothesise that it’s not unlikely that time spent travelling will stand out in the “emotional timeline” as more time consuming than most other events, relatively speaking.
So the moral is, to pack more into your time, travel or be very afraid.
Update: This time travel tube map of London is a work of genious.
