Emotions

Fear Scary movies such as The Shining and Scream have been shown to stretch time judgments

Anger People report that angry faces seem to last longer on a screen than faces with neutral expressions, even if the on-screen time period is the same

Sources: M. Wittmann et al / Drug and Alcohol Dependence 2007; M. Wittmann et al / J. Psychopharmacol. 2007; D. O’Boyle et al / Brain 1996; M. Pastor et al / Brain 1992; J. Smith et al / Brain and Cognition 2007; A. Smith et al / J. Child Psychol. and Psych. 2002; S. Droit-Volet et al / Front. Integr. Neurosci. 2011; S. Droit-Velot et al / PLOS ONE 2014

Most people have experienced this phenomenon firsthand. High-octane experiences can slow perception of time, flinging the world into slow motion. An out-of-control car careening toward the median or a skydiver’s plummet toward the ground can cause time to apparently stretch, making the event seem longer than it actually was.

Time can be stretched even without risking life and limb. After just 10 minutes of meditation, people seem to perceive time as lasting longer than it objectively does, scientists reported in 2013. Emotions can also stretch or contract time. Looking at angry faces or scary spiders makes people think that time slowed, for instance. To further muddle matters, simply knowing that this link between emotion and time perception exists can weaken the connection, French scientists reported April 15 in Consciousness and Cognition.

Even something as simple as temperature can change time perception. Walking on a treadmill in a hot room for an hour seemed to make time speed up for men in one study. After an hour, participants clicked a computer mouse after 2.6 seconds when they were supposed to click it at three-second intervals, an effect that wasn’t present when they were kept comfortably cool. After acclimating to the heat over a 10-day period, the men no longer misjudged time, scientists reported in the March International Journal of Psychophysiology. The results fit with older data suggesting that fevers can distort the perception of time.

Hallucinogenic mushrooms and drugs such as cocaine and LSD skew the brain’s sense of time, as can certain disorders. Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder have trouble telling apart two lengths of time. Parkinson’s disease can leave people with problems in timing seconds and subseconds. And even before symptoms appear, people with Huntington’s disease have deficits in estimating passing time.

Brain injuries can also warp a person’s sense of time, though such effects are almost always subtle — too subtle for patients to even notice, says cognitive neuroscientist Federica Piras of IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation in Italy.

The fact that so many diverse diseases, injuries, drugs and even bodily states can sway time perception serves as powerful evidence that timekeeping in the brain is not a monolithic entity. Instead, people rely on a diverse collection of clocks, each with a different job description.

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