Maybe people can control time – or at least their perception of it.
A new paper by UNLV psychology professor James Hyman, recently published in Current Biology, shows that the way people experience time has less to do with the physical hands of a clock and more to do with the number of experiences in a given period of time.
“You are your brain. By actively controlling these processes, you influence not only what you are doing right now, but also how you perceive things that have happened in the past few weeks and probably in the future,” Hyman told the Review-Journal.
The study is one of the first of its kind to examine time at the minute and hour level, as opposed to studies that look at it over the long term or down to the second.
“This is how we live much of our lives: one hour at a time,” Hyman said in the UNLV press release.
Behavioral scientist Aaron Sackett told the Review Journal that the study was the best cellular-level evidence he had seen to date for the malleability of time perception. Sackett was the author of the 2010 study “You’re Having Fun When Time Flies: The Hedonic Consequences of Subjective Time Progression.”
“I think one of the most interesting findings is that the study suggests – at a neurological level – that there is no such thing as a fixed ‘internal clock’ that functions independently of sensory input,” Sackett wrote in an email to the Review Journal.
Hyman’s study also sheds light on an area of the brain associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and may have implications for treating these and other diseases.
The study shows that brain activity changes each time someone repeats an action. The results contradict the previous assumption that the brain responds similarly to repeated experiences, Hyman told the Review Journal.
Take an activity like checking email, which many people do several times a day. Although it is a routine action, brain activity changes with each repetition. So the brain tells time based on the frequency with which a person checks their email, rather than the analog clock outside.
“We know how life normally goes. If we start to artificially manipulate ourselves, for example by checking our email excessively, it will seem as if the pace of life has changed,” Hyman said.
The results suggest that people have some degree of control over how they experience their time.
For example, when it comes to studying for a test, Hyman says people may not want to do even more activities that could alter their brain activity.
“I tell my students to study for 20 minutes and then just shut down,” Hyman said. “If you want to remember the very last thing, you don’t want it to change.”
On the other hand, people who have had a negative experience such as a breakup may want to flood their brains with activity.
“It’s speculative, but we’re at a point where we’re beginning to understand how the brain encodes these different phenomena, and where people can be proactive about their own brain activity rather than feeling passive,” Hyman said.
The study also has implications for a part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex, which is important for understanding brain diseases ranging from anxiety to Alzheimer’s.
Lila Davachi, a professor of psychology at Columbia University and a specialist in memory science, said the study’s focus on this brain region helps understand how this region, along with the hippocampus and other frontal regions, helps organize sequential experiences.
Michael Hasselmo, director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience at Boston University, told the Review Journal that, unlike previous studies that focused on the hippocampus, studying this brain region is crucial to understanding episodic memory – memories of specific places and times in a person’s life.
“It’s the frontal cortex that helps you think about what the cues are and what the correct memory is in relation to a particular event,” he said.
This is particularly important in the context of Alzheimer’s disease, which is characterized by the loss of the episodic sense of time.
“It opens up the possibility that we can treat people’s perception of time and train them to perceive time more accurately, which in turn could help with other symptoms as well. It offers some new targets not only to study these disorders but potentially to treat them,” Hyman said.
Contact Katie Futterman at [email protected].
