Count off five seconds to yourself, and then look at your watch. Almost exactly, right?
Time perception is one of the brain's greatest mysteries. Science is slowly beginning to figure out how the body performs motor tasks that require millisecond responses and how it controls the circadian rhythm, but the ability to consciously track the passage of time remains a mystery.
To begin with, we do not have a special sense organ for this, similar to those that allow us to perceive the physical and chemical nature of the environment (touch, taste, smell). The perception of time is also unusual in that there is no clinical condition that could be defined as a lack of a sense of time. “We simply have no one to compare with,” says John Werden of Keele University (UK).
Some people think that this is no accident. Warren Meck of Duke University (USA) considers time to be so important for the performance of cognitive functions that evolution has endowed the brain with several reserve systems that go into action when the underlying mechanism is damaged.
Nothing is known about the possible biological basis of such a clock. The only thing they could think of was the presence in the brain of a certain “pacemaker” and a counter of its signals. They say that this "device" emits regular impulses, and the brain estimates the passage of time by their number. The hypothesis is consistent with observational data, but is desperately incomplete: what is this “pacemaker”, where is it located, how are its signals calculated?
In addition, you will have to explain why the perception of time is changing: cocaine, amphetamines and nicotine speed it up, and some antipsychotic drugs slow it down. The neurotransmitter dopamine is probably involved: people with dopamine system disorders (Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia) also perceive time incorrectly.
Time can be stretched / shortened in other ways. As you know, it slows down when you are scared and flies when you feel good. The older a person is, the faster time flows for him.
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Perhaps the key to these puzzles is how we think about our own perception of time. “We are under the illusion that time is a whole, although in reality we measure different aspects of it separately from each other and control them in different ways,” says David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine (USA).
Mr. Eagleman conducted the following experiment. Volunteers fell backwards from a thirty-meter tower and stared at the LED display on their wrist. A number on it flashed twenty times a second. In a normal situation, the brain cannot recognize such a blinking, but after all, during the flight, a person is scared, and the time for him should slow down, right? Alas, no one was able to make out this number, although on average it seemed to people that they fell for more than two and a half seconds.
The “slowing down of time,” argues Mr. Eagleman, is probably due to the fact that in a new or important situation, the brain begins to absorb information in more detail. Roughly speaking, it is not time that slows down, but the brain is accelerating. The scientist found out that if a person shows the same image several times, and then shows a new one, he will be sure that he has been looking at this new one longer than the previous ones. In addition, the brain consumes more energy, peering into an unfamiliar picture.
This observation also explains to some extent why time “speeds up” as we get older. Children's brains process a huge amount of new information about the world. With age, the new becomes less and less. It turns out that we can stretch our life, striving for new and exciting experiences. But where to find the time for this?