

“If you’re thinking about how time is currently passing by, the biggest factor influencing your time perception is attention,” Aaron Sackett, associate professor of marketing at the University of St. In moments of life-or-death fear, for example, your brain would release large amounts of adrenaline, which would speed up your internal clock, causing you to perceive the outside world as moving slowly.Īnother common distortion occurs when we focus our attention in particular ways. But you don’t need to travel any distance at all to experience strange distortions in your perception of time. Time moves differently atop a mountain than it does on a beach. But what’s certain is that, outside of the realm of physics, our individual perception of time is also surprisingly elastic. Scientists still have much to learn about how we perceive time, and why time operates differently depending on the scale.
