How long is your minute?
A minute in your head isn't a clock's minute. Age, body heat, fear and boredom all stretch or squeeze it.
Close your eyes. Open them when you think exactly one minute has passed.
Did you beat the clock, or did it beat you?
I wanted to know why my minute and your minute aren’t the same length. So I went looking. It turns out there’s no shared clock in our heads. Each of us has a guess. And a lot of ordinary things push that guess around: your age, your temperature, a scare, even how bored you are.
The clock that might be in your head
The most popular explanation is a model. Nobody has found it sitting in the brain. But it’s a handy picture, and it has three parts.
A pacemaker ticks. Excitement is supposed to make it tick faster. A gate opens when you pay attention to time and lets the ticks into a counter. Then you compare the count with what a minute usually feels like.
This version comes from the researchers Richard Block and Dan Zakay. Even they say it’s an open question whether a ticking pacemaker is really needed. Still, it’s a useful way to sort what follows. Some things seem to change the ticks. Some change the gate. And some happen later, in memory.
Older people stop sooner
In a 2016 study, 233 healthy people closed their eyes and counted two minutes in their heads. Someone timed them.
115s
Ages 15 to 29. Their average "two minutes".
87s
Ages 50 to 89. Same task, same instructions.
The group in between, ages 30 to 49, landed at 96 seconds. And inside every group, people were all over the place. Being about 35 seconds away from your group’s average was normal.
One study is just one study. But in 1998, Block, Zakay and Peter Hancock pooled 16 experiments on age and time. Same direction. When older adults are asked to produce a stretch of time, they stop sooner than younger adults. Their answers also vary more from person to person.
Why? The 2016 authors floated ideas, like changes in dopamine, but didn’t test them. The 1998 reviewers said the pattern didn’t fit the popular idea that aging slows the clock. Their best guess was attention. Lab tasks like this are mostly empty waiting. With spare attention and nothing else to do, older adults may watch time more closely. More ticks get through the gate, so the minute seems to arrive sooner.
Hot heads count fast
The oldest clue is a fever.
In 1933, the American scientist Hudson Hoagland wrote up something odd. His wife had the flu and a raised temperature, and time seemed to crawl for her. So he had her count to 60, aiming for one count a second, at different points in her fever. The hotter she was, the faster she counted. She reached 60 in less real time.
That fits the clock picture. Faster ticks mean your inner minute is done before the real one. It might even explain the crawling: if your inside clock runs fast, the outside world seems slow next to it.
One sick person isn’t proof. So in 1995, two researchers, John Wearden and Ian Penton-Voak, gathered almost every study that had changed people’s body temperature. Heated rooms. Heated helmets. Hot and cold baths. Real fevers. In almost all of them, warming people up made their inner time run faster. The rarer studies that cooled people down found it ran slower.
There was one catch. The effect showed up only when people knew they were timing. Remember that. It matters later.
Scared seconds
Does time really slow down when you’re scared? In 2007, neuroscientist David Eagleman and his team tested it about as directly as you can.
Volunteers at a thrill park in Dallas fell backwards 31 metres into a net. That’s about 2.5 seconds of free fall.
The same drop, timed from memory on a stopwatch
First, seven of them watched someone else fall, then re-created that fall on a stopwatch. After their own turn, they re-created their own fall. It came out 36% longer.
But did they actually see in slow motion? Each of the 20 volunteers wore a wrist display that flashed numbers just a little too fast for them to read. If their eyes really sped up mid-fall, the numbers should have become readable. They didn’t. Fallers read them no better than people standing on the ground.
So the slow motion wasn’t in the moment. It was in the memory. The team’s idea is that a frightening event gets recorded in richer detail, and a memory packed with detail seems longer when you play it back.
Emotion does seem to bend time in the moment too, at least for tiny stretches. In one lab study, faces flashed on a screen for under two seconds. Angry, happy and sad faces were all judged as lasting longer than neutral ones, and angry faces most of all. The usual explanation goes back to the pacemaker: getting worked up makes it tick faster.
A watched pot
Here’s the catch from the fever section. Scientists split time questions into two kinds. Prospective means you know in advance you’ll be asked how long something took. Retrospective means you’re asked out of the blue, afterwards.
They behave in opposite ways. In 2010, Block, Hancock and Zakay reviewed 117 experiments. When people knew they were timing, a task that kept their brain busier made the time seem shorter. When they were asked afterwards, the busier task seemed longer.
So waiting and remembering are different jobs. In the gate picture, while you wait and watch the clock, the gate is wide open, ticks pile up, and the wait stretches. Looking back, your brain seems to judge by how much changed, and a busy stretch has more in it.
The feeling that “time flies” is something else again. In a 2016 study, 27 people got pinged eight times a day for five days. Each time, they rated how fast time felt, plus their mood and what they were doing. Time felt faster when they were happier, and when what they were doing grabbed their attention. Sadness slowed it down. But that feeling didn’t match how they judged short beeps at the same moments. And in this small study, students and people around 70 felt time passing at about the same speed.
“Time flies” and “how long was that?” turn out to be different questions.
So whose minute is right?
The clock’s. Everyone else is guessing, and the guess moves with age, temperature, fear and focus.
What I actually took away:
- There’s no standard minute inside a head. When timing matters, use a real clock.
- Waiting for something? Stop watching it. Paying attention to time is the thing that stretches it.
- If a scary moment felt like slow motion, that was probably your memory, not your eyes.
- If someone’s minute is shorter than yours, neither of you is broken. Big gaps between people are normal.
Sources (11)
- Ferreira and colleagues (2016). Time perception and age. Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria.
- Block, Zakay and Hancock (1998). Human aging and duration judgments: a meta-analytic review. Psychology and Aging.
- Block and Zakay (1996). Models of psychological time revisited. In Helfrich (ed.), Time and Mind.
- Hoagland (1933). The physiological control of judgments of duration: evidence for a chemical clock. Journal of General Psychology.
- Wearden (2005). Origins and development of internal clock theories of time. Psychologie Française.
- Wearden and Penton-Voak (1995). Feeling the heat: body temperature and the rate of subjective time, revisited. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
- Stetson, Fiesta and Eagleman (2007). Does time really slow down during a frightening event? PLoS ONE.
- Droit-Volet, Brunot and Niedenthal (2004). Perception of the duration of emotional events. Cognition and Emotion.
- Droit-Volet and Meck (2007). How emotions colour our perception of time. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
- Block, Hancock and Zakay (2010). How cognitive load affects duration judgments: a meta-analytic review. Acta Psychologica.
- Droit-Volet and Wearden (2016). Passage of time judgments are not duration judgments: evidence from a study using experience sampling methodology. Frontiers in Psychology.
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